CONSENSUS BUILDING IN COMMUNITY RELATIONS

Many practitioners and scholars believe that the fundamental goal of public relations and to a
great extent community relations, is building relationships with an organization’s key
constituencies. Effective organizations choose and achieve appropriate goals because they
develop relationships through consensus building with their constituencies, which public
relations practitioners typically call publics.

Ineffective organizations cannot achieve their goals, at least in part, because their publics do not
support and typically oppose management efforts to achieve what publics consider illegitimate
goals. Public opposition to management goals and decisions frequently results in “issues” and
“crises.” As a result, the process of developing and maintaining relationships with strategic
publics is a crucial component of strategic management, issues management, and crisis
management.

Basically, because a growing number of public relations practitioners and scholars have come to
believe that the fundamental goal of public relations and community relations is to build and then
enhance on-going or long-term relationships through consensus building with an organization’s
key constituencies. Tools and techniques for measuring and evaluating the relatively short-term
outputs and outcomes of specific public relations programs, events and campaigns have existed
for quite a number of years. But up until now, measuring the success or failure of long- term
relationships stemming, in part from public relations efforts, have not existed.

Outputs are usually the immediate results of a particular PR program or activity. More often
than not, they represent what is readily apparent to the eye. They measure how well an
organization presents itself to others, the amount of attention or exposure that the organization
receives. Outcomes measure whether target audience groups actually received the messages
directed at them … paid attention to them … understood the messages … and retained those
messages in any shape or form. They also measure whether the communications materials and
messages that were disseminated have resulted in any opinion, attitude and/or behavior changes
on the part of those targeted publics to whom the messages were directed.

As important as it can be for an organization to measure PR outputs and outcomes, it is even

more important for an organization to measure relationships through consensus building. This
is because for most organizations measuring outputs and outcomes can only give information
about the effectiveness of a particular or specific PR program or event that has been undertaken.

During the past few years, a number of academicians have been seeking ways of more
effectively determining the overall value of PR, not only to organizations in particular, but also
to society in general. Two academicians who have played a leading role in this area have been
Dr. Linda Childers Hon of the University of Florida and Dr. James E. Grunig of the University of
Maryland. Their efforts to date in seeking to develop a reliable PR Relationship Measurement
Scale are documented in the pages that follow.
They have found through their research that the outcomes of an organization’s longer- term
relationships with key constituencies can best be measured by focusing on six very precise
elements or components of the relationships that exist. These are:

1. Control Mutuality: The degree to which parties agree on who has the rightful power to
influence one another. Although some imbalance is natural, stable relationships require
that organizations and publics each have some control over the other.
2. Trust: One party’s level of confidence in and willingness to open oneself to the other
party. There are three dimensions to trust: integrity: the belief that an organization is
fair and just … dependability: the belief that an organization will do what it says it will
do … and, competence: the belief that an organization has the ability to do what it says
it will do.
3. Satisfaction: The extent to which each party feels favorably toward the other because
positive expectations about the relationship are reinforced. A satisfying relationship is
one in which the benefits outweigh the costs.
4. Commitment: The extent to which each party believes and feels that the relationship is
worth spending energy to maintain and promote. Two dimensions of commitment are
continuance commitment, which refers to a certain line of action, and affective
commitment, which is an emotional orientation.
5. Exchange Relationship: In an exchange relationship, one party gives benefits to the other
only because the other has provided benefits in the past or is expected to do so in the
future.
6. Communal Relationship: In a communal relationship, both parties provide benefits to the
other because they are concerned for the welfare of the other -- even when they get
nothing in return. For most public relations activities, developing communal relationships
with key constituencies is much more important to achieve than would be developing
exchange relationships.

The process of incorporating the goals, interests, and concerns of publics into the strategic
decision processes of organizations is never easy, of course, because organizations generally
encounter multiple publics with multiple goals. Support for the idea that organizations make
better decisions when they collaborate with stakeholder publics can be found in the writings of
Michael Porter, a specialist on strategic management in the Harvard Business School. Porter's
theory of competitive advantage was the first theory of management to demonstrate that firms
may gain economic benefits from social pressures and the first to explain the economic value of
collaborating with stakeholders.

As a result, public relations and community relations practitioners need special skills to negotiate
relationships with management and with multiple publics because maintaining relationships with
one public may make it difficult to maintain a relationship with another public with competing
goals. And, management may be reluctant to balance the interests of publics with what it
perceives to be the interests of the organization.
Strategic public relations and to a large extent, community relations consists of; 1) Identifying
the most strategic publics with which an organization needs to develop a relationship; 2)
Planning, implementing, and evaluating communication programs to build relationships with
these publics, and 3) Measuring and evaluating the long-term relationships between the
organization and these strategic publics.

Good relationships through consensus building keep publics from engaging in negative
behaviors such as litigation, strikes, protests, or negative publicity. At other times, there may be a
long lag between the development of a good relationship and a behavior, e.g., when good
relationships with university students lead to donations of money years later when they have
made their fortunes.

When public relations and community relations helps the organization build relationships
through consensus building with key constituencies, it helps the organisation to;

I. Save money by reducing the costs of litigation, regulation, legislation, pressure

campaigns, boycotts, or lost revenue that result from bad relationships;
II. make money by cultivating relationships with donors, consumers, shareholders, and
legislators who are needed to support organizational goals;
III. employees also increase the likelihood that they will be satisfied with the organization
and their jobs, which makes them more likely to support and less likely to interfere with
the mission of the organization;
IV. benefit both parties in the relationship rather that those designed to benefit the
organization only.

Some dual concern strategies for consensus building are asymmetrical because they emphasize
the organization’s interest over the public or vice versa. Consensus building can be implemented
through any of the following method:

a) Contending: The organization tries to convince the public to accept its position.
b) Avoiding: The organization leaves the conflict either physically or psychologically.
c) Accommodating: The organization yields, at least in part, on its position and lowers its
aspirations.
d) Compromising: The organization meets the public part way between its preferred
positions, but neither is completely satisfied with the outcome.
e) Cooperating: Both the organization and the public work together to reconcile their
interests and to reach a mutually beneficial relationship.
f) Being unconditionally constructive: The organization does whatever it thinks is best for
the relationship, even if it means giving up some of its positions and even if the public
does not reciprocate.
g) Saying win-win or no deal: If the organization and public cannot find a solution that
benefits both, they agree to disagree; no deal. A strategy of no deal is symmetrical
 because it leaves open the potential to reach a win-win solution at a later date.

h) Reciprocity: The organization demonstrates its gratitude for supportive beliefs and
behaviours.
i) Responsibility: The organization acts in a socially responsible manner to those who have
supported it.
j) Reporting: The organization meets legal and ethical requirements of accountability.
k) Relationship nurturing: The organization accepts the importance of supportive publics
and keeps them central to the organization’s consciousness. Providing information and
involving publics are key to the organization’s work.

Public relations managers can measure the success or otherwise of their consensus building
efforts with their publics by counting suggestions, complaints, inquiries, and other contacts that
members of publics, the media, government, or leaders of activist groups make with the
organization, rather than to regulatory bodies, regulators, or the media. Other process indicators
of effective consensus building strategies include counts of what management has done to show
publics that their interests are legitimate, of contacts with networks of activist groups, or in social
responsibility reports showing the extent to which management has worked on problems of
interest to publics.