In today’s high-stakes, faster-paced policy arena, having the right stakeholders on your side of a legislative debate, or reputational issue, can be a significant factor in achieving a favorable outcome.
When a company speaks on its own behalf, or through its GA, PA or Communications consultants, it is viewed as having a direct vested interest in the outcome. However, when well-respected organizations and opinion leaders lend their voice to yours, or speak independently, they can significantly shape the nature of the debate.
As the following graph shows, there is a distinct nexus between your company’s issues, public officials and a wide range of stakeholders – both favorable and unfavorable – that are attempting to affect the outcome of an issue.
And remember that for every issue that is of importance to your company, there are multiple constituencies – competitors, grass roots activists, members of the media – that will have an entirely different view of how an issue should be resolved through legislation, regulation or litigation…
Success is ultimately decided by how and when the right stakeholders are brought into the policy process to influence the outcome.
Do You Have The Right Base of Stakeholders?
Too often, companies develop relationships based on very narrowly tailored criteria.
They either prefer to speak through industry trade associations, or the business organizations they fund. Or, they speak through a hodgepodge of organizations and individuals that have been accumulated over time without much strategic thought being given as to how these relationships were developed.
The result is that many companies often ask the wrong people, or organizations, to speak out on issues they are either not qualified to address, or where they have little or no credibility. The results speak for themselves in the form of protracted and costly efforts to achieve business results in the policy arena.
Stakeholder Relationship Development Should Be A Precisely Developed Process, Not An Afterthought
The reason why many companies rely on a hodgepodge of stakeholder relationships is that little thought was placed into strategically mapping their issues to develop relationships with opinion leaders that matter.
Moreover, turnover in a company can significantly affect the stakeholder relationship landscape: According to the Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics, employees voluntarily change jobs every 3-5 years. This number can increase substantially in a robust economy.
So in some cases, if a company started a relationship with an organization or opinion leader in 2000, there could have been a turnover of at least three relationship managers by 2011. And today’s current relationship manager may have little or no idea why the original relationship was created.
The net result is that you can have a relationship manager overseeing a portfolio of dozens of relationships and a substantial budget, with very little substantiation to support why these relationships exist.
Add up all the relationships that you fund and you can be spending a lot of money building relationships that are of little or no value to your company.
Aligning Your Stakeholder Engagement Activities To Your Issues Is Critical
Intelligent Management Inc. can help you take the guesswork out of your stakeholder relationship development and management programs.
Through carefully crafted research to identify opinion leaders and influencers on your issues and by using a set of proprietary metrics and algorithms and a step-by-step internal evaluation process we can help you fully evaluate your entire portfolio of stakeholder relationships.
We can help you achieve significant financial savings and also ensure that you can demonstrate a significant ROI in your investment in relationship building with the right organizations. At the same time, we can help you build in the flexibility you need to change the scope of relationships with minimal reputational risk.
Our proprietary systems have been demonstrated to achieve significant results.
For one client, we evaluated over a thousand business, trade, policy, civic and academic organizations, which resulted in a complete realignment of the company’s relationship portfolio that achieved significant business objectives at a savings of several hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Let’s discuss how to set up a thorough Stakeholder Mapping and Engagement Process. Simply call (203.727.7868) or email me to schedule a no-cost, no-strings-attached initial consultation to get the ball rolling and to determine if there is an opportunity to work together.
I have helped many significant CA functions build clean, simple and effective planning systems that can produce long-term performance metrics and remain cohesive over time.
