By Disrupt PR | 2025 Bulldog PR Awards Gold Winner, Best Boutique Agency
Public relations and public affairs sound like the same thing. They’re not.
Confusing the two costs companies real money — the wrong strategy, the wrong hires, and outreach aimed at the wrong audience. If you’re a founder or communications lead trying to figure out which one your company needs, here’s the honest answer from someone who spent years as a broadcast journalist watching companies get this wrong.
The short answer
- Public relations shapes how the public sees your brand — customers, media, investors, employees. Its goal is visibility, credibility, and reputation.
- Public affairs shapes how policymakers and regulators treat your industry. Its goal is influence over the rules your business operates under.
You need PR when you want to be known. You need public affairs when you need to be understood by the people who write the laws that govern your work. Many companies eventually need both — but almost never at the same time or from the same team.
Public relations vs. public affairs: at a glance
| Public Relations | Public Affairs | |
|---|---|---|
| Goal | Shape public perception | Shape public policy |
| Audience | Customers, media, investors, general public | Lawmakers, regulators, government agencies |
| Primary tactics | Media relations, thought leadership, press releases, social campaigns | Lobbying, coalition building, policy proposals, regulatory submissions |
| Success looks like | Coverage in Forbes, Bloomberg, TIME, CNN | New legislation passed, regulation shaped, policy changed |
| Typical industries | Consumer tech, health tech, retail, entertainment | Healthcare, energy, fintech, pharmaceuticals |
| Who does the work | PR agencies, in-house comms teams | Lobbying firms, government relations teams |
| Timeline to impact | Weeks to months | Months to years |
What public relations actually is
Public relations is the discipline of shaping how your brand is perceived by the public — including customers, journalists, investors, employees, and industry peers. It’s the work that gets your company written about, quoted, invited to speak, and remembered.
Good PR does five things:
- Earns media coverage in outlets your buyers already trust
- Establishes credibility through third-party validation (a journalist quoting your CEO is worth 100 marketing emails)
- Positions leaders as authorities in their industry
- Manages reputation during moments of crisis or scrutiny
- Fuels commercial outcomes — coverage drives search visibility, closes sales cycles, and increasingly, feeds the AI models that mediate how buyers discover companies
If your company launched a wearable that detects disease early, a PR strategy would focus on landing coverage in outlets like Wired, TechCrunch, and The Wall Street Journal, positioning your founder as a thought leader in preventive health, and generating the kind of sustained media presence that builds trust with patients, investors, and hospitals.
The core question public relations answers: Does the market know who we are, and does it believe what we say?
What public affairs actually is
Public affairs is the discipline of influencing the policy environment your company operates in. It’s less about being seen and more about being heard — specifically, by the people writing the rules.
Public affairs professionals work with:
- Lawmakers and legislative staff
- Federal, state, and local regulators
- Government agencies
- Advocacy coalitions
- Industry associations
The work looks like drafting policy proposals, testifying at regulatory hearings, building coalitions with other companies facing similar regulatory challenges, and lobbying for or against specific legislation. It’s often invisible to the public — the win is a bill quietly amended, a regulation clarified, or a compliance path opened.
If that same diagnostics company from above wanted to actually sell its wearable, it might discover that state data privacy laws or FDA regulatory frameworks made the go-to-market path unworkable. Public affairs would engage regulators, submit expert testimony, and build a coalition with other health tech companies to shape those rules — so the product could actually reach patients.
The core question public affairs answers: Do the rules our industry operates under allow us to succeed?
How to know which one you need
Here’s the honest test.
Choose public relations if:
- You need customers, investors, or partners to know you exist
- Your business model is legal and viable but underexposed
- You’re trying to build reputation, close sales, or attract talent
- You’re a growth-stage company that has a story and wants it told
Choose public affairs if:
- Your industry is heavily regulated (healthcare, fintech, energy, cannabis, AI, data)
- A pending law, rule, or agency decision could materially change your business
- You need government contracts or approvals to grow
- You’re facing regulatory scrutiny or an industry-wide policy shift
You may need both if:
- You’re in a regulated industry where public perception influences policy (health tech and AI are the clearest examples)
- You’re preparing for an IPO, where both investor perception and regulatory clarity matter
- You’re managing a crisis with both reputational and regulatory dimensions
Most growth-stage companies start with PR and only add public affairs when a specific regulatory issue emerges. If you’re not sure which category your challenge falls into, it’s almost always PR first.
The mistake most companies make
The most expensive mistake we see: companies hire a PR agency to solve a public affairs problem, or vice versa.
A biotech company facing an FDA approval question doesn’t need press coverage — it needs regulatory strategy. Hiring a PR firm to “generate buzz” won’t move the FDA. Conversely, a consumer brand facing a viral customer service crisis doesn’t need a lobbyist — it needs a communications team that can move fast, manage the news cycle, and rebuild trust with the public.
The skills, the relationships, the pacing, and the tactics are entirely different disciplines. A firm that promises both usually does neither well.
Where the two overlap
There’s a real overlap zone — and it’s growing, especially in industries where public opinion increasingly shapes regulatory decisions.
Consider a health tech company navigating both consumer trust (a PR challenge) and evolving data privacy law (a public affairs challenge). The two functions have to coordinate. The narrative your PR team builds in The Wall Street Journal is often the same narrative your public affairs team uses in Congressional testimony. Get the story right, and it does double duty.
This is the reason sophisticated companies increasingly want integrated communications counsel — but even then, the two functions are usually staffed by different specialists working in coordination, not by a single generalist trying to do both.
Who does each type of work
Public relations professionals typically come from:
- Journalism backgrounds (this is common at boutique agencies — former reporters who understand how news actually gets made)
- Marketing communications backgrounds
- In-house corporate communications teams
- PR agencies of varying sizes and specialties
The best ones have deep, current relationships with working journalists. Ask any PR firm you’re considering: when was the last time your team pitched a Forbes reporter and got a response the same day? If they can’t answer specifically, they don’t have the relationships.
Public affairs professionals typically come from:
- Government (former congressional staff, agency officials, or elected office)
- Law firms with regulatory practices
- Lobbying firms
- In-house government relations teams
- Industry associations
The best ones have relationships that predate their careers in advocacy — they know the specific staff members, committee counsel, and agency officials who actually shape policy in your industry.
The honest bottom line
If you’re reading this trying to figure out which one your company needs, the answer is almost always one, not both — at least at first.
For most growth-stage companies, the honest starting point is public relations. Build visibility. Establish credibility with the market. Get your leaders quoted in the outlets that matter. Then, if and when a specific regulatory or policy issue emerges that could materially change your business, bring in public affairs specialists to address it.
Companies that try to do everything at once usually do nothing well. Companies that pick the right discipline for their current moment tend to compound results faster than they expected.
Disrupt PR is the 2025 Bulldog PR Awards Gold Winner for Best Boutique Agency — the only PR awards program judged exclusively by working journalists. Founded by a former Emmy-nominated broadcast journalist, our team specializes in earning press coverage in top-tier outlets including The New York Times, Forbes, Bloomberg, CNN, BBC, and Good Morning America for growth-stage companies across healthcare, tech, and finance. Book a discovery call to talk through which discipline your company actually needs.
