Many PR briefs are sadly not fit for purpose. It’s not because the people writing them are bad at their jobs; usually it’s quite the opposite.
This conundrum occurs because the brief gets thrown together in a hurry, by someone who doesn’t do PR for a living, often when there’s already a fire to put out. Agencies who have sat on the receiving end of hundreds of these will quietly tell you the same things: the good ones are rare, and the rest make everyone’s life harder than it needs to be.
The frustrating part is that a bad brief doesn’t announce itself. You don’t find out it was the problem until three months in, when the coverage isn’t landing and nobody is quite sure why. So before you spend the money chasing results from a shaky starting point, get it right now, not when it is too late.
Here are but a few ideas on how to brief a PR agency properly. And some mistakes that quietly sabotage the whole thing.
Start with the business goal, not the PR goal
This is the one almost everyone skips. Briefs tend to open with the PR objective. “We want more coverage”, “we want to raise awareness”, “we want to be seen as a thought leader”.
But awareness of what, for whom, to do what? Why do you want it, and why do you want it now/yesterday? Raise awareness so more of the right people buy, or trust you, or take your call? Are you about to head into a funding round? Do you need a little help finishing one off? Are you (cleverly) secretly sat on a funding announcement and need help to get it out there before a hiring spree?
A good agency will keep asking “why” until they hit something real, so expect this, if you are speaking to a good agency at least.
Tell us what success looks like for the business, not just the comms. More qualified inbound, an easier time fundraising, senior hires who’ve heard of you, or owning a conversation your competitor currently owns. Are you here because you have an amazing technological, social, or scientific advancement? Do you need us to strategically plant the flag, so that all that come later know you were the first?
Now we are starting to look at a brief we can actually build a strategy around.
Be honest about the problem you’re not mentioning
If you’re coming to PR because something’s gone wrong (a quiet patch, a competitor eating your lunch, a previous agency that didn’t work out, a reputation wobble), tell us; nobody is here to judge; we are here to partner up and drive you forwards.
We get it; we are human, nobody wants to lead with the bad news. But we’ll find out eventually, and we’d much rather know on day one so we can actually help, than discover it halfway through and have to rebuild the plan around it. Same goes for what’s worked before. If a previous campaign flopped, that’s useful to know; we will certainly tell you if we are getting no answers or positive results from a pitch. Knowing that something isn’t working is as useful as knowing what is. If something landed, we can build on it. The brief isn’t a sales pitch for your company; we’re already on your side.
Give us access to people who can actually talk
Good PR needs real humans who can speak with credibility. Your founder, CTO, a customer who will go on record, and whoever genuinely knows the thing. And, even if you are the spokesperson, maybe there is someone on your team that can bring us up to speed on a technical issue; they are experts in their field, let’s use them behind the scenes.
Where this goes wrong is when an agency is kept at an arm’s length and fed everything secondhand. You end up with us trying to write a founder op-ed without ever having spoken to the founder, or pitching a technical story we only half understand because the one person who could explain it is “too busy for a 3-minute call.” You can guess how that reads to a journalist.
Be real about budget and timing
You don’t need a bottomless budget, and we don’t expect one. But we do need to know what we’re working with, because the honest answer to “what can PR do for us” is “depends what you’ve got.”
A six-week push and a twelve-month retainer are completely different animals, and so is the strategy behind each. Same with money. There’s no shame in a modest budget, but there’s a lot of wasted effort in us designing for a budget that doesn’t exist. Tell us the real numbers and the real timeline. We’ll tell you what’s genuinely achievable inside them, which is a far better conversation than the one where we both pretend.
Resist the urge to over-prescribe
The more detail in a brief, the better; up to a point. Past that point, you start telling the agency exactly what tactics to use, which outlets to chase, and which formats to produce.
And the thing is, you’re hiring a PR agency because they know how to do PR. If you’ve already decided it’s three press releases and a podcast tour before anyone’s looked at whether that’s the right move, you’ve boxed in the people you’re paying for their judgement. (There’s also a lot more to modern PR than media relations, but that’s a whole other post.)
Give us the destination and the constraints. Let us argue for the route. If we can’t make a smart case for how, that tells you something useful about whether we’re the right agency, which is exactly what the briefing stage is for.
Say how you’ll measure it, before we start
Decide what “working” looks like at the start, not the end – and we can make suggestions too; we don’t expect everyone to come to the starting calls and know everything, don’t worry. This is where a lot of PR relationships quietly turn sour: there were never any agreed measures, so six months in everyone’s grading the same work against a different scorecard.
PR isn’t performance marketing and we’ll be the first to tell you not everything can be tracked like an ad. But that’s not a free pass to measure nothing. Agree up front what we are collectively looking out for. Share of voice, coverage in the publications your buyers read, inbound sales, the founder’s name showing up in the right rooms. Pick the signals that map to the business goal from the top of this list, and you’ve got a brief that holds together end to end. One we like still, is changing what that first page of Google looks like, it sounds basic, but if we can get you on there, or change it from your own LinkedIn pages to a list of credible placed wins, that is a lovely visual for a changing of the tide. Of course, we are adapting to the times; GEO and AI placement is important, and we’d be fools not to push PR in that direction too.
Actually talk to the agencies you’re briefing
A quick one, but it matters. Especially when procurement runs the process, agencies often get put at a polite distance.
During a brief, let the agency ask awkward questions and sense-check a direction with you before they commit to it on paper. The chemistry (whether these are people you’ll want on the phone every week for a year) doesn’t show up in a deck.
The short version
A good brief isn't long, polished, or full of comms jargon. It's honest about the business goal, honest about the problem, realistic about budget and time, clear on how you'll measure success, and generous enough to let the experts do the expert bit.
Get that right and the agency can do the job you're hiring them for. Get it wrong and you'll spend the next quarter wondering why the magic isn't happening – when the answer was on page one all along.
Who said you need a finished brief before talking to us? Something that works more and more for us is when a client gets in touch, they chat with us, and we build a brief, together, cutting out that crazy guesswork and actually moving forward pre-brief, together, as the team we will be for months and years to come.
Just a thought.