Know Your Stakeholders and leverage their insights

By Nancy Salisbury - 5 min read

Stakeholder relationships are essential assets. Stakeholders must be understood, not just known, yielding organizations quality insight into their unique communication needs at various points in a CSR initiative.

It has become virtually inevitable that every organization will be held accountable for their environmental and social actions – rewarded for acting and rebuked for failing to act. Employees, consumers, investors, and other stakeholders are holding organizations to higher sustainability and transparency standards. Growing concerns of socially conscious stakeholders have pressured companies into a more systematic discussion to create and deliver responsible operational policies and business activities.

Keeping up with current sustainability issues and opportunities requires vigilance and strategy. Organizations create engagement opportunities to collect stakeholder information to analyze and segment populations.

Stakeholder research is more than collecting data points and social sentiment. It's about knowing how to put the facts and information together into timely, proactive business initiatives. Think of this as gaining social insights to populate your organizational strategy.  

Know your audience

Another approach to developing stakeholder awareness is understanding the basis for the engagement. Identifying the business purpose for integrating stakeholder viewpoints into organizational CSR decision-making answers the "why" of conducting engagement activities. The following list from the AA1000 Stakeholder Engagement Standard highlights different dimensions based on the scope of engagement to distinguish stakeholders. 

1.      Dependency: groups or individuals most dependent on the organization’s activities, products, or services or whom the organization is dependent on to operate. For example, employees and their families or customers who rely on the organization's products for their safety, livelihood, health, or welfare.

 2.      Responsibility: people to whom the organization has, or in the future may have, legal, financial, operational, or moral obligations.

 3.      Tension: groups or individuals who need immediate attention from the organization concerning financial, broader economic, social, or environmental issues.

 4.      Influence: groups or individuals who can impact the organization’s or stakeholder’s strategic or operational decision-making. These can include those with informal influence and those with formal decision-making power.

 5.      Diverse perspectives: groups or individuals whose different views can lead to a new understanding of the situation and the identification of opportunities for action that may not otherwise occur.

 6.       Proximity: the people an organization interacts with most, including internal stakeholders, those with longstanding relationships, those you depend on in your day-to-day operations, and those living next to your production sites.

 7.      Misrepresentation: groups or individuals who are illegitimate stakeholders by falsely claiming to represent a stakeholder group, distorting information, or acting in an illegal manner that can affect the organization.

Capturing the various stakeholder connection purposes and categories helps organizations streamline and prioritize stakeholder relevancy for short-term and long-term CSR issue management. Long-term is the key, because gaining stakeholder insight is an ongoing process.

A list of stakeholders should be fluid. As engagement progresses, stakeholders' input may revise the initial identification and prioritization of stakeholders to fit the situation better.

Utilizing Stakeholder Insight

Detailed stakeholder definitions provide organizations with a more defined group to communicate with and, more importantly, stakeholders that are much more likely to find the organization’s CSR content and engagement opportunities relevant to them. Businesses also use these defined stakeholders to activate the entire strategic CSR communication process to identify the channels they're likely to consume and better understand the types of content most likely to resonate.

• It's also a jumping-off point for the next step in planning CSR communication activities. Think deeper: Why does each stakeholder group need your CSR product, service, or initiative?

• What problem of theirs does it solve?

• What are their motivations, and how can you match them?

By following this route, you’ll find that your target audience is not one big group of people. They’ll be divided into several segments, each defined by these attitudinal and behavioral aspects.