Readings: Week 5

Internal and community relations are perhaps one of the most important roles of PR - after all, PR is all about improving the relationship between and an organisation and its publics. What better way to achieve this than developing and maintaining a healthy relationship with the organisation’s community - their stakeholders.

The reading by Marianne Sison dealt with issues of trust, honesty and community, integrated into the sphere of internal and community relations. Although I already felt community relations was imperative to the success of an organisation, I have now discovered methods to achieve this. Based on the two-way symmetrical model of communication, these methods include collaboration, negotiation, and consultation. A major focus on this is feedback - so the community recognises the organisation has taken on board their concerns, and further, are acting on them.

Internal relations on the other hand can be done through methods such as newsletters, company newspapers, notice boards, memos, awards, events, intranets and interpersonal communication. The emphasis on all of this is communication - making sure the staff and employees are informed and can provide feedback. This will help to ensure the staff is happy - therefore, they will more likely be good ambassadors for the organisation. This is a practice that we need to put into place for our group plan. Already it has become evident that communication is the key to success. As our group is not a large umber of employees, methods such as an intranet or newsletter would be wasted. Our main method of internal relations needs to be through interpersonal communication. We need to talk to each other, face too face, and ensure we all know what each other is doing.

On the other end of the readings, I found looking at the case study's a huge help. While ti is great to know the theory, the way I work is to see how it is put into practice. While the two case studies on blackboard did not relate to the issues management plan we are undertaking, it was good to see how they formulated the plan, and more specifically, how it was presented. The APHS plan was interesting, in that is demonstrated how a simple plan can be executed successfully. This is what we need to aim for.

These readings tied in closely to the work I have done last year for the Surfest Program Plan. In the Johnston and Zawawi textbook, there is a chapter on Tactics, which has a case study at the end which is similar to the readings - it was good to compare the two and see the different approaches they took and how they actually put the theory of PR into practice.


Allyson.