The Strategic Public Relations Center at USC Annenberg released its fifth study of practices in the PR industry late last week.  Each year, Annenberg surveys a broad sample of practitioners across organizations of varying sizes.  Their study is one of the more notable to benchmark the state of Public Relations as an industry.

I have not taken a deep-dive into their results or the full report but have taken a look at some of their top-line findings.  There were some findings that stuck out to me in particular:

1. The emergence of the PR/GR Ratio (Ratio of PR budget to gross revenue) - Many large organizations are starting to adopt the PR/GR ratio as a valid model for determining PR budget, with an average of $786 spent on PR for every $1 million in gross revenue.
2. PR practitioners ranked their evaluation methodologies as mediocre, signaling that the PR profession still has a ways to go as far as evaluation is concerned (although the perceived importance of evaluation is quite high in PR).
3. PR folks evaluation measures continue to evolve from simply counting media hits to more sophisticated measures including:
   1. Contribution to market share
   2. Contribution to profitability
   3. Contribution to sales
   4. Influence on corporate culture
   5. Influence on employee attitudes
   6. Influence on stakeholder awareness and opinions
4. Only a small percentage of PR budget (average of 6%) is spent on measurement
5. Access to the C-Suite has increased over the years - around 64% of PR professionals report directly to the C-Suite with 23% reporting to marketing and the remainder reporting to a mixed bag.  Those reporting to legal expressed the lowest level of satisfaction.