Beyond the squeaky wheel

If you’re interested in stakeholder management, you’ll be interested in this recent paper by Brad Rawlins of Brigham Young University which addresses a crucial question communicators constantly face in dealing with myriad stakeholders. Which is: “How much attention does each stakeholder group deserve or require?”

Since all stakeholders do not have the same interests or demands, once stakeholders have been identified there is a struggle: who gets the attention? Sacrificing the needs of one stakeholder for the needs of another can be a problem – especially if you don’t make the right choice.

Brad’s paper synthesises a large amount of research in stakeholder management and public relations and provides a model that identifies ‘key publics’ for communications strategies. Brad writes: “By using the steps outlined in this paper, organisations can take a more systematic and comprehensive approach to prioritising stakeholders.” The paper is a very useful contribution to our knowledge of how best to prioritise stakeholders to ensure we’re hitting target, not just assuaging the squeaky wheel.

Comments

[Sean@Prompt]

Thanks - interesting paper, although more academic than many businesses will need. This paper is helpful in planning proactive communications and identifying where resources should be prioritised, but is of limited use when there's already an urgent communications need - ie, a squeaky wheel - because issues don't usually affect all stakeholder groups equally and at the same time.

[David Phillips]

Thank you for the alert. I must be slipping not to have noticed before.

Jon White and I have been working in this field for over a decade when we first developed a focus group using visualisation methodology (using a software as an aid) to identify stakeholders and compare their relative significance.

The range of approaches to stakeholder mapping and auditing is difficult and tends to be complex for boardroom discussion.

Once we can get a board to come together (as a focus group) we can ask them to identify their stakeholders and the relative (importance, influence and attitude) significance of stakeholders, they both identify a lot of them and begin to understand public relations much better.

What is fascinating is seeing directors engage. Usually the sceptical CFO is the most receptive. I think because he can see that this is a form of audit (which he understands) and because, after benchmarking, it is possible then to set time eliminated stakeholder objectives based on, in our case, numbers he can relate to public relations in his own language.

We have found is that by taking stakeholder management to the senior managers of organisations and showing them that they have a role (and its not all down to the 'spin doctors' and marketers), they begin to understand how important (and stretching) PR management is.

For those with an interest (more at: http://theclarityconcept.pbwiki.com/).