Public relations has gradually emerged as one element of American nonprofit management and pedagogy, albeit a second tier subject. This is an historical inquiry into the emergence of nonprofit public relations in the United States, both as a practitioner activity and a curricular subject. One of the earliest nonprofits to use public relations formally was Harvard in 1900. An early milestone was the spread of public relations from individual nonprofits to a nonprofit subsector, such as a paper at a national social service conference in 1909. Then public relations gradually spread to other subsectors, eventually evolving into somewhat of a generic sectorwide management activity. However, the failure to create a professional organization of nonprofit public relations practitioners in the late 1930s and the uncertain marketing of an arguably generic textbook in 1956 may have reflected the continuing uncertainty, if public relations was a common and similar activity throughout the U.S. nonprofit sector.
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