By definition, community relations efforts should benefit the organization’s surrounding community. Benefits here include, but are not limited to, adding new skills and energy to problem solving, supplying a source of volunteers, building better links among the business network and improving the community’s quality of services.

After taking into account the above-mentioned considerations, Obama said that the next step involves the organization integrating the community relations focus into its mission. In the Hospitals’ case, this entailed Obama and the senior management team using language from the Hospitals’ mission to create a separate but connected mission exclusively for her department, the Office of Community Affairs:

The University of Chicago Hospitals Office of Community Affairs is committed to building strong and meaningful relationships with the surrounding community and recognizes that these relationships enhance its position at the forefront of medicine.

Tackling this issue enables the company to develop a comprehensive community relations strategy, Obama said. Steps to consider here include building top-down support, defining and knowing your community, benchmarking peers/identifying resources and defining success. For Obama and the Hospitals, this intricate, behind-the-scenes work translated into a year and a half of taking a multifaceted look at the South Side of Chicago. For instance, many people think of the South Side as a mecca of great jazz and blues music. However, that perception doesn’t even get past the 1960s – what has defined the community since then? Also, the South Side is a predominantly working-class neighborhood. Yet, as Obama explained, there are “pockets of relative affluence” within that community. These are the types of microscopic findings that organizations that are serious about implementing community relations programs must achieve.