Creating Bold New Opportunities
Having a great community relations program is essential to being a strong industry leader. Today, almost every kind of corporate outreach program should have some aspect of community relations built into its strategy. In the past, I worked on important public affairs programs for companies like AOL, Miller Brewing Company, and United Airlines, and all of them required critical elements of community outreach in order to be successful. This outreach also produced many surprising and long-lasting benefits.
Utilizing a broader community relations strategy provides important opportunities to earn deeper customer loyalty and reinforce brands. But even more so, being a strong community partner is the ideal opportunity to expand the company’s mission.
Beyond strategic philanthropy and employee volunteerism, there are important untapped opportunities to align your mission and outreach efforts to enhance relationships with customers, community leaders, shareholders, investors, and other stakeholders. Business, like life, is all about relationships.
For greater success, the company mission and the community relations mission should be joined and authentically enhance each other. Implementation should be both creative and unique to the company. If you are a technology company with a mission to make the world a more connected place, then what can you do today to deploy a community relations strategy that will actually fulfill the same mission in the here and now?
Most importantly, if your company’s business mission is bold (which it should be), then your community relations mission should be equally bold. A company should not be afraid to take a stand that matches its passion and purpose.
