Copyright © 2005 Michele Pariza Wacek
The Artist Soul
http://www.TheArtistSoul.com
Community relations is one of those marketing
strategies that isn't talked about much, even though I venture
to say practically everyone ends up doing it at one time or another.
Basically, community relations is when you and your business become
involved in your community. For instance:
* Your business donates money to nonprofit organizations.
* You or your employees volunteer at a fundraising
event.
* You or your employees volunteer for a nonprofit
organization.
* You or your employees join a service club.
* You or your employees network and/or volunteer
at industry association meetings or business functions (such as
Chamber of Commerce events). Some people might consider this networking
and not community relations, but I would argue networking falls
under community relations. Regardless, you get the idea.
I'm going to go through the pros and cons of
community relations in a moment, but first I want to encourage
all of you to think about ways to not only add community relations
to your marketing strategy but also to get better at leveraging
those opportunities to grow your business. But first, let's go
through the pros and cons.
Pros:
* Builds credibility for you and your business.
* Builds personal relationships with customers.
* Works well with advertising - similar to public
relations, community relations is a "soft" sell approach
that can make your customers more receptive to your advertising.
* Can be a stepping stone for PR.
* Creates goodwill (and good karma).
Cons:
* Time - community relations can consume a ton
of it. All that volunteering can suck up a lot of working and/or
leisure hours.
* Long wait to realize results - like public
relations, you implement a community relations plan for the long
haul. And I do mean the long haul (even longer than PR).
* Difficult to track - I'm talking mainly about
the non-business networking activities here. You may never be
able to trace sales to community relations. Actually, chances
are you probably won't. You need to trust it's working on some
cosmic level and let it go.
* No payoff at all - this can happen if you find
yourself donating time and/or money to charities that are wonderful
causes but offer little advertising and/or promotional opportunities.
Now, that doesn't mean I'm advocating only supporting high-visibility
causes. On the contrary, there are many good reasons to have a
community relations program in place. For one, the good feeling
you get knowing you're supporting a worthy cause (not to mention
all the good karma you build).
Basically, you can sum up the cons to this: spend
lots of time or money for little/no return.
Not a good marketing strategy.
But, it doesn't have to be that way. You can
and should find ways to increase your ROI (return on investment)
for all the community relations activities you take part in. And
one good way to do that is to leverage them into marketing strategies.
Creativity Exercise -- How to get a return on
investment with community relations
Grab some sheets of paper and a pen (I like the
fun gel pens myself) and get ready for some brainstorming.
First, list all the activities you're doing that
are considered community relations. Write them all down.
Next, analyze those activities. What ROI are
you currently getting from them? Do your customers know you donate
time and/or money to those activities? Do you get sales because
of your involvement? Are you building your brand and/or awareness
of your business because of your donations?
Don't know? Well, then you probably aren't getting
much return.
Next, I want you to brainstorm ways you can start
leveraging those activities. Can you devote a section on your
Web site to telling people about your involvement? Can you use
your Web site to help raise money and/or volunteers for the causes
you support? If there's an event involved, can you more aggressively
market your services during it? (Set out flyers or brochures or
have a really good elevator speech if you're able to introduce
yourself.) Can you send out press releases? Can you have your
logo added to the organization's marketing materials? Or have
the organization link to your Web site?
Try and brainstorm 20 ways you can increase your
ROI. Some will be silly, some will be completely impractical --
but that's okay. All you need are one or two gold nuggets to really
jumpstart your marketing and make that investment in time and
money really start to pay off.
