This discussion is for students in JMC 38002, Public Relations Case Studies, Spring, 2008. Others who wish to join this conversation about community relations are welcome, so long as you stay on topic. I mean, this is a class assignment.
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On my other blog, I sometimes tangle with misguided marketers who see PR as nothing more than a subset of their discipline. They view PR as they do advertising or promotion: as a supporter of the sale.
They’re wrong, of course, but it’s not a good idea for you, as an intern or entry-level professional, to call them out on it. They can get pretty testy.
PR is not a branch of marketing. Rather, it serves management all areas of the organization, using communication and counsel to maintain the relationships and create the environment necessary to success. We often work with marketing folks, communicating with customers, distributors and media who can influence sales. But just as often we support functions such as employee communication or community relations — two areas of PR practice with no connection to marketing.
Today’s focus is community relationships, which are vital to your future employers. Guth & Marsh (G&M) begin Chapter 7 by reminding us that communities come in different forms:
Geographic communities are clustered around a location like a university campus or a manufacturing plant. These are our physical neighbors.
Demographic communities are clustered around common traits such as culture, language or ethnicity. Depending on the client you work with, you may reach out to Hispanic, African American, Gay & Lesbian communities and others.
Psychographic communities form around lifestyles and attitudes. A local park system for example, may be concerned with communities of environmentalists, cycling enthusiasts or soccer players. Psychographic communities are self-selecting, based on the interests and passions of their members.
Virtual communities are defined by where they gather: on the Internet. And I’m not convinced that makes them a “category.” Most often, virtual communities are also geographic, demographic or psychographic. The fact that they meet on line is not a defining characteristic, but it will alter how we communicate with them and how we monitor their activities.
Knowing your community categories is less important than understanding where the interests of your your organization and community publics intersect. As G&M point out on page 141, our challenge is “to identify common interest and values — even with stakeholders with whom there is no prior relationship.”
Community relations is like every other PR challenge: You must know your publics and you must see the world through their eyes. Then, you must bring that perspective to management as you devise strategies for communication and policy. Remember the WIIFM?
Don’t forget, too, that maintaining relationships with communities is a balancing act. For example, the business community in Kent, Ohio, may support a plan by the university to build a conference center, apartment complex and retail space on Main Street. Local residents, on the other hand, may oppose you based on concerns about traffic, noise and parking — quality-of-life issues.
It’s all part of the “relationship wheel” we talk about in class. It’s all part of understanding that stakeholder groups have different needs in different contexts, and that those needs deserve a hearing at management’s table.
Does this sound anything like marketing to you?
Let me suggest you read carefully the 6 bullet points listed under “Key Considerations” (pp. 145-146), as they are important guides to community relations. If any PR pros are following along, the 6 categories will be self-evident from the list:
- Conduct stakeholder research
- Define organization priorities
- Think long term
- Pick your partners carefully
- Mirror the community
- Remember employee ambassadors
I’m not going to rehash the textbook cases in this post, but please read them and weave them into our discussion. For example, let’s talk of how the Colorado state park system rallied community support around the “quality of life” issues that Coloradans hold so dear. Let’s look at the community partnerships the park system built with 25 different “communities” within the community — all in support of the “Colorado Year of Trails” campaign.
Each of the communities — from hiking enthusiasts to towns and cities on the Front Range — came together to support something they all value. See the common ground here? Do you see the need for organizations to “mirror” community needs?
Sadly, the outcome measures for all three of the campaigns in our chapter are weak, dwelling on media impressions and advertising equivalency numbers (measures that marketers use those measures all the time, I might add). What we need are metrics that gauge behavior change — no easy task in CR.
The other two cases in the chapter are worth your time if only to see how community relations efforts bring an organization closer to a community by aligning with its values. Wells Fargo did it with an educational program built around Alaska’s most famous sporting event, the Iditarod. The University of Maryland’s “Fear the Turtle” campaign tied in environmental groups, but also doubled as a marketing campaign for the university — an integrated campaign that both PR and marketing can cheer about.
BTW, am I the only one to notice that “Fear the Turtle” sounds a whole lot like the campaign at U of Akron that came much, much later? Hmmmm?
Oh, well. Little in this world is original these days, and you have to admit that “Fear The Roo” became a successful rallying slogan for U of Akron sports, and sold a ton of t-shirts in the process. We can’t say the same about Kent State’s “On the Hunt,” which I’m guessing none of you even remembers!
Building bottom-line results into a community relations program will never be easy for a several reasons:
- CR programs are long-term, so the changes we seek can’t be easily gauged month-to-month.
- CR doesn’t always seek behavioral change, but instead to create an environment of trust and acceptance necessary to doing business.
- CR has more to do with an organization’s ethics and values than its profits or business plans, and that makes it a tough sell at times.
Here are two Silver Anvil Award winners from PRSA that I’d like you to review. Relax. The summaries are just 3 pages long:
- From Fleishman Hillard (New York): erase-fh.pdf
- From Mitchel Communications Group, Fayetteville, Ark. (pdf): tysonsilveranvil.pdf
Some questions to ponder and discuss:
How can public relations professionals do a better job of measuring the outcomes of community-relations efforts?
How might companies get their employees involved in community relations — as is it worth it?
What else is on your mind?
15 comments
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March 24, 2008 at 4:28 pm
Rebecca
After reading the case studies on E.R.A.S.E. and Tyson, I can see why
the impact of community relations campaigns may be difficult to
measure. Although advertising and placements within media outlets can
be counted, the impact of a CR campaign on the community cannot be
guaranteed through numerical values. Like Bill said in the post, CR
is more about changing the environment and establishing a positive
relationship instead of encouraging action or a change in behavior.
Tyson did extensive research before launching its community relations
program, but I would be interested to see how it got the employees
actively engaged in the campaign. The case study said Tyson was
experiencing plant closings and significant lay-offs during the
implementation of the program. If I was about to lose my job as a
working-class employee at the company, I’d be upset to learn my
employer was spending millions of dollars to feed other hungry
people. I’d be angry, knowing I might be struggling to feed my own
family once I lost my job. The case study doesn’t contain much
information on employee opinion, so I cannot help but wonder how the
employees felt about the program. This is a situation where employee
relations and community relations may intersect.
March 25, 2008 at 1:11 pm
samantha0613
I would agree that for community relations, measuring behavioral change is most important. The E.R.A.S.E. case demonstrated that there was an environmental change with the drop in absences, hospitalizations, and days off etc. since the program’s implementation. Nevertheless, I do not completely agree with Bill in that media impressions and advertising equivalency are weak (marketing) measurement tools of evaluation. They show whether a message has reached an audience or not and should be taken into consideration. Without the issue or message being brought to someone’s attention, you cannot expect attitude or behavioral change. No, they do not interpret what will happen in the long run; but, they could explain why a program did not succeed in the first place with the message maybe never being brought to the public properly. However, I think that the E.R.A.S.E case is an excellent example of how there are other methods of evaluating the success of your efforts besides measuring the amount of media coverage.
As far as getting employees involved in community relations, I would think that volunteerism would be the best way for them to get involved in a program. Volunteering makes people feel more involved with something in their own community and it makes people feel better about themselves for doing a good thing for society. For the Tyson case, I think it was a good idea to have their employees help out with “Powering The Spirit” events. However, I have to agree with Rebecca. Even though there were many employees that did help with the good cause, I don’t know how much employees will want to help out a company in the future that is laying off its employees and closing plants. Tyson may want to promote volunteerism as an incentive for keeping a job.
March 25, 2008 at 2:49 pm
jyokester
I agree with Rebecca and Sam when they say that it’s difficult to measure the outcomes of CR with numbers and pie charts. That works for advertisers and marketers, but not necessarily those who want to build relationships.
Instead, going out and doing a follow-up with the community about any behavioral differences seems to be a better way to get the real response you’re looking for. You’ll come across people who may have better ideas to execute your goals, as well as criticisms to draw back on and build from.
The only problem with this is that it doesn’t always come out as clear as if you had a simple “Yes” or “No” answer, so recording success/failure is difficult. Not impossible, though.
To me, community relations is all about going out and meeting your community, and although you can get response by sending out a mass survey or setting up a hot line, it doesn’t show the public that you care about THEM.
Although volunteering is an excellent way to use the spirit of a committed employee, I think it’s much more important to find those who typically sit on the sidelines and involve them in community relations. Those employees may want to get involved, but don’t find an opportunity to.
…I know, that is more employee relations-like, but you need those ambassadors to make any sort of progress with your public. They know the insides about the company and when someone asks about their job, you can be confident that they’ll have something positive to say.
Have the employees come up with ideas of their own for community relations, and so when you incorporate their efforts, they’re going to feel like they helped the company grow. They may even ideas and previous experience with CR campaigns, so I wouldn’t overlook their help.
What else is on your mind?
Lester Lefton stole my seat last night at a Student Ambassadors meeting…haha, I know it’s nowhere near relevant to this blog, but I figured I would mention it.
March 25, 2008 at 6:50 pm
jstubler
I also agree that community relations is a hard area of research to accurately measure the success or failure of the target audience’s behaviors. I think that the E.R.A.S.E. campaign did a good job of measuring the number of children that were positively affected by the asmtha professionals help in schools. E.R.A.S.E. was able to measure quanitatively the amount of absentees, hospitalizations, and ER visits of asthmatic children before and after the program was implemented in the target schools, but this particular case allowed for that quantitative measurement whereas other public relations campaigns do not. Either way, media relations impressions are important to help the company see how many people are actually aware of the campaign being promoted because awareness is the first step. The Tyson company would certainly want as many consumers to know about their fight against hunger because many of their consumers are concerned with the hunger issue themselves and would prefer to support a company that is visibly trying to help the community. As far as advertising equivilancy measurements, I agree with Bill that they are a weak measuring tool because they do nothing to gauge the reaction that the target audience has toward the public service announcements or other publicity used to promote a company. It simply measures, if the company had used advertising how much they would have spent. I think that it would be more beneficial to try an interview some members of the target audience with face-to-face interviews or public forums for participants in the campaign to see if behaviors were changed at all. This is also difficult to represent numerically because every single person could have a different view and behavior toward the P.R. campaign or company being promoted.
In regard to employee relations, I agree that many of the employees at Tyson would be less interested in volunteering if they were about to be layed off. They are more concerned with feeding their own families so I think that volunteering as an incentive to keeping your job is a good idea. The first thing a company needs to think about when asking employees to volunteer to help others in the community is how effective its employees will be as ambassadors for the company. Tyson should be concerned with helping employees as much as the outside community because the employees would probably be more willing to volunteer their spare time to the community through company volunteer programs if their jobs were secure. Companies can get the employees involved in decision making process according to what is important to them. This way they may be more excited to volunteer and the company will also gain insight into what is important to people in the surrounding community that they are targeting.
March 25, 2008 at 9:00 pm
agabriele
The Tyson case came at a financially difficult time for the company. I think it is great that Tyson got its employees to volunteer for such a good cause. It not only builds morale, but it shows that Tyson’s employees care about their company and community. However, I have to disagree with the above comments about using volunteerism as a means for employees to keep jobs. That sounds like a bribe to me. Rather than making charitable volunteer work for the company an optional incentive, why not make it a mandatory activity? Not only would this get employees more involved with the company, but it would put them more in touch with their community. When volunteering for an organization or company, you learn more about its philosophy and gain leadership skills through team building. The bottom line is that knowledge is power. The more employees know about a company, the more they can contribute to its success; the more employees feel they are contributing in the workplace, the higher the job satisfaction.
Looking at the comparisons made between marketing and public relations, many people believe they are both “supporters of the sale”. This is always an interesting topic to me because I have two minors, PR and marketing. And when people ask me if they are “basically the same thing”, I have to constantly explain the different elements of each. Why would I be wasting my time taking classes for these two different minors if I could possess the same skills with just one on my diploma? I see it every day on Craigslist when I search for internships under the job listing “marketing/ pr/ ad”. And yes, for very small companies, one or two employees could serve two out of the three functions. But what is the point of marketing a product if the company’s image and reputation does not sit well with consumers? Professional, positive relationships with customers and the community serve as the backbone of any success the company may have. Taking away the community relation function of PR would prevent any business from standing up straight.
March 25, 2008 at 9:47 pm
srollin2
I must agree there seems to be an overlapping of public relations, marketing and advertising. Is that a bad thing? We live in the gray, and as up-and-coming PR professionals we have to figure out where we fit in and define the field accordingly as it evolves.
As for the E.R.A.S.E. campaign, I believe it to be successful because the objectives were easily measured through fewer absent students, hospitalizations and ER visits. This is one of the rare incidents that a numerical value is a possible measuring tool. Marketers and advertisers are concerned with sales and the bottom line; however, public relations is more concerned with building relationships with those publics impacted by the messages a company creates. Furthermore, if a company does not have a positive reputation with the community, it will fail. This is why overlapping does not seem like such a bad thing, because one cannot survive without the others. The efforts should be integrated in order to successfully reach the objectives and the goals for the company and community.
I agree the Tyson case is somewhat biased. Where is the employee contribution to this campaign? If I feared losing my job, the last thing I would want to do would be to support a campaign that would ultimately brand the company as a socially responsible power house and gain them increased revenues. I agree that if volunteerism was an incentive for job security, then more employees would become invested in the cause. As we have mentioned in class: Involvement=Ownership. As for the comment about an incentive being a bribe, I have to disagree. As a result of increased brand recognition, the company would also increase it customer base and thus make more money to pay employees. It seems like a good deal to me.
March 26, 2008 at 7:19 am
Bill Sledzik
Good thoughts so far, guys. Let me weigh in on a few things.
Sam, you are right on. I dismissed those measures of media impressions too quickly. They DO contribute to awareness, without which we cannot achieve attitude and behavior change. And while “impressions” doesn’t measure awareness, they do tell us who may have been exposed to messages. Ad equivalency is another matter. It’s measuring publicity outcomes with an advertising yardstick. That’s apples to oranges, and it distorts the picture.
Amanda, I like the idea of encouraging employee volunteerism as a way of bringing our clients closer to their communities. But “mandatory” volunteerism turns it into an oxymoron, no? If I have to do it, it ain’t volunteer. I will say that some companies allow employees to do limited volunteer work on company time. That makes it easier to recruit people, but you have to weigh it against lost productivity on the job.
An yes Shantae, we live in a grey world, indeed. Get used to folks defining what we do — public relations — as marketing and promotion. The marketing folks understand very well the value that PR strategies bring to the table, so they include us in their planning and, in the process, they label us as branch of marketing. Look at any area hospital and you’ll find PR functions in the “marketing” department. Look right here at KSU. We call it University Communications & Marketing. Governments long ago stopped using the term “public relations” in favor of “public information” or “public affairs.”
Think of marketers as your partners, not rivals. But take every chance to educate them on what public relations can do that goes beyond helping to sell products and services. Spread the gospel.
March 26, 2008 at 12:50 pm
Rebecca
All this talk about employee volunteerism reminds me how important it is to get upper management involved in any campaign. I haven’t looked at the research, but I bet companies run by managers with positive attitudes towards volunteerism can lead to employees who are more willing to spend time volunteering on behalf of their organization.
My boss is a leader in the community, and his positive attitude towards volunteerism rubs off on my fellow employees. Right now the company I work for is competing in a weight-loss challenge sponsored by the Tribune Chronicle in Warren, Ohio. The winning team gets to donate the winnings to charity. The challenge has brought my co-workers together, and it is for a good cause. The free media coverage for the company is obviously a plus as well.
March 26, 2008 at 11:37 pm
kehuntley
As Shantae said in her post, I agree that we do work within the grey area. PR relies on marketing and marketing relies on PR. Amanda even noted that many jobs available today use the terms interchangably. I feel that it is necessary to utilize functions of both marketing and PR in order to complete the job successfully, especially in cases like Tyson and E.R.A.S.E.. However, we know, as future PR professionals, what the differences are — and that sometimes we must embrace them.
I think that when PR and marketing are used in conjunction with one another in these types of situations, the results turn out the best. I feel that using ad equivalency and media impressions to measure outcomes are a good way to gain a little bit of insight of how successful you may become in your efforts. However, I don’t feel that these give a completely accurate measurement. In our readings, I feel that the E.R.A.S.E. case gave the best results, because they showed actual numbers after a certain period of time. Although the case was based on a very limited number of students, it was able to gauge how effective the program would be in the long run.
On the topic of volunteerism, I completely agree with Rebecca in that the attitudes of higher management will rub off on the other employees. After all, if you see your boss doing volunteer work as he/she is suggesting it to you, aren’t you going to feel “compelled” to do the same? I know from my own experience that nothing pushes me to do the “extras” like seeing someone else doing it — and who knows, even enjoying it! It’s kind of like an unspoken duty.
A more obvious answer to what a company could do to get employees involved in community relations is to offer some type of incentive. Although this might end up costing the company a little bit of money, I feel that the results would add up greatly in the long run. Promote the fact that if an employee spends a half a day volunteering for the cause, the other half of the work day could be spent with their family at home or wherever they choose. Small incentives like this could add up to a huge boost in employee morale, and in turn, boost the volunteering and the other “extras” you might want your employees to engage in.
March 27, 2008 at 1:35 pm
dduke527
As many students mentioned in their post, I too agree that PR works within the grey area and jobs titles are used interchangeably. When I intern at the American Heart Association, I was doing more than just writing press releases, I also worked on advertising and marketing for different campaigns. Since the American Heart Association is non-profit, and with many other non-profits, they only have one person doing the marketing, advertising and pr. Without all three of these media outlets, I don’t think their campaigns and messages have the potential to reach the amount of people the organization would like.
I think that media impressions are important to a company. They give the company a sense of how many people saw the ads/media coverage for that particular campaign and can help explain why a campaign was successful or not. Impressions for the E.R.A.S.E campaign were a success because the objectives could be easily measured. They campaign impressions could put an exact number on absent students, hospitalizations and ER visits. Although, it was only a selected number of students, it still shows how the program will run in the long run.
As for the community relations Tyson case, I agree with Rebecca, in I would like to know how the employees were involved with the campaign. I think that if I were going to lose my job, I would probably not support the campaign. Using volunteering for the campaign as a job security is a way for the CEOs to get employees invested in the campaign. I think more employees would be will to volunteer their time, if it guaranteed them a job. However, I don’t feel with this case, Tyson considered employee opinions about the campaign.
Again, agreeing with many students, providing incentives is a good way to employees to get involved in community relations. Like Kathryn mentioned above, incentives could boost morale among employees, and this could end up being very beneficial for the company and its cause.
March 28, 2008 at 1:44 pm
kgarlan3
After reading the case study on E.R.A.S.E. and reading some of the student’s responses. I have to agree that although it is hard to measure the success, in terms of numbers, in cases like these, the relationships and impact from both cases are important parts of building relationships and encouraging behavioral change. An interesting fact about the E.R.A.S.E. campaign is that I actually heard Michael Rinaldo a Senior Vice President and Senior Partner at Fleishman Hillard talk about his work on this campaign and the PRSSA National Conference in October. Reading the case study, the results are much less evident, but hearing Rinaldo talk about the relationships he built with doctors, teaching and families gave a more personal account to the success of this campaign. Although media impressions don’t always reflect the long term result, they do bring attention and awareness, which are important steps in any campaign.
I feel that volunteering would be a great way to get employees involved. When we talked in class about how the biggest problem faced by Habitat for Humanity isn’t getting volunteers, but getting people to move into the houses they build, is a perfect example. I agree that this case lacks the employee’s point of view, which is important to have. I don’t think makeing volunteering mandatory would help, but creating ways to get employees and their families involved would be a great way to encourage workers to volunteer. I have three siblings under the age of ten, and I know that my parents are happy to take them to anything where they can all do it together. I feel like involving the families, even just a couple weekends a year, would create a positive morale for the company. Ultimately, I feel that employees would become better ambassadors to the community.
March 28, 2008 at 2:04 pm
ahayes4
Wow, what a discussion so far!
I don’t think there is any question that public relations overlaps with marketing, but I also don’t believe we should be lumped under that title. We are, as the above posts agree, required to wear multiple hats in our field, and to be experienced and successful in several areas. We are marketers, but we are also journalists, entrepreneurs, managers and most importantly, relationship builders. We need to know our client(s) in and out, because we are basically the go-to whenever there is a problem or question.
I agree with the above post that media impressions are extremely important to gauging success in a public relations campaign. However, as an earlier post pointed out, as PR professionals we cannot depend on numbers and statistics alone. I believe we certainly need to take the figures into consideration, but we also need to go beyond the numbers to the people they represent. Individual, more in-depth feedback should be our main goal in order to get a better sense of what is actually going on. Such feedback is especially relevent in a community relations campaign, such as the Tyson and E.R.A.S.E. cases.
As far as using volunteerism as incentive for job security, I’m not sure what to think. Someone pointed out in class that if you’re forced to do it, it’s not volunteer work. I would think employees might begin to see the company as “shady” for almost blackmailing them into helping build the company’s brand. Obviously, this is not desirable because our internal relationships cannot suffer due to external endeavors. Our employees are our best chance at building positive community relationships, because as we know, they are our company’s ambassadors to the community.
I don’t really have much else to add to the conversation here; it’s neat to read what others in the class are thinking about these issues as we try to figure out what exactly our roles in the PR world will be. I might be biased, but it seems obvious to me this class has a lot to add to the conversation here and in the PR world.
March 30, 2008 at 10:56 am
aegut
Wow. Who knew a discussion about community relations could take so many twists and turns? Sometimes it feels like public relations practitioners are counselors, marketers, salesmen (and women) all wrapped up into one.
It is important to remember the fundamental role that pr people play in any campaign. That role is essentially to build a fiduciary relationship between the client and the company. If a healthy relationship with two-way communication has not been established then the campaign will eventually fail. Our marketing counterparts do not use this aspect of public realations when creating a plan to build community relations. They only care about the ROI at the end of campaign. When dealing with community relations a dollar amount equating to the impact of the campaign is hard to measure. It is true that the more advertising and marketing dollars spent the more people a message will potentially reach. But what is the use of spending money to reach large groups of people if the message being sent is not going to resonate with the publics being reached? Will the dollars spent in the campaign really affect the outcome of the campaign if the message is not perfected and relatable? If changing people’s actions is the ultimate goal, for example the Tyson Company wanted to change people’s actions by getting them to donate more protein to food banks, then money is not necessarily a good way to measure the outcome. The outcome should be measured in actual actions taken by the community.
I do agree with the posts stating involvement equals ownership. Participation can create a sense of community, promote bonding and lead to happier employees. It can also cause headaches and put undue stress on employees. I do not agree that volunteering is a useful tool to determine who keeps a job and who would lose a job. This has been discussed by my peers relating to the Tyson case. Imagine working 40 plus hours a week, raising a family and then being forced to volunteer for a cause that does not affect you so you can feed your family and not end up on the other end of the campaign, being fed by your former co-workers because you lost your job. This scenario is a little stressful right?
Those who volunteer should have other incentives such as getting out of work an hour early on a Friday. Who wouldn’t want to see their family or just go to sleep an hour earlier after a hard week. Those employees who are being laid off should be chosen not because they volunteered, but because of their skills and how much they contributed to the company. Those that produce should be kept and those that did not should be axed. Survival of the fittest is the way to run a company. A little objectivist sounding but it is a good philosophy to run a successful business. If the goal is to build good relationships this whole volunteer to keep your job idea would not work. Keep in mind that employees are the best ambassadors a company has to reach the public. I can see a certain news station running with this story. “Tyson workers forced to volunteer for fear of charred and broiled at the end of the day.” “Company participates in unethical and unreasonable means of firing employees.” “Stay tuned as we let the chicken out of the coop next.”
In the end community relations is all about building trust. Is the reputation a company created strong enough to get the community involved on their side? I guess that’s why marketing needs public relations. Branding a company as relatable to the community needs to be done with a flair that public relations professionals possess. When it boils down to it a successful community relations plan needs to capture the emotions and momentum of the community at that second in time. Public relations professionals with a wealth of knowledge in psychology, philosophy and much more will be able to be successful and reach a mutually beneficial outcome for the community and the company.
March 30, 2008 at 11:59 am
sblei
The implementation of community relations in the case studies of E.R.A.S.E and Tyson are prevalant, but leaves room for other alternatives to measuring the outcomes. CR needs to involve the employees of the company, as well as the outside publice. I belive CR is most effective when incorporating all levels of people in the decision-making process. I think that surveys and research along those lines are often overlooked. A more effective way to establish a relationship with your publics is incorporating face-to-face interactions with the community. This involves interactions with employees of your company and the public in order to gain feedback and act upon it for more successful results.
I like how the E.R.A.S.E campaign approached the situation of children who were affected by asthma. They worked closely with their key publics and through the process, it allowed them to measure their outcomes more effectively.
The Tyson case doesn’t address the importance of their employees and how volunteerism at a risky time could affect the employees and their families. In order to execute a volunteer program with your employees, a company must ensure that if upon doing so, the employees won’t be negatively affected. Employees are one of the most important assets to a company, and must be taken into consideration for most decisions made in the organization. As stated in the text, employees serve as unofficial ambassadors to the company. Along with this, if volunteerism is initiated to employees who are at risk of being laid-off, the success of the program may flourish due to lack of security.
CR is a vital aspect of effective planning and serves as a tool to help gain respect and loyalty to an organization. It portrays to the community that a company truly cares about relationships made with the public, and employees. Through the planning and implementation of community relations procedures, a company will be able to grow at a successful rate.
March 30, 2008 at 12:34 pm
kendrawheeler
I agree with what most of you said about the Tyson case. How was it possible to get the employees onboard when they were facing lay-offs? We don’t know anything about employee morale from the case, but I hope that Tyson had a really good employee relations program implemented before they went out to help the community.
I feel that the Tyson employees’ satisfaction should have been taken care of before a community service initiative. But then again, I don’t really know what the employee relations situation was at the time of the community relations campaign.
As far as measuring the outcome of a CR campaign. I don’t think it would be that difficult. A client and firm should go back and look at their objectives. The objectives should have been made from research conducting about the communities needs. I think any effort in community services makes a difference.
When a firm and a client first decides there is a need for a CR campaign, they should do so because they know the publics in the community and they know what the publics needs and interests are. The CR campaign should be based on something the community lacks. I think this would be successful if the client and firm made an effort to help out.
Yes, I know that measuring the outcomes of a campaign is more complex than that, but I do think, that implementing the campaign and the slightest push for a change makes it successful.
And as far as media measurement is concerned. I don’t think it should be that important. Yes every PR professional wants their client to be covered by the local news station or paper. But my question is, is it really that important when it comes to CR. The whole goal of a CR campaign is to combine the organizations values to what matter to the community.
In my opinion, if the organization is doing a good job of helping out in the community. Us, PR people should beg for media attention. It seems like if there is really a story in what the organization is doing, then the journalists should come out and seek the organization.
It’s the same as if you donate to the local food bank, or clean up litter in a neighborhood, or volunteer at a homeless shelter; you do those things out of the kindness of your heart. You don’t beg for recognition or praise. If someone wants to acknowledge your good deeds, then they will do it on their own.
So, in my opinion media measurement is not a good way to measure success in a CR campaign.