Community Relationships and the Practice of Public Relations in Higher Education

In 2004 the Finnish Universities Act was amended to include a third strand as an essential part of research and teaching. This paper focuses on relationship building to explore whether this approach would be helpful in developing university-community relationships and educational public relations. By means of a dialogic community relations model the paper suggests that different forms of social interaction and communication strategies are needed in relationshipbuilding, maintenance and enhancement; but, when aiming at collaborative community relationships, priority should be given to the development of the two dialogic strategies.