What Thirty Years in PR Actually Taught Me

World PR Day passed last week. I've been sitting with what this profession has given me, and what it has cost me.

July 16 was World PR Day, which honors Ivy Lee, one of the people credited with shaping public relations as a professional practice. He’s a complicated figure, later in his career he did work that drew real and fair criticism, but the principle he’s remembered for held up. I’ve known about Ivy Lee since early in my career. What I didn’t know then, and couldn’t have known, was how much my own relationship with this profession would complicate and deepen and sometimes frustrate me over the next three decades. This is the piece I’ve been meaning to write for a while.

Let me start with what public relations actually is, because most definitions miss it.

PR is not spin. It is not the art of making bad things sound good. It is not media relations, though media relations is part of it. It is not a press release, though press releases are sometimes useful tools. Public relations, at its core, is the practice of building and maintaining trust between an organization or individual and the people who matter to them. That’s it. Everything else is technique.

I know that definition because I learned it the hard way, over thirty years of doing this work in situations where the techniques kept failing until I got back to the principle.

I didn’t set foot in a PR classroom until 2020, twenty-four years into doing this work. I built this practice self-taught, one relationship and one hard lesson at a time, and I’m proud of what I built that way. When I finally did walk into that classroom, it wasn’t because I needed someone to tell me what I’d already learned by living it. It was because I wanted the credential to sit alongside the experience, and I graduated in 2025 carrying both. I’m proud of the years of self-taught practice that got me here, and I’m just as proud, and just as excited, about what the degree adds to what comes next.

I was talking with a fellow communications professional recently about this exact tension, what it actually takes to lead with honesty when you don’t have every answer yet. It’s a conversation I’ve had more times than I can count over thirty years, in different rooms, with different clients, but always some version of the same moment.

The instinct in those rooms was almost always to manage the message. Soften it. Position it. Give people enough to satisfy them without giving them everything. I’ve sat in that kind of room more than once and felt something shift in me. Not because I was morally superior to anyone else there. Because I had watched enough situations like this one to know how they end. The managed message always costs more than the honest one. The trust you spend years building evaporates faster than you think it will, and it takes longer to rebuild than anyone budgets for.

The times I pushed for honesty instead, it was uncomfortable. It created friction. And it worked, not because honesty always works in a neat, satisfying way, but because the community we were trying to reach could tell the difference, and that difference was the whole thing.

Ivy Lee believed in transparency at a time when that was a radical position for a business to take. He argued that companies should tell the public what they were doing and why, rather than hiding behind silence or deflection. That principle is over a hundred years old and somehow it is still a hard sell in certain rooms.

What thirty years taught me that Ivy Lee’s history didn’t cover is this: the principle of transparency hits differently depending on who you are and who you’re trying to reach. For large institutions with resources and legal teams and crisis communications playbooks, transparency is a strategy. For a nonprofit running on a shoestring, for a small Black-owned business, for a community organization that has historically had every reason to distrust the systems asking for their trust in return, transparency is something more fundamental. It’s the only currency that actually works.

Most of the clients I care most about are not the ones with the biggest budgets. They’re the ones with the most at stake. The ones for whom a communications misstep doesn’t mean a bad news cycle. It means lost funding, lost community, lost trust that took years to build. Those clients need strategy that understands their context, not strategy borrowed from a corporate playbook and scaled down.

That’s what I want the next chapter of Vysyons to be. Not just communications support for whoever can afford it. Communications strategy built specifically for the organizations and individuals who need it most and have historically had the least access to it.

August is Communications Month at Vysyons, which means the next several weeks of posts across all our platforms are going to go deeper into what strategic communications actually looks like in practice. What a media pitch does and doesn’t accomplish. What visibility means for a Black-owned business versus what it means for a Fortune 500 company. What it takes to build a message that holds up over time rather than just sounds good in the moment.

I’ll see you back here on August 4 for the first of those conversations.

Visibility without strategy is just noise. Strategy without truth is just performance. The work is making sure neither one is missing.

Worth Noting:

If you want to go deeper on Ivy Lee and the history of public relations, the Museum of Public Relations keeps a solid archive of the profession’s origins. It’s worth an hour of your time if you’ve ever wondered where this field actually came from.