hopwood have been hired by the National Youth Agency (NYA) to promote projects aimed at improving the lives of young people.

We were selected from a shortlist of consultancies and will work with the NYA on national projects in areas such as financial education and citizenship. Here at hopwood, we will deal with the media, produce publications, set up social media campaigns and recruit young people to projects. More

Checking in at #measurepr this week, and it occurs to me that one of our New Year’s Resolutions here at hopwood PR must be to get our heads round the tricky business of measurement.

There are some massive challenges here:

1. All our clients are different so there’s no obvious one-size-fits-all way to measure results – have a look at our case studies and you’ll see we’re results oriented but that our projects have hugely varied outcomes

2. Clients’ priorities (and their people) change over time (but they might not tell you) so it’s easy to find yourself measuring the wrong thing

3. Assuming clients’ media profile matters to them, how do you evaluate that profile in a rapidly-evolving new media world?

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Having just completed my Masters in English at Exeter, I returned home to the Midlands wondering which direction my career was heading in. I knew I needed practical experience and wanted to gain an insight into the PR industry. So to be intern at hopwood was an ideal opportunity. After all, I wasn’t quite sure what PR was – I knew it was outward facing and involved communications, but how did it interrelate with other industries? What was its relationship to journalism? How was it different to marketing? These were all questions that were to be answered in my time at hopwood.

Welcomed by the friendly team and abundance of tea, I was soon thrown in to writing press releases. Having to adapt my detailed, analytical style to informative, concise facts was challenging, but it was intriguing to learn that so much of journalist’s material is inspired and indeed written by those in PR! I enjoyed sitting in on meetings – though more of an observer than a contributor – and revelled in the fact that they called it “the board room”, very ‘The Apprentice’!

What I enjoyed most about hopwood was the diversity of their clients. One day I would be researching a women’s charity, the next writing for an MP or a leading corporate clothing company. I was immersed in business, politics, the public sector and not-for-profit organisations. Having always had an interest in the environment, I particularly responded to their property and urban regeneration clients and the projects which are transforming our towns, cities and landscape today. More

There’s a debate (unhealthy, I think) in the PR industry about whether or not it’s appropriate to measure the amount of media coverage we generate in terms of what it would cost to buy the same amount of space or air time as advertising.

It’s a hot topic on twitter under the hashtag #measurepr. Here’s what we think about measuring PR.

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My boss Duncan Hopwood is a regular participant in #PRStudchat, a twitter chat that brings together public relations students, educators and professionals for a live monthly discussion. More

I went to a really interesting CIPR seminar on social media and pr. The two key speakers, Adam Sefton and Paul O’Donoghue enjoyed an ongoing debate about content versus conversation which really got me thinking. I fully intended to write my first blog post about this but some new client wins and first blog nerves got in the way… More

So here they are, the world’s favourite quotes about the public relations profession as compiled in our online survey of communications professionals. More