Community Relations

Outstanding Community Relations create strategic connections that help companies achieve visibility as good community citizens while remaining focused on the organization’s business goals.

Companies have multiple constituencies to serve and careful analysis of those provides the basis for building understanding, for connections and for acceptance for important industry initiatives.

Talking Points helps companies make the connections that are the most effective for achieving business objectives.

Talking Points Accomplishments
Duke Energy
Charge: Quickly take multi-county community relations effort to multi-national level following $24 billion merger.
Approach: Identify and establish best practices in corporate philanthropy and community relations.
Result: Community relations matched the speed of the merged operations. The corporate foundation pre-planned expenditures to match the company’s key disciplines. Reversed negative public opinion at proposed Greenfield merchant power plant site in Indiana and through aggressive programming, drove the company’s ratings higher in the Fortune “Most Admired” community segment from 1999 to 2003.

Phillips Petroleum
Charge: Align a $9 million corporate philanthropy program with corporate goals.
Approach:  Institute highly focused areas of giving and budgeting.
Result: Topline giving remained constant. Initiatives funded were reduced by 70%.  Corporate giving areas aligned with corporate goals and had more impact for the company and in the community.

University of Alabama
Charge: Refocus public relations efforts.
Approach: Analyze existing university strengths; benchmark best university PR practices; gap analysis; define desired state; define plan for change.
Result: PR function now proactively advances key stories to targeted audiences. When universities do this well, they attract the best students, researchers and financial support.

About Scott Carlberg

• Re-engineered systems to streamline staff and increase productivity in community relations operations.
• Created and implemented external relations plan for a major petrochemical complex in the Texas Panhandle. Fence-line relations, press relations and corporate reputation were enhanced.
• Aligned corporate giving to support minority scholarship programs in subjects of interest to corporate recruiting.
• Identified key messaging and communication opportunities for Fortune 100 firm’s new CEO and COO.