About Dick Dyer, APR
Senior Counsel, Founder
Dick Dyer was born in Belfast, Maine in 1950, and graduated from the University of Southern Maine in 1972 with degrees in Speech, Theater and Art. During his undergraduate years he wrote for the Gorham Observer, became President of the Student Government, and a member of the state championship debate team.
After graduation he taught communications in both public and private high school settings. Dyer began his career in public relations with a position at the Maine Department of Conservation, followed by positions at the Department of Human Services, the Department of Education, and the Maine Arts Commission. In 1991 he was recruited to work for the national public relations and management-consulting firm, Jackson Jackson & Wagner. In 1993 he established Dyer Associates.
Dyer specializes in crisis and issues management, community relations, customer satisfaction modeling, and management consulting. He is a frequent lecturer in university seminars and various public speaking venues. For Dyer, the art of communications is not only a vocation, but an avocation as well.
Dyer received state and national recognition for his public relations work in the form of the Intellectual Freedom Award from MLA/MEMA/SIRS in 1991. He is nationally certified by the Public Relations Society of America and has been honored by the Maine Public Relations Council with the Edward Bernays Award, the top award given to an active public relations practitioner in Maine. Currently, he is developing a presentation entitled: Plato to Columbo: The Art of Asking the Right Question.
“Nature has wisely furnished us with two ears and one tongue; a most useful lesson if rightly applied.”
-Early American Almanac
About The Company
Dyer Associates is a public relations and management consulting firm serving clients throughout New England and the Mid-Atlantic States. Established in 1993 by Senior Counselor Dick Dyer, APR, the firm consists of one full time counselor and several associate consultants representing graphic design, branding, marketing, research and human resource development.
Dyer Associates operates on the philosophy of listening—to one another in the firm, to our clients, their constituencies, and the environment. It is easier to develop strategies for changing behavior when you actually have heard what is said in addition to what is measured or polled.
The firm also works on the principle that public relations is the art and science of building relationships that earn trust and mutually supportive behavior between an organization and its constituencies. When undertaking a project, staff listen to the situation from the client’s perspective, as well as the target audience’s perspective, and then develop a strategy for obtaining a win-win arrangement for both parties.
The centerpiece for our strategies is the diffusion process model. Based upon research conducted at the University of Iowa on behalf of the US Department of Agriculture, the diffusion process model concludes that behavior change happens when two or more people of influence get together. Information, awareness and reinforcement activities are all one-way communications activities that do not involve people to people contact and therefore do not lead directly to behavior change. Two-way communications lead directly to behavior change. Traditional public relations, then, can only serve to raise awareness, provide basic information and/or reinforce where people already are. Effective public relations emphasize the need to identify barriers and affinities between the organization and its target audiences and define two-way activities that will make a difference in behavior. That is what Dyer Associates does—it is our specialty.