Dear Andreas
Francis Ingham is DG of the PRCA. Its fee-paying members include RLM Finsbury (among other WPP companies), so, ultimately, it contributes to his salary. Possible COI?

Paul

Come on, you are a CIPR fellow, and CIPR and PRCA are rival bodies. In fact, Ingham used to be the CIPR's assistant director, until he defected to the PRCA. Shall I make an ad-hominem comment based on your COI too?

Yes, Finsbury is one of several hundred members of PRCA. Even so Ingham did not condone their behaviour. And what he says about the poor perception of PR professionals is the same thing CIPR have said (and according to Wikipedia, it's one thing CIPR and PRCA agree on, and have collaborated on).

The question is not, does the man have a COI; the question is, Is there merit in what he says?

And there is. Oliver's revamp of the Contact Us pages has made a huge difference, because previously, PR professionals would pass three invitations to fix the article themselves before they would come to the OTRS e-mail address.

But there is still room for improvement. OTRS e-mails should be responded to the same day, not up to four weeks later. Is anyone collecting data on how quickly OTRS mails are responded to? Are those data public? If not, there is another potential area for improvement.

PR professionals could be invited to post to the COI noticeboard AND the article talk page at the same time (leaving a link on the article talk page to the COIN discussion), so they get a prompt response. There should be a discussion whether PR professionals should be forbidden or encouraged to contribute to COI noticeboard queries where they do not have a COI themselves beyond being PR professionals too. These are some ideas.

Andreas