Public relations: policy and practice of the International Committee of the Red Cross

In: International review of the Red Cross: humanitarian debate, law, policy, action, Band 18, Heft 207, S. 307-317

Abstract

For a long time it was considered at the ICRC, as in most other international organizations, that the function of an information service was to put out information on the institution's current activities and its general aims. No attention was paid to the true needs of those sections of the public who were at the receiving end, the only concern being the ICRC's short-term interests. This one-way process meant that the people to whom this flow of information was fed received it passively but there were no means of discovering what were their reactions, in other words, there was no feed-back.