Smarter people than us have worked over the years to develop a concise definition of the field of public relations. Here is a collection of definitions harvested from textbooks, presentations and professional journals.

• Public relations is the management of communications between an organization and its publics.
• Public relations is the attempt to create opportunities or solve problems by applying our knowledge of human nature. Public relations equals human nature.
• Public relations is the management function that evaluates public attitudes, identifies the policies and procedures of an individual or an organization with the public interest, and plans and executes a program of action to earn public understanding and acceptance.
• Public relations is the planned effort to influence opinion through good character and responsible performance, based upon mutually satisfactory two-way communications.
• Public relations functions through two-way communication, seeing the right people get the proper message at the correct time from a credible source in a way they can understand, accept, act on and respond to.
• Public relations is the deliberate, planned and sustained effort to establish and maintain mutual understanding between and organization and its publics.
• Public relations is a management function, of continuing and planned character, through which public and private organizations and institutions seek to win and retain the understanding, sympathy and support of those with whom they are or may be concerned.
• Public relations is doing good works and telling people about them.
• Public relations is actively managing an organization’s many communications relationships to build an environment of mutual growth, harmony and understanding.
• Public relations helps organizations define their key messages and then facilitates the dissemination of the messages to their audiences in ways that are informative, clever and exciting.
• Public relations seeks to elicit mutually favorable behavior from an organization and its publics. It is focused on getting people to do something, getting people not to do something or getting people to let an organization do something.
• Public relations fosters two-way communication, interprets an organization to its publics, anticipates, analyzes and interprets public opinion, seeks to build consensus, manages communication, advocates and promotes social responsibility, manages change, creates an environment in which an organization can operate successfully, handles adversarial relationships, and builds awareness and interest through publicity and promotion.