Betsy Plank, First Lady of Public Relations (1924–2010)

In 1973 Plank left Edelman to become director of public relations planning at AT&T. She soon transferred to Illinois Bell, where she led a 102-person external affairs department — the first woman to head a division at the company. She stayed at Illinois Bell for seventeen years, through the 1984 divestiture of the Bell System, which she later described as the most difficult professional challenge of her career: "We had a couple of years to break up the world's largest corporation and prepare it without a single missed step."

PRSA, PRSSA, and PR Education

Plank served as national president of the Public Relations Society of America in 1973 — the first woman to hold the office. In 1967 she had helped create the Public Relations Student Society of America, the student affiliate that now operates chapters at more than three hundred universities. In 1987 she co-chaired the national Commission on Undergraduate Public Relations Education, which established the curriculum standards adopted by PR programs across the country. In 2005 she endowed the Plank Center for Leadership in Public Relations at the University of Alabama, which now runs the Betsy Plank Day mentorship program every April on her birthday. Her stated conviction — that public relations would become a profession on par with law and medicine only when its education standards were fully accredited — shaped the field's academic development for three decades.

The Firsts

Plank was the first female president of the Publicity Club of Chicago (1963), the first female national president of PRSA (1973), the first woman to lead a division of Illinois Bell, the first recipient of the PRSA Educators Academy's David W. Ferguson Award (1997), the first recipient of the Arthur W. Page Society Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award, and the first woman to receive the Institute for Public Relations' Alexander Hamilton Award. She was the first person of any gender to hold three top individual PRSA honors. She co-founded The Chicago Network in 1979, one of the earliest professional-women's organizations in American business. In 1990 she left Illinois Bell and launched Betsy Plank Public Relations in Chicago.

What Plank Represents

Every senior woman in American public relations today — every chief communications officer at a Fortune 500, every managing partner at an independent firm, every PRSSA chapter president who will run an agency in a decade — works in a field Betsy Plank made structurally possible. She proved that a woman could run the biggest external affairs department in one of the country's largest companies, that a woman could lead the national trade society, and that the field's education infrastructure could be built by practitioners rather than left to the academics. She was mentoring students into her eighties. Her ten Professional Commandments — including "invest in something in the profession you practice" — are still taught inside the Plank Center.

The Record

Betsy Plank died on May 23, 2010. She was 86. She is survived in the professional record by PRSSA, by the Plank Center for Leadership in Public Relations at the University of Alabama, by The Chicago Network, by the Betsy Plank Scholarship Endowment Fund at the PRSA Foundation, and by the hundreds of practitioners she mentored personally. The University of Alabama holds her papers. Every April 3, PRSSA chapters across the United States run Betsy Day social campaigns in her memory.

The EPR In Memoriam canonical record. Related: Daniel J. Edelman (1920–2013) · Ivy Lee (1877–1934) · Carl Byoir (1888–1957) · Harold Burson (1921–2020) · Jack O'Dwyer (1933–2018) · John W. Hill (1890–1977).