When you deal with others to gain their agreement or cooperation (willingness to work together), or their support for something, you are using the methods (ways of doing something) of public relations, whether you are aware of this or not.

The first step to successfully apply public relations, or PR for short, is to know the definition of PR. Now properly defined, it is: GOOD WORKS WELL PUBLICIZED.

By good works is meant the deeds or activities that you do to help others.

Doing good works is not enough if you want to expand your activity. You have to actually publicize it to get cooperation or agreement. Publicize means to make something known to people, usually by advertising and other ways to get the message out throughout your area.

For example, suppose you decided to do a project to clean up your neighborhood and started painting out graffiti on public buildings. If you never told anyone about your project, people who saw you do this activity may think you were ordered by a court of law to do this for getting too many traffic tickets or something. However, if you printed some handouts that promoted the Neighborhood Clean-up Project and passed them out to people and asked them for participation, people would know what you were doing, and in many cases, might decide to participate. There are many other ways to make your project broadly known and gain agreement and cooperation. All of this is in the field of public relations.

In public relations you are basically reaching people with an idea of some kind to get their agreement and support. Your success in dealing with others, then, depends on how you reach the public with your idea.

Public relations is an absolutely necessary tool to help you get your ideas across. And any person who is working to make the world a better place would have far greater success from the use of public relations.

No matter what you do—from taking actions to improve the area in your neighborhood to helping people get off drugs—by using the tools of public relations you can reach others with your message. You will then get their agreement and cooperation on it. Public relations makes it possible for you to get acceptance and support of the activity you want to do.

Public relations is not new. It existed as an officially recognized subject in Roman times a few thousand years ago, when it was used for the purpose of promoting different events. Even back then, messages were written on the walls of the Colosseum (the large, roofless building with rows of seats built in Rome that was used for public entertainment) for people to see.

Over the centuries PR remained only partly developed as a subject because it was stopped in its advance by those with bad intentions. They were only interested in using it to serve their hidden reasons for doing things that benefited them and usually harmed others.

It wasn’t until Scientology, with its discoveries about communication and the true nature (the basic qualities that someone has) of Man, that public relations actually became a complete subject that could benefit society and any person.

Public relations is a way to make your projects known and it has its own laws.

To begin to learn how to do public relations, you must start with an understanding of what public relations is and what it consists of.