Lobbying in the United Kingdom
Formal procedures enable individual members of the public to lobby their Member of Parliament but most lobbying activity centres on corporate, charity and trade association lobbying, where organisations seek to amend government policy through advocacy. Companies and individuals who operate in this sector commonly use the terms "public relations", "public affairs", "political consultancy" or "corporate affairs" to describe their activities (though this was also a reaction to the negative publicity surrounding the word "lobbyists" following the 1994 Cash-for-questions affair). Professional public affairs agencies, representing multiple clients, undertake a significant proportion of lobbying activity in addition to individual organisations conducting lobbying on an in-house basis.
Public Relations Society of America
In 2000, PRSA and the Institute of Public Relations signed a mutual declaration saying the two would work together in areas like ethics, education, accreditation, professional development and new media. The society started two efforts to revise its definition of public relations in 2003 and 2007, but neither moved forward. In November 2011, PRSA led an initiative called Public Relations Defined, in order to create a crowd-sourced definition of public relations. 927 submissions were made on PRSA's website filling in the blanks to the statement: "Public relations (does what) with or for (whom) to (do what) for (what purpose).” The winning definition was: "a strategic communication process that builds mutually beneficial relationships between organisations and their bodies." According to the Chartered Institute of Public Relations (CIPR) "reactions to the new PRSA definition were mixed and views vigorously debated."