Relationship building as a retention strategy: linking relationship attitudes and satisfaction evaluations to behavioral outcomes

The practice of public relations historically has focused on managing communications. Within the past 5 years, however, an increasing number of scholars have started to conceptualize the practice of public relations as relationship management, and have centred their research efforts on examining the factors that affect organization-public relationships. Recent research has shown that effectively managed organization-public relationships affect key public member attitudes, evaluations, and behaviors. In the current investigation, 122 participants were surveyed to determine whether student-university relationship attitudes and satisfaction evaluations distinguished those who returned to a university from those who did not. The results show that respondent relationship attitudes differentiate those who returned to the university from those who did not, which provides a quantitative illustration of the benefits of incorporating a relationally-based grounding for the practice of public relations. Implications of the findings, suggestions for managing organization-public relationships, and limitations to the investigation also are presented. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved.