Case Study. Know your allies…

Consider this:

You volunteer in an NGO working in the field of digital skills and IT proficiency for aspiring young entrepreneurs.

As a young professional, you’ve been tasked with the delicate activity of Stakeholder Identification: the results of your activity will inform the communication strategy that the PR office will implement for the next solar year.

Stakeholders are groups of interest, institutions, people in general that might be impacted, or might have an impact, on the activities that are planned, developed and implemented by the organization.

The head of the communication unit requests from you precise indications on the nature of the considered stakeholders (public authorities, third sector representatives, etc.), the general category their belong to and their actual relevancy for ongoing and future activities.

The aim of next year’s PR campaign is to:

  • Engage the stakeholders that you identified as (potential) proactive members of your NGO’s network of associated partners
  • Establish robust professional collaborations
  • Develop long-term institutional partnerships
Download content:

Questions:

  1. What variables will you consider to establish a hierarchy of relevance?
  2. What will be the indicators of their relevancy?
  3. How many macro-cluster of stakeholders could you identify based on the above?
Answers:

This is a typical task to which communication, marketing and PR professionals relates on daily basis. In management studies and STKH’s theory there are plenty models used to carry out these three specific activities. In the context of this training material, you will be introduced to the POWER-INTEREST Matrix (Johnson and Scholes; 1999): one of the most reliable and robust framework for stakeholder identification.

What variables will you consider to establish a hierarchy of relevance?
First, you want to set your measure units. In this case, they will be the POWER (low/high) and INTEREST (low/high) of the given stakeholder in organisation activities.

  • By POWER, we refer to: the influence that the given STKH can have on organisation’ strategic decisions
  • By INTEREST, we refer to: the interest that the given STKH can have on organisation’ strategic decision – and how they might be impacted by them

What will be the indicators of their relevancy?
Based on the above, there can be three layers of hierarchy (relevancy of the given category):

  1. High power / high interest
  2. High power / low interest (or vice versa)
  3. Low power / low interest

How many macro-cluster of stakeholders could you identify based on the above?
Depending on its relevancy, the given category should be:

  • Managed very closely            (High power / high interest)
  • Leveraged                              (High interest / low power)
  • Keep satisfied                         (High power / low interest)
  • Monitored                              (Low power / low interest)

Keywords:

Critical thinking

Bibliography:

Own elaboration* *This scenario is completely fictional. Any reference to real people and/or events is purely by chance