Public relations Community support Most businesses give little attention to the money they donate each year to support local school, civic and charitable organizations. These expenditures include cash, merchandise and in-kind donations, as well as program advertising, and should be tracked and budgeted for several good reasons. If you decide in advance how much you can spend in community support each year, you can then select those groups which mean a lot to you and/or your customers, and be able to say "no" to all the others without feeling guilty or "used" at the end of the year. To those not on the list who you might want to support, tell them to contact you earlier next year and you'll be ready for them. Using this method will help you support who you want without overspend. Attracting customers through community support If you want more return from your community investment, determine which cause or community event will generate the most goodwill in the community - particularly with your target customers. Talk with your customers, employees and others whose objectivity you respect to identify 3-5 possibilities. Next, determine what it will take to "do it right", looking for small as well as large ways to provide support. Decide on a budget, then choose one or more whose investment will have the most positive impact in the community for the money you have available. You can tell everyone else you provide most or all of that budget to the organization(s) or event(s) of your choice. And if that works well for you - or seems that it will in a few years - do it again next year. One of the benefits our clients enjoy most about working with us is saying: "Gould handles all that. Call them." You can do that, too. Employee relations Some modern-day marketing manuals talk about internal and external customers. You know who your external customers are, but many businesses don't realize that satisfying their internal customers - your employees - is just as important. This does not mean letting your employees run your business for you. It is realizing that you can't treat your employees poorly and expect them to treat your external customers any differently. Respect for your employees means you value your business, and depend on them to help you satisfy customers in your absence. You have to communicate your objectives and vision, what is expected of them in that regard, train them to do meaningful work and what it means to be good representatives of your company, and reward them appropriately for helping you be successful. If most business owners could see that their experiences as a customer reflect the overall climate in the marketplace, they could take steps to make sure customers in THEIR business are treated better - a competitive advantage. Need help figuring out how to do it? Call Gould.