RUW Master's student discusses Reputation Management through PR in the Public Sector

07,Apr 2021

Ms Thekrayat Mohamed Ibrahim from the Master in Design Management programme at the Royal University for Women completed her Master’s degree in which she discussed her thesis online under the title “Developing a management public relations framework to improve the public organisations' reputation in Bahrain”.  Ms. Ibrahim was supervised by Associate Professor Dr. Matthias Bode from Department of Marketing at the College of Business & Financial Sciences and co-supervised by Assistant Professor Dr. Amine Moulay from Urban Design at the College of Art & Design.

Ms Ibrahim urged that in comparison to  the public organisations in Bahrain in managing reputation by Public Relations (PR),  the private sector invests a lot of money and other resources, to build and keep a good reputation. The study aimed to discover the available PR management frameworks and identifying the gap between the existing PR frameworks and theories with the actual practice as well as how a reputation can be improved through a developed PR framework.

The study used a mixed research methodology combining quantitative and qualitative methodologies by distributing surveys to PR employees in the Public organisations in Bahrain in addition to having an expert Interview with the PR Director of the selected ministries.

The researcher discussed the proposed developed PR framework for the public sector in Bahrain which can be utilised in the private sector as well.

At the end of the discussion, the researcher presented a set of recommendations, the most prominent of which was filling or reducing the gaps in PR practice to improve public organisation’s reputation in Bahrain, continues reputation measurements using new methods to analyse them and find solutions, like the social media comments sentiment analysis, behave and imitate the private sector, review the process of recruiting the PR officials by the government, adopting the two-way communication model, adopt a PR chartered, and adopting the strategic planning instead of the tactics.