Researchers come up with new tool to assess an organisation's public relations

A lot of weight is put on an organization's relationship with its public stakeholders by the communication and marketing experts and now a new tool has been introduced by a research team to better measure and understand this bond.

A lot of weight is put on an organization's relationship with its public stakeholders by the communication and marketing experts and now a new tool has been introduced by a research team to better measure and understand this bond. Yang Cheng, co-author of a paper on the work and an assistant professor of communication at North Carolina State University, said that "traditionally, these relationships are measured using questionnaires, which provide only a static snapshot of how one party viewed an organization."

He continued, "But questionnaires don't account for the organization's role in shaping the relationship, nor do questionnaires account for the dynamic nature of relationships." Introducing the tool- Contingent Organization-Public Relationships (COPR), which help to understand how the relationship works overtime, Yang said: "Our tool, called Contingent Organization-Public Relationships (COPR), accounts for both of those factors, and can help our field better understand both how and why relationships change over time.

The COPR, as a toolkit, can be applied to evaluate relationships is not only positive and cooperative environments but also during conflicts or crises." Organization's stance on one subject and the take of the public on the same subject becomes the framework of COPR to understand the relationship.

With the understanding that each side will adopt a stance that best serves its interest, the stances are measured on a continuum that runs from "aggressive" to "accommodating". The COPR, after considering both the team's stances, describes the relationship as belonging in one of the six well-defined categories. For example, if both parties have taken an aggressive stance, they have a "competing" relationship. But if a one-party is aggressive and the other party is accommodating, they have a "capitulating" relationship.

"COPR allows us to see how these relationships evolve in response to changing circumstances, such as during a concerted marketing push or after a crisis," Yang said. To demonstrate COPR's utility, the researchers conducted an analysis of the Red Cross in China from 2011 to 2014, as the organization grappled with a crisis concerning its credibility with Chinese audiences.

The research team also lead an experiment to demonstrate COPR's utility. The experiment conducted took an analysis of the Red Cross in China from 2011 to 2014, as the organization grappled with a crisis concerning its credibility with Chinese audiences. The results were published in the Journal of Applied Communication Research. (ANI)