CHAPTER 6

Community Relations

Overview of chapter

Community Relations
The most important audiences of an organization is its community, or home of operations.  Management and employees engaged in the community, such as local organizations, charitable organizations is a common practice of building community relations.  Usually involves in-person interaction.  The use of ROPE is a common way to solve community relations problems.

The ROPE process is useful for planning  and carrying out an employee relations program.  ( ROPE:  Research, Objectives, Programming and Evaluation)

Research

Reputation and existing and potential problems with communities are areas for researching community relations.

Objectives

Impact objectives involve outcomes as informing or influencing attitudes  and behaviors of the community.

Output objectives consists of lists a public relations practitioner will accomplish to enhance an organization’s relations with the community.

Programming

Community relations involves organizational involvement with the community by way of sponsorship of events, employee participation in community activities, contributions to charities and more.

Uncontrolled media used in community relations is used to engage the local journalists with news releases, photos, videos, interviews and leaders from the organization.

Controlled media includes house publications, online video, direct mailing, speakers, social media and more.

Evaluation

Evaluation involves measuring, analyzing and evaluating objectives. 

Impact objectives can be measured by surveys or other methods.

Output objectives can be simply measured by observation, determining  if the output was achieved.