Ultimate Guide to Strategic Communications and Public Relations for Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs)

Background to this Course

Building on the work I was doing for some small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs), in late 2024, I conducted a quick survey among SMEs in seven countries in East Africa (Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda, Burundi, South Sudan, Malawi). I randomly selected 100 SMEs (84 returned the questionnaire), to assess their corporate Knowledge, Attitude, Perceptions and Practices of communications and public relations. The selected SMEs are in a wide spectrum of business lines, including Manufacturing/processing/ agro-value addition, retail, fashion & apparel, pharmaceuticals. Others were in the services industry (hospitality & tourism, health, education, micro-finance, construction, technology & innovation, logistics & transportation, consulting services).

Findings

The findings were stunning. Here is the summary:

• 75% rated communications and public relations highly (as “extremely important”) for the growth and profitability of their businesses; the remaining 25% rated it as “very important.”
• In over 80% of the SMEs, the communications and PR function was performed by personnel without any formal training in communications & PR
• These personnel who were responsible for communications & PR in these SMEs had no technical knowledge of what communications and PR are
• The CEOs/MDs in most cases held this fort (amidst their other busy schedules), in others, this role was allocated to other managers - to juggle on top of their main roles (as Administration manager, Logistics Manager, etc). Trained communications & PR persons were presented in less than 10% of the respondents
• 60% said they didn’t have a communication/PR strategy/plan, unit or budget in their company

Conclusions/The Problem

The quick conclusions from this survey:

• There was a high appreciation of the value of communications & PR among SMEs for their growth and bottom line. Having Effective PR strategies for SMEs was important to them
• Communications and PR was mainly done by personnel without any training in these areas. There is urgent need for a quick orientation/training to enable the fort-holders basic understanding to improve their level of effectiveness in delivery of communications & PR
• There is an urgent need to provide a basic understanding and skills to communications & PR to SMEs managers as they grow and work towards hiring professional services in future
• Given the similarity of presence and challenges of SMEs anywhere in the world, this could be true of any SME anywhere

The Solution – This Course

This course is designed as a solution to the challenge above. It is intended to:

• Provide a basic technical understanding of what communications and PR are, especially in the context of SMEs
• Remove haphazardness with which SMEs currently do communications and PR, and its place bring planning and consistency
• Train the fort-holders to effectively perform specific communications & PR functions such as media relations, online and social media, branding, public relations,
• In the medium to long term, work towards supporting SMEs to put in place effective communications and PR strategies and plans so that they can realize the full benefits of effective communications.