Betsy Plank

Betsy Plank might be called public relations’ First Lady.

She was the first woman elected president of the Public Relations Society of America, and the first person to receive PRSA’s two top professional honors: the Gold Anvil as the nation’s outstanding professional and the Lund Award for exemplary civic and community service. At Ameritech she was the first female to head a company department, directing external affairs.

Plank credits The University of Alabama for much of her success. She says the Capstone provided an outstanding foundation for her career even though there was no such thing as a public relations major when she graduated with a bachelor’s degree in history in 1944. "The University gave me those rich disciplines which have served so faithfully throughout a professional lifetime."

Plank served as executive vice president and treasurer of Edelman Public Relations, an international coun-seling firm, and later served as director of public relations planning for AT&T before joining Ameritech (formerly Illinois Bell).

She spent more than seventeen years with Ameritech and it was here that she faced her greatest challenge — shaping and articulating that institution’s response to the divestiture of the Bell System. "We had a couple of years to break up the world’s largest corporation and prepare it without a single missed step," she recalls. "There were many problems. It was fascinating to live through, challenging to prepare for and carry out, and almost twenty years later, the telecommunications industry hasn’t settled down yet."

Plank is dedicated to civic causes in Chicago, such as The Girl Scouts and The United Way’s Crusade of Mercy. She serves on the advisory board of Illinois Issues and as a trustee of the Illinois Council of Economic Education.

Her dedication to public relations education is unexcelled. Northern Illinois University, Ball State University, the University of Texas, Kent State University, and the University of Florida all have honored her for excellence in the field. She co-chaired the 1987 national commission to develop guidelines for the undergraduate public relations curriculum at colleges and universities and is a founding member of PRSA’s College of Fellows, an honorary group of national leaders in public relations.

In 2000 Plank received The Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award from the Arthur W. Page Society, a professional organization whose mission is to strengthen the policy-making role of the chief corporate public relations officer. Also that year she was presented the University of Alabama College of Communication and Information Sciences Distinguished Achievement award, which was renamed in perpetuity the Betsy Plank Distinguished Achievement Award.

"I think public relations is fundamental to a democratic society," she says, explaining that the framers of the constitution were, in a sense, the nation’s first practitioners of public relations. "It’s necessary because people need to be informed, and they need to make intelligent choices. Public relations is the broker of that kind of information."