History

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The The Clarity Concept was conceived by Dr Jon White and David Phillips in 1994 when Jon was at Cranfield University and David was running Phillips & Company a public relations consultancy and his start-up media content analysis and evaluation company Media Measurement.

A discussion on how to assist Public Relations Practitioners led to an idea that it would be helpful to practice if there was a robust method for organisations to identify the publics (social groups/stakeholders) that affected its strategic direction and relationships.

The practice of creating mindmaps using a whiteboard was common enough but lacked flexibility, in addition, such practice did not, necessarily, carry with it a robust methodology or the essential for research, replicability.

Using a tickbox or questionnaire approach would not offer the flexibility needed and there was a need to be able to deploy both explicit and tacit knowledge.

The solution found was that of Visualisation where a group under controlled conditions could identify social groups and their relative significance.

The early software resolved the basic requirements by providing pictorial representations of perceived relative importance, influence and attitudes of social groups.

However, this offered little by was of useful data for management or for benchmarking and evaluation.

The breakthrough came with a capability to extract the meta data that lay behind the computer visualisations.

The software was used for consultative work for five years and by 2003 it was obvious that it has other applications, for example in centres of learning and wider issues and brand management applications. It was time to re-build the software.

Working with Renderspace, a Slovenian software house a Pristop company, the leading Eastern European Public Relations Consultancy, new software was developed called Publigram.

By 2005, a wide range of large organisations (including the world's second largest employer) were using the Clarity Concept and its associated software.

Today, the software is available to consultants with training in its use and application.