Tag

small business

Apr 05
Love0

What Is PR, Really? How Ethical Public Relations Actually Grows Your Business

By Public Relations No Comments

Public relations has a reputation problem.

When most people think of PR, they picture crisis management, damage control, and spin — a team of consultants hired to make something bad look good, at enormous expense and with questionable honesty. It’s a perception that dogs the entire industry, and frankly, it’s not entirely undeserved. High-profile cases like the Bell Pottinger scandal — where a firm was found to have created racially divisive propaganda campaigns on behalf of a client — reinforce exactly the kind of distrust that makes business owners hesitant to invest in communications support at all.

It’s enough to make you think PR needs its own PR firm.

But that version of public relations is not the only version. And it’s not ours.

What Most People Get Wrong About Public Relations

The crisis-and-spin model of PR gets the most attention because it makes the best headlines. A celebrity needs a statement. A corporation needs a narrative. A politician needs a news cycle managed. These are real services that exist, and some firms specialize in exactly that kind of work.
But the vast majority of organizations — small and mid-sized businesses, nonprofits, professional services firms, community institutions — don’t need crisis management. They need something far more useful: a clear, consistent, credible public presence that builds trust with their customers, donors, partners, and community over time.
That’s the work we do every day. And it looks nothing like spin.

What Ethical PR Actually Looks Like

At Jaggers Communications, public relations means helping good organizations tell their story clearly, consistently, and honestly — to the audiences that matter most to them.
In practice, that work begins before a single press release is written. We start by helping clients clarify their own business goals. What does growth look like for your organization this year? Who are your best customers or constituents, and how do they make decisions? What does your organization genuinely stand for, and is that coming through in how you communicate?
Those conversations shape everything that follows. A media strategy built on a clear understanding of your goals will always outperform one built on guesswork or generic best practices.
From there, we build integrated strategies that connect public relations with marketing, social media, and content. Earned media doesn’t live in a silo, and neither does your audience. Your customers are reading your newsletter, following you on LinkedIn, and occasionally catching a mention of your work in a local publication — and all of those touchpoints should tell the same story.

Why Honest Communications Is Also Good Business

We feel strongly about truthful practices, but the argument for ethical PR isn’t only about values — it’s about results.
Trust is the foundation of every lasting client relationship, every loyal customer, and every media relationship that produces ongoing coverage rather than a single transactional mention. When a journalist knows that your organization delivers accurate information and keeps its word, your calls get returned. When your customers know you communicate with them honestly, they become advocates. When your partners see that your public presence matches your private reality, they refer business to you.
Firms that traffic in spin may win a news cycle. Firms that build genuine credibility win over time.
There’s also the practical matter of what happens when dishonest PR strategies unravel — and they do unravel. Bell Pottinger, once one of the most prominent PR firms in the world, collapsed entirely after its racially divisive campaign in South Africa came to light. The firm did not rebrand. It ceased to exist. The reputational damage to its clients was severe and lasting.

Integrity in communications isn’t just the right approach. It’s the durable one.

What Working With an Ethical PR Firm Looks Like

If you’ve been hesitant to invest in public relations because of what you’ve seen or heard about how it works, here’s what partnering with Jaggers Communications actually involves:

  • We listen first. Before we recommend anything, we want to understand your organization, your goals, and your audience.
  • We set realistic expectations. PR is a long game. We’ll tell you what’s achievable in 90 days, what takes six months, and what takes a year — and we won’t promise coverage we can’t deliver.
  • We measure what matters. Impressions and placements are useful data points, but we care more about whether communications activity is actually moving the needle on your business goals.
  • We tell you the truth. If a strategy isn’t working, we’ll say so. If there’s a better approach, we’ll recommend it even if it’s a harder conversation.

Ready to Work With a PR Firm That Works Differently?

If your organization is looking for a communications partner that will help you grow — ethically, strategically, and sustainably — we’d love to start a conversation. Jaggers Communications has spent more than a decade helping Charlottesville-area businesses and organizations build the kind of public presence that earns trust and drives real results.

Contact Marijean today!

Jan 19
Love1

The Hidden Cost of Familiarity: Why Fresh Eyes Catch the Errors Your Team Misses

By Communications

Every communications professional has a version of this story.

A client told us about a nightmare from her previous job. Her team had spent weeks preparing an annual report — a high-stakes document that would go to donors, board members, and community partners. They reviewed it carefully. They proofread it. They passed it around for approvals. They were confident.

When the finished report came back from the printer, the last name of a major donor had been cut off.

For anyone in fundraising, that moment is visceral. A major donor whose name is misspelled — or worse, truncated — in a printed piece is not a small error. It’s a relationship problem. It’s a credibility problem. And because it was printed, there was no fixing it quietly.

The team hadn’t been careless. They had looked at that document so many times that they stopped seeing it.

Why Proofreading Your Own Work Is a Losing Battle

There’s a well-documented cognitive phenomenon behind this kind of error. When you’ve read the same document repeatedly, your brain begins to predict what it expects to see rather than processing what’s actually on the page. You read what you meant to write, not what you wrote. Typos disappear. Truncated names become invisible. A transposed number in a budget table goes unnoticed through round after round of review.

This isn’t a failure of professionalism or attention. It’s how human cognition works. The more familiar you are with a piece of content, the less reliably you can proof it.

It’s why newspapers have copy editors. It’s why publishers have proofreaders. It’s why even the most experienced writers will tell you: never proof your own work before it goes out the door.

For small and mid-sized organizations — especially nonprofits, where staff wear multiple hats and bandwidth is always stretched — this principle is easy to know and very hard to act on. When you’re the person who wrote the annual report, managed the design process, coordinated approvals, and is now also responsible for final proofing, bringing in a genuinely fresh set of eyes can feel like a luxury.

It isn’t. It’s insurance.

What a Fresh Pair of Eyes Actually Catches

At Jaggers Communications, we don’t trust our own eyes to a final proof on content going out into the world — and we bring that same discipline to our clients’ work. Before any significant piece of communication is published or printed, we dedicate a proofreader and editor who has never seen the document before to give it a complete review.

That independence is the whole point. A fresh reader brings no assumptions about what the document is supposed to say. They see what’s actually on the page.

In practice, that means catching errors that slip through even rigorous internal review:

  • Proper nouns — names of donors, board members, partner organizations, elected officials — are among the most common error sites in organizational communications. Spell-check won’t flag a real name that’s been subtly misspelled, and a team member who knows the person may read right past the error.
  • Numbers and dates are another high-risk category. A transposed digit in a financial figure, a wrong year in a grant deadline, an incorrect event date — these errors are invisible to a brain that knows what the number is supposed to be.
  • Formatting inconsistencies — a heading that doesn’t match the style of its peers, a caption that belongs to the wrong image, a page number that doesn’t sequence correctly — are nearly impossible to catch when you’ve been looking at the document for weeks.
  • Tone and clarity issues that felt fine in draft often reveal themselves to a reader coming in cold. A sentence that made sense in context during the writing process may read as confusing or even unintentionally off-brand to someone encountering it fresh.

The Documents That Deserve a Final Review

Not every piece of content carries the same stakes. A social media post can be corrected in seconds. A printed annual report cannot.

The communications that most benefit from a dedicated fresh-eyes review are those where errors are costly, embarrassing, or impossible to correct after distribution. That includes:

  • Annual reports
  • Grant applications and reports to funders
  • Event programs
  • Donor acknowledgment letters
  • Printed marketing materials
  • Press releases and media pitches
  • Board presentations

For any document where the consequences of an error outweigh the cost of a final review — and that threshold is lower than most organizations assume — bringing in outside eyes is simply the responsible choice.

How Jaggers Communications Can Help

If your team is stretched thin and needs extra capacity at the final stage of a communications project, Jaggers Communications offers editorial review and proofreading as a standalone service. Our reviewers come to your document without any of the context or familiarity that makes internal proofing unreliable. We catch what your team has stopped seeing.

We also offer broader communications support — helping organizations with writing, editing, content strategy, and communications planning — so if the bandwidth problem goes deeper than a single document, we can help you think through that too.

The annual report nightmare our client described? It was expensive, embarrassing, and entirely preventable. A fresh pair of eyes before it went to print would have caught it.

That’s worth the investment.

Contact Jaggers Communications to talk about editorial support.

Jan 13
Love0

What I’ve Learned in Five Years as an Entrepreneur

By Communications

In January of 2011, after 14 years of working for other firms, I opened my own. I was nervous but determined. Five years seems like a worthwhile anniversary to celebrate; a benchmark that in small entrepreneurial business means “you’ve made it.” Here are some lessons I’ve learned in my first five years as a small business owner:

  1. The conversations you have today may result in business eight years from now. Lead time can be very long, so keep having those conversations and meeting new people.
  2. Don’t waste time with worry. There are better ways to spend time! There was a single day in my second year of business that two large clients ended their engagements. (They were both restructuring.) It was a panic-inducing shock, and I’ll admit, I spent a full 24-hours freaking out about it. And then I stopped, and got busy finding new work. I’ll never kill that kind of time with worry again.
  3. Get the signed contract and, especially if there’s some concern about client cash flow, a deposit. I was royally stiffed by a client in the second year of business (it was a bad year, all around. I got divorced, too, and going through that kind of personal trauma while trying to run a business is unbelievably hard). And you know what? I am GLAD now, because that experience taught me such valuable lessons. I also found the courage to fight back and won, a feeling not as gratifying as not making a mistake in the first place, but a relief all the same.
  4. Eat breakfast. This is probably a life lesson, in general, but a morning routine that includes getting some protein in my system (and, possibly some caffeine as well) makes it possible for me to rock through a morning without being distracted by something as boring but insistent as hunger.
  5. Delegation is critical to success. When I find myself doing something I know another team member could do better, for less, I stop and turn it over. It took me awhile to get to that point but now delegation is much more routine. I can recognize much earlier what MUST be done by me, and what should be assigned to another (eager) team member.
  6. Take care of your people. My firm is run as an S-corp of which I am the sole employee. I like it that way and plan to keep it structured like that for the long haul. I have contract employees — freelancers — who do client work such as editing, writing, researching, web development, graphic design, SEO, etc. I do my best to keep them as busy as they want to be, with work they enjoy. I try to pay them as fast as I can. And if it’s a good year, and they did especially well, there’s a little something extra for them. I’ve been able to provide work for people who are good at what they do, and who enjoy the benefits of working a flexible schedule from home (or wherever they are). I’ve worked with a dozen or so contractors over five years and have developed a wonderful, dependable team over that time.
  7. Take time off. This was harder to do early on, but I’ve achieved good balance with this and find that a break now and then really resets my energy. I’m not much impressed with people who humblebrag/complain about how busy they are and how many hours they work. I am impressed with people who recognize that time with friends and family, time for self-care, time to think about the big picture and progress toward goals is just as important as earning a paycheck.

I’m so grateful to the clients I’ve worked with since the earliest days of 2011. I’m so appreciative of my team members who have made so much of this business possible. I’m excited about the future and know how rare it is to get to a fifth anniversary (and beyond) through a recession and other obstacles. It’s great to feel confident about the future of this business, and delightful to have you paying attention along the way. Thanks for reading, and for being here to learn along with me.