November 2000 - Sink or Swim Through a Corporate Acquisition

By Rosemarie Kelly (Cargill)

Sometimes you know it's coming; sometimes you don't. Either way, when it arrives, community relations staff must sink or swim. "It," of course, is a corporate merger or acquisition, the topic of CVC's October program.

Teresa Bonner, of U.S. Bancorp, has lived through not one, but two corporate mergers in less than five years. Patti Hague of HealthPartners talked about the need to be prepared in the changing corporate world, especially when one of those changes mean a change in corporate leadership and, consequently, corporate program focus and giving guidelines.

While an air of uncertainty is bound to set in when a merger or acquisition is announced, community relations staff need to prudently pause before making changes to programs. Bonner recommends that staff contemplate the culture of the two companies and assess areas of similarity and differences before determining future community relations programs and practices.

The process occurs in two stages. The first is to make the implicit explicit or stating the obvious aloud. The second stage is writing down the discovery. Take the time to gather data before implementing changes.

When U.S. Bank and Piper Jaffray merged, Bonner's staff conducted a series of interviews with senior management of both companies, members of each company's operating committee, state-based leadership and business line heads. Through surveys, they identified perception within the company; ranked top goals for community relations; assessed the existing priorities and guidelines for giving; and gauged the relative emphasis of time, personnel, and company resources management placed on programs.

Hague underscored that the health care industry is no stranger to mergers and acquisitions and concurred with Bonner that it is important to ask key stakeholders what they think at each developmental stage of key programs. Hague also discussed the Keystone Program as an example of an organization that has played a role in insuring that corporations maintain their commitment to community after undergoing a merger or acquisition.

Keystone organizations set guidelines for Minnesota companies to follow. Because of programs like Keystone, companies new to our community often feel pressured to continue their involvement activities at or above the same level of the company it purchased. An example of this was the Pillsbury acquisition by a company in England. After the acquisition, the new management continued Pillsbury's giving in the community in part because Pillsbury was a leader in the corporate community and the new management elected to continue its level of community involvement.

Keystone accomplishes its goal by encouraging peer to peer networking, that is, a CEO calling another CEO to express the importance of giving and volunteering in the community. Keystone also works with small, medium-size and large corporations to develop financial models for giving that would keep them at an agreed-upon giving level and that can withstand changes in earnings performance.

Both presenters expressed the need to be prepared, continually take the pulse of management, and continually assess the effectiveness of community involvement and giving programs. Specific suggestions for preparing are as follows:

• Do honest debriefings of current programs;
• Gather employee input on how things are going;
• Take a step back and look at what's working and what's not;
• Develop an intimate understanding of the corporate strategy; and
• Continually gather information on what peer companies are doing.

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