Today's corporations are increasingly asked to become responsible citizens in the society. Accordingly, the concept of ‘Corporate Social Responsibility(CSR)’ has been gaining much interest. Corporations implement various philanthropic activities a...
Today's corporations are increasingly asked to become responsible citizens in the society. Accordingly, the concept of ‘Corporate Social Responsibility(CSR)’ has been gaining much interest. Corporations implement various philanthropic activities as a way to fulfill their CSR. In this study, corporate philanthropic activities are defined as a part of strategic public relations.
Purpose of the study was to explore the impact of corporate philanthropic activities on ‘Organization-Public Relationships(OPR)’. In this study, OPR is operationalized as an outcome variable affected by strategic public relations, namely corporate philanthropic activities. Users of three representative mobile communication companies in South Korea-SKT, KTF, and LGT-were participants of this study. A total of 304 participants were recruited. To test hypotheses and a research question, multiple regression analysis, T-test, and ANOVA were conducted.
Results of the study indicated that the level of publics’ knowledge and participation in corporate philanthropic activities had significant influence on OPR. Major findings of this study can be summarized as follows. First, the more publics’ were aware of corporate philanthropic activities, the more positively they evaluated OPR. Second, publics who participated in corporate philanthropic activities tended to evaluate their relationship with the organization more positively than publics who did not participate. Third, among the three different types of corporate philanthropic activities, corporate giving contributed most significantly to positive ratings of OPR.