Italian Red Cross Communication stra­tegies 1915–1918: Managing and mastering public relations

The Great War not only has destroyed Europe's heart and ideals of collaboration, giving rise to new nationalisms, but represented as well a tragic locus of exemplar human solidarity where communication engaged in extremely complex and different tasks: orchestrating the conflict on the one side, namely in the acception of propaganda and, on the other, promoting solidarity and mobilizing aid. In this article we decided to explore the communication and Public Relations (PR) efforts of the Italian Red Cross (IRC) in the 1914-1918 period and compare them with the ones embedded in the tradition of the discipline. IRC internal documents and four major newspapers of the period represented the empirical basis, together with two main websites dedicated to the Great War. Results show a peculiar modernity of the IRC approach and use of PR tools and strategies.