Community Relations Ranks at the Bottom for Higher Ed PR

http://chronicle.com/article/Understanding-the-Public-in/48999/?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

The previous article, Understanding the Public in Public Relations, is from the Chronicle of Higher Education. It focuses on a portion of public relations at universities that gets short shrift: community relations.

Now how, you ask, does a university located in a community ignore the community? Well it isn't a matter of ignoring. It's more a matter of taking for granted.

Throughout the history of higher education, institutions of learning have depended on the support and finances of the local community to fulfill their missions. Without the local community, these institutions wouldn't have become the Harvards and Yales and even the University of fill-in-a-name. Instead, they would have withered away and died.

In the early going, even Harvard had problems staying afloat, relying on the generosity of the local community, and some benefactors from throughout the United States, to pay faculty, provide books and provide students...

So why is it that universities have taken their communities for granted?

Well, like any good relationship, if you're in it long enough, you begin to relax. You begin to count on the person on the other side to just be there and to just be. That's when you begin taking the relationship and hence the people for granted.

I'm not saying that all universities do this. I'm saying that it's easy to do this in a longstanding relationship. But when new people move into an area, they don't understand how the university did whatever it did. They expect a certain level of attention, and when they don't get it, problems arise. Here's when you should focus on community relations--before this happens.

Public relations is supposed to be about building and maintaining relationships. Community relations really focuses on this more than many other forms of public relations, which is why it's so important. And while we have a tendency to just take that relationship for granted, it does require work and maintenance.

So PR folks in Higher Education, when was the last time you asked your neighbors what they think of your university? Maybe it's time again.