Effective ambassadorship or outreach is frequently left to chance.  Especially in a time of renewed vigor in community engagement through social networking, it is well worth revisiting stakeholder segmentation.  How far should a board drill down or attempt to segment the “audience” of an organization?  How many resources should be deployed to engage stakeholders and which relationships are the most important to manage well?  How do you know when you understand enough to avoid serious oversights in outreach?  Here are a few guidance questions, a sort of take home test.  This would make a great assignment to prepare members for a board meeting or at least the development or outreach committee.  Actually, even communication needs regarding more “internal” governance issues are impacted by a review of who cares, might care or is actively monitoring organization activities.

1)      Who are the groups of interested parties (stakeholders) that should know about what the organization is doing, accomplishing or striving to accomplish? Who is impacted by the success or failure of the organization?

2)      Who is most immediately or substantially impacted by organization activities?  Additionally, who most immediately or substantially impacts the organization activities and the effectiveness of those efforts?  We can refer to this as the inner circle.  For now, all other stakeholders can reside in a larger outer circle.  Remember that some stakeholders are also inside of an organization, such as staff and volunteers.

3)      Just concerning the inner circle, how would you characterize the relationship in terms of positive vs negative, strong vs weak?  What is your evidence for this characterization?

4)      What does each one of these stakeholder groups need in terms of an information or communication process and content – both towards them as receivers and from them as senders? How do you know this is important to them?

5)      Can you treat the communication needs of all the members of a stakeholder group the same?  If not, is it important to treat the subgroups differently?  Why, what is the consequence of foregoing further compartmentalization or segmentation?  If the consequences can be significant with conscious recognition and adjustment of communication to accommodate further segmentation, can you find the resources for this additional effort?

6)      Who is responsible for managing these various relationships and the accompanying communication patterns?  How well are these relationship management assignments work – is the board able to rapidly assess the solidity and consequences of these relationships?

These are just a half dozen starter questions in mapping and managing stakeholder relationships can form the basis of a formal stakeholder engagement strategy or plan.  One can always go at this piecemeal or systematically.  Needs assessments can be conducted in an informal table top exercise or a much more thorough data gathering and analysis.  

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3.22 Copyright (C) 2007 Alain Georgette / Copyright (C) 2006 Frantisek Hliva. All rights reserved."