Developing a new competency assessment model for selecting a public relations and communication agency

The objective of this article is to develop an ex novo model for selecting public relations and communication agencies, or agencies that provide public relations services, based on perceptions from communication managers who work for companies with the highest turnover in Spain and who belong to the Association of Directors of Communication-Dircom. We were inspired by the matrix model of rubrics for competency assessment (Goodrich, 2005). For this purpose, we sent a questionnaire and carried out a factorial analysis and a content analysis to know and classify the attributes that communication managers used when selecting a public relations and communication agency. Results indicate that communication departments consider criteria in the following order of priority: experience, specialization of the sector and client portfolio, professionalism, reliability, quality of the service and the economic proposal. With this model, we seek to enrich chapters offered by the literature on public relations and communication departments and agencies and, professionally, help these communication departments to objectively select a public relations and communication agency, within the framework of final decision models.