In brief
The Public Relations and Communications Association (PRCA) is the world's largest professional Public Relations body.
Its mission is to create a more professional, ethical, and prosperous global PR industry. Activities include championing and enforcing professional standards, promoting best practice through training and research, and lobbying on the industry's behalf.
The PRCA represents over 35,000 PR professionals worldwide, across 400 consultancies, 500 in-house teams and thousands of individual and freelance members. It also manages the International Communications Consultancy Organisation (ICCO), the umbrella body for 41 PR associations and 3,000 agencies worldwide. In the UK the majority of the top 150 UK PR consultancies are PRCA members.
PRCA members collaborate in regional, sectoral, working, and campaigning groups and need to be able to connect and communicate with both ease and safety – GDPR compliance is important to the association’s reputation.
The PRCA uses Guild to create dedicated, flexible communities for many of its member groups. They allow thousands of members to safely share industry knowledge, information and resources wherever they are in the world.
They also run communities on Guild that welcome PRCA and ICCO non-members to improve global access to PR and communications best practice resources, increase their reach, build relationships and broaden their membership base around the world.
Why did the PRCA choose Guild for its member engagement communities?
PRCA's Director of Communications and Marketing Koray Camgöz played a key role in choosing and rolling out Guild across the organisation.
He explains one of the reasons they were looking for a member engagement solution like Guild:
“We deliver a broad programme of conferences, webinars and meetings at local, regional and national levels as well as a learning and development programme. These events support our profession and membership. They provide valuable opportunities for our members to collaborate, network, learn from leading speakers in the industry and share information and expertise.
We were looking for a digital platform to enable members to continue their conversations outside of our programme of events and meetings."
The PRCA set up a number of branded specialist communities representing regions, sectoral interests, campaigning groups and apprenticeship groups for communications professionals at the very start of their PR careers. Koray continues:
"We initially set up 13 different communities on Guild. Those groups are hosted and managed by a number of PRCA community managers, who volunteer in their region, and by PRCA HQ team members."
Using Guild enabled PRCA to quickly set up groups and communities focussed on specific areas of expertise and industry challenges. He continues:
"As the COVID-19 pandemic took hold and countries went into lockdown, we set up a dedicated international Covid-19 Taskforce group to help our members navigate all the challenges that were arising.
Ensuring that we support the next group of communications leaders and professionals is also a priority for us, so we also created a 'Future Leaders' group and apprentice communities to encourage talent into our sector and nurture it with skills development and professional support."
Has the PRCA developed its member communities on Guild?
“It’s very easy to manage and create new groups when we need to, so we’ve grown to over 20 live groups now.
Guild has none of the advertising, privacy and compliance issues, and we’re actively protecting our organisation and our members’ data.
We’ve created a couple of “public” groups. We represent and champion the whole of the PR industry globally, not just our current membership.
We want people to be able to connect with us and access some of the resources and events that are available to non-members, even if they feel membership isn’t right for them just now.
The PR Academia community on Guild is a growing group of PR academics and practitioners from around the globe interested in bridging the professional and academic gap. It's important that practitioners can access academic models. It's equally important that what is taught in higher education translates to meaningful outcomes for comms professionals in businesses and organisations.
Connecting academics and practitioners supports the sector long-term on behalf of our members.
We've also just launched the PRCA PR and Comms Community which again, welcomes non-members and is a growing, global community of PR and comms professionals. It’s for practitioners of all levels to build their networks, access resources, get updates and learn about best practice.
Running open groups as well as our private communities allows people who aren’t members yet to develop a feeling for the work that the PRCA does and the culture of our association.
If they’re looking to join a professional association in the future, we hope they’ll feel at home with us.”
How has Guild helped your membership and your organisation?
Koray explains that Guild is increasing their global reach, has increased the value of PRCA membership and has enabled members to stay connected in a simple, compliant and secure way:
"Guild has added significant value to our member communications. We looked at other membership community and messaging solutions, but Guild provided us with exactly what we needed.
Guild is intuitive to use, it's 100% designed for mobile use, it's simple to set up, and it looks very professional. Most critically, it's GDPR compliant. Consumer messaging apps like WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram create all sorts of data and governance issues that we wanted to avoid.
It's not just the privacy and the elegance of the app. The ability to draw insights from the analytics is essential in us understanding how engaged our members are, what our members value and which topics and discussions create the most engagement.
The video room is an excellent feature. It allows us to convene groups of people across the globe for both informal get-togethers and formal discussions. What's great about it is that it's integrated into the app. It hasn't replaced our event or meeting technology, but it allows the various communities and groups to meet and deepen their relationships beyond our events schedule.
Guild provides us and our members with the confidence that their data and information is held safely and gives us the flexibility to continue to support our growing global profession effectively.”
Other membership organisations building communities on Guild
NEU (National Education Union) use Guild for teacher community on remote education
The Marketing Society Coffeehouse launches on Guild
Renewd moves from Slack to Guild for its B2B membership community
CommsHero superpowers its PR community with Guild
Race Equality Matters boosts diversity initiatives with Guild communities
CIPD supports HR leaders during the pandemic with membership groups on Guild
Join Guild 🤝
See for yourself how the Guild experience is different to WhatsApp, Slack, LinkedIn or Facebook Groups. Guild is a safe space to connect, communicate and collaborate with others.
Join us on a platform that is purpose-built for professionals and businesses.
- Just want to join some groups? Simply join Guild and then look through the discoverable groups and communities to find relevant ones to join
- Thinking of running your own community? With an elegant and simple to use, mobile-first UX you've got everything you need to start a community - custom branding, analytics, video, group and user management and support. Get started with your own community here with our free and paid plan options.
Contact us if you want to know more or have any questions.