Chapter Four

Chapter Four- Community Relations.

This chapter in the book is all about community relations. In the very beginning of the chapter it says, " It is necessary for organizations to live by a community's ordinances and social mores."

In this chapter, it talks about that successful community relations are planned,organized, and systematized. That within community programs, there should be fivce considerations. Targeting, Participate or own, here versus there, "official" versus employee activitiies, reaching opinion leaders. All of these considerations are looked at to ensure that ones community can create and keep good PR with which ever organization it is in relation with.

One of the PR cases that the book talks about is the "Grassroots Efforts Save a Historic Piece of Land." This case was about the small town of Exter, New Hampshire wanting to perserve of piece of land that the historic Town House of Exter stood. It was there that New Hampshire declared it independence from Great Britian. The people of the city wanted to perserve and keep this piece of land in its natural state. But the taxpayers association did not want this to happen. How the community went about keeping this piece of land in the community was a very smart and good example of good PR between organizations and the community. For example, the community needed to get a broad specturm of well-respected opinion leaders in the community to support and be a part of the efforts to keep this piece of land there own. It works. The connections the community had with the big organizations helped to get the community what they wanted, their piece of land. The piece of land was turned into a nice park were the community could enjoy their history.

This chapter was a very good example of how keeping good relations with big businesses within the community can definitely play a key role in helping your community get what you want out of your community. With the support of a big organization, people can gettmore done within their community then they ever dreamed of.

Katie

Chapter Three

Chapter three is all about employee-employeer relations. I really liked and appreciated this chapter because I personally, have had really good employee-employer relationships and really bad employee-employeer relationships. I think that this chapter really hit the nail on the head as far as how employeers should view their employees and how they should be treated. At first whenever I first started reading this chapter, I didn't really know how public relations had anything to do with relationships within a company. Usually when I think of PR, its between two different companies, not relationships within one company.

The first PR case about employee-employeer relationships that the book focuses on is on page 31 titled, "Investing in Employees Pay Offs." It was a case of the Malden Mills fire that destroyed a lot of the company. Everyone's jobs were at risk. A similiar problem occured in 1980 when the Mills had to declare bankruptcy and laid off workers. After re-inventing itself, the Mills opened back up, and re-hired all of its employees that had been laid off due to the bankruptcy. This is a perfect example of great employee-employeer relationship. After the fire, all but a handfull of workers were hired back to work at the Mills. And, its employee-employeer relationship runs roughly at 95%. This is an example of wonderful relationships within a company.

This chapter gave many examples of different kind of relationships between employees and their employeers. It also goes to show that a company can have employees that are more than willing to want to work for them is they keep a good relationship with them.