OAKE COMMUNICATIONS :: Community Relations

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Our Community Relations service is dedicated to helping Oake Communications’ clients ensure the effectiveness of their communications with their ‘communities of interest’.

We deal with general PR and media issues, relations with employees and the investment community elsewhere at No.17, but there are other groups that are increasingly and rightly being treated as stakeholders.

Here we address communications about corporate social responsibility (CSR) issues and with special interest groups, local businesses, government offices, community service groups, non-governmental organizations, charities and so on.

Communicating corporate social responsibility

We advise clients on corporate citizenship, accountability, corporate governance and CSR policies and opportunities, then develop and implement communications programmes to put these into practice. In some cases, these can involve building mutual respect with a particular community so that you can work together more productively. In others, they may involve improving coverage in local media, advising on risk management or effectively responding to opponent groups. Others may entail communicating how a client provided a solution to an environmental problem.

We advise clients on involving their employees in community projects, the donation of used computers to local schools

and their sponsorship of appropriate charities. We provide consultancy and services to clients on the internal and external communication of their CSR vision, strategy and programmes. We develop and communicate codes of conduct for clients, giving guidance on how their employees should meet their responsibility for preserving and enhancing their company’s reputation.

As environmental, globalization and social factors have become increasingly important to their stakeholders and those who influence them, so the importance of good corporate citizenship has become a key issue for many companies. It’s crucial today for larger businesses operating internationally to demonstrate that they are good corporate citizens in each country in which they operate. Companies whose activities are perceived as having a major environmental impact, such as power companies, manufacturers of chemicals, and airlines, have an obvious need to make every effort to minimize this impact and communicate their efforts to do so convincingly.

We advise clients on how they can leverage the power of their brands or their particular industry expertise to maximize the value of their CSR activities for the target community and for their own reputation. Following an initial creative review of potential issues, we’ve found that even small companies find that there are low-cost initiatives they can take which result in significant benefits, both for their communities of interest and themselves.

The Client & Partner Briefing we published on this subject: 'Communicating Corporate Citizenship: the Value in Values' can be found here.

Contact us today to find out how Oake Communications can help your company develop, implement and communicate its corporate citizenship.

We are a registered Organisational Stakeholder of the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) and support the mission of the GRI to develop globally accepted sustainability reporting guidelines through a global, multi-stakeholder process.