Now that your firm has sponsored a continuing education series in the local schools or held a meeting with civic leaders to determine the impact of your company on the community at large, it is time to bear down and measure the real effect that these outreach programs have had on the bottom line.
In the gamut of potential PR campaigns, those targeted to improve community relations are perhaps the hardest to gauge. Your customers are, in a sense, a captive audience, linked to your firm by the bonds of business and mutual gain.
Because the analysis of PR campaigns can clearly improve fiscal health, your clients, who stand to benefit, may be more willing to participate in the task. But corporations, especially large ones, often have an ambiguous, antagonistic relationship with the communities in which they work. Determining the success of your efforts to court these communities takes planning and patience and, most of all, finesse.
Dow Chemical practices one proven method of community outreach: it created advisory panels in every major Dow site charged with the task of engaging the community in open discussion. These full-time panels open the floor to questions ranging from the environmental impact of Dow sites to corporate contributions to the local governments and civic groups, says Mike Butcher, global director of marketing communications for Dow.
The trick to dealing with the community is to get beyond the quick fix of single large-scale events and to create a long-term working relationship.
This hardly means, however, that broad one-time events are worthless. Working on this wider scope, Dow sponsored an educational program last year in junior high schools across the nation. The program, known as Chemipalooza, sought to introduce students to chemistry and scientific thinking through such innovative artistic venues as music and dance.
The response to Chemipalooza came back to Butcher loud and clear. Without much effort on the part of his staff, letters flooded in from school boards, principals and teens saying "they were proud to have us in their communities," Butcher says. These unsolicited responses were a boon. They allowed Butcher's department to gauge the success of the program without launching an extensive analytical attack.
Rockwell International experienced a similar situation when it sponsored a program that placed 300 of its employees as volunteers in local schools. When the program ended, the school system held an assembly in honor of Rockwell at which several teachers and students gave personal testimony to the benefits of the corporation's efforts, says corporate communications director Thomas Hobson. Rockwell technicians videotaped the testimonials and now use segments of the tapes in PR campaigns.
While fortuitous responses to community efforts are certainly welcome, strategic attempts to gauge the effectiveness of out-reach campaigns also have their place.
Barbara Burns, managing director of New York City's Consultants in PR, recounts a recent job in which she was hired to determine what people in New Orleans thought about a local industrial company.
The company had several problems with the community but was nonetheless one of its major employers. Before Burns even went into the neighborhoods to conduct her interviews, she talked to several people inside the corporation to gather their opinions and beliefs: she wanted to know what the company imagined its community wanted to hear. Armed with these rough ideas, Burns could then clearly show her executive team where their expectations of the community failed to match what the community actually thought.
Effective community relations depends on knowing what the community expects. And this can be determined through directly surveying the c ommunity. But Lauri Grunig, an associate professor in the College of Journalism at the University of Maryland, says there are less sophisticated but perhaps more telling ways to determine what people think.
In the late 1970s, she says, AT&T was engaged in trying to determine the effectiveness of its community relations campaigns. Through an analysis of the number of phone complaints its customer service bureaus had received, the firm determined that the most effective bureaus were the ones that had the highest number of phoned-in complaints.
Although at first blush, the analysis seemed confusing, even incorrect, AT&T communicators defended their claims. They reasoned that a high number of complaints was a positive development: it meant that the relationship between AT&T and the community was strong. After all, complainants, according to the study, went to AT&T with their problems, not to government agencies or to the press.
In the end, community relations efforts come down not to a question of access but to a question of image. And, try as one may, image cannot be quantified. (Mike Butcher, 517/636-3431; Barbara Burns, 212/486-1140; Tom Hobson, 319/295-5777)