Community Relations

Community relations are extremely important for major corporations such as American Express. By being actively involved in the community a corporation shows the public they care about people and realize as a major organization it is there duty to give back to others. The public appreciates when corporations do their part to give back but giving back goes a lot further than writing a check. For example Disney has recently started a campaign that gives everyone the opportunity to help others and in return Disney will admit them to one of their parks at no cost. Check out this great example of a corporation doing something more than simply writing a check here.

When it comes to American Express they take their role in the community very seriously and do a great job of getting involved. Specifically they focus on preserving and enriching diverse cultural heritage, developing new leaders for tomorrow, and encouraging community service where their employees and customers live and work. By focusing on three specif areas they are able to participate in special events and help different communities in different ways. Because American Express is such a large corporation they invite others to help them help others. They ask for organizations (that fit into the criteria of their focus) to contact them and tell them why American express should help them out. For example, AmEx is a supporter of JA Worldwide which is an organization dedicated to educating students about entrepreneurship, work readiness, and financial literacy. This is a great organization for AmEx to be involved with because they are a financial institution and one of the organizations goals is to help students better understand how to deal with finances.

American Express strives to serve its customers with the best customer service, best products, and accesses to the best events. Their mission to be the best goes along with their goal of helping others in the community. They realize in order to be the best they must help as many people as possible even if they are not card members. By sponsoring programs and events in the community they are showing the public that they want to give back and make the world a better place. This is in turn great PR for the company. It lets the public know they are doing their part to help others which makes us think highly as the corporation. They are showing the world that they are focused on more than making money.

One of AmEx's larger community relations campaigns involves Feeding America. Feeding America is an organzation that is committed to helping the hungry. They are constantly in need of support through financial donations and volunteers and American Express was willing to help them. American Express is focusing on the organization's Store Donation Program which recoveres perishable products that do not meet retailers standards but can still be consumed safely. AmEx is helping to fund the building of new stores so the organization can reach its goal of adding 2,00 new stores to the list of national partner sorts. With the help of AmEx Feeding America hopes to collect 148 million additional pounds of food each year. This is a great campaign for American Express to be associated with because it helps people all around the country just as AmEx serves customers all over America.

Overall I think American Express is doing a great job of fulfilling their community relations duties. They do not help every organization but rather focus on organizations they can relate to and believe in. This is important because they are able to focus their efforts on one area to make a large impact rather than helping random organizations all over the place. The only other thing I feel AmEx could do would be to start a foundation. The foundation could have one specific goal and that way employees at the company and the public would know exactly what the company was doing to help the community.