Stakeholder engagement

Companies need to understand external views and expectations so they can respond appropriately. Nowhere is this more pronounced than in CR, where there are widely different perspectives and expectations of companies.

Engagement provides an ear to the ground. It helps companies navigate the complex CR agenda through a better understanding of issues, risks and opportunities. Stakeholder inputs can help to develop strategies, set priorities, and assess the effectiveness of activities and communications.

We help our clients to engage with CR stakeholders and opinion formers and to use stakeholder feedback to inform their CR programmes. Engagements may focus on CR reporting and performance or look in detail at a particular CR issue. Our services include stakeholder mapping, facilitating focus groups and workshops, conducting opinion surveys, and distributing targeted communications though our Global CR Who's Who database of opinion leaders.

We also organise multi-client lunches where guests can exchange views and experiences with other CR professionals as well as academics, representatives of NGOs and the media.

Stakeholder mapping
The first step is to understand who can impact your business, and how. Key groups such as employees and customers are sometimes forgotten because companies focus on CR specialists. We help clients to identify stakeholders and to plan appropriate engagements with them. We make sure you have a complete stakeholder map before deciding how to engage.

  Latest example: We are working with a US Fortune 50 industrial conglomerate to identify and prioritise its key stakeholders across a range of operational sectors.

Three ways to engage: surveys, focus groups and workshops
We advise our clients on the next steps - who and how to engage. Different engagement tasks require different approaches. Our three approaches can be tailored to any engagement challenge, from simple one-way information gathering, through a more detailed survey to dynamic two-way dialogue in a workshop.

  Surveys: Telephone surveys provide detailed feedback from relevant experts and show how a company is perceived by a broad range of influential groups. We identify opinion leaders with expertise in social, environmental and ethical spheres, or particular insight into the relevant industry. We develop a tailored template of questions covering CR performance and communications. Our interviewers are experienced CR consultants who can extract the maximum value from the engagement with the minimum inconvenience to the interviewees.
  Focus groups: These provide a forum for discussion, enabling clients to meet important stakeholders. Meetings are often held over lunch at our office or in a private room in a restaurant. We facilitate the event, using an agreed agenda of questions. This ensures the client gains the maximum benefit and that the experience is positive for the guests. We take detailed notes during the meeting and present the findings to our client.
  Workshops: We recommend a workshop when a company has a specific strategy or perspective it wants to expose to external scrutiny. The external stakeholders are usually experts in the given field. The engagement is multi-directional, both between the experts and between the company and the experts.


All our surveys, focus groups and workshops are run by experienced CR consultants. Our knowledge of the issues is critical to our clients getting the most from these engagements.

 

Latest examples: We ran a series of four focus groups in London, Brussels and Washington DC to gather stakeholder feedback on Vodafone's CR reporting and performance as part of their AA1000 assurance process. We are now running a series of issue-specific stakeholder workshops to help Vodafone assess and improve its CR strategies and interact with relevant experts.

For the last two years we have conducted an annual survey of 50 global CR opinion leaders for GlaxoSmithKline (GSK). The findings have helped GSK improve the effectiveness and transparency of their online CR report and supported decision-making on social, environmental and ethical issues.

Global CR Who's Who
Our Global CR Who's Who is a hand-picked list of over 1,200 CR/sustainability leaders in academia, government, media, pressure groups and companies from over 60 countries.

We use this to recruit panels for stakeholder engagement and to distribute company CR publications. We run the Global CR Who's Who as a club - access is exclusively for member companies and we encourage their participation in its development.

Key features:

-   Access to 1,200 sustainability leaders in 60 countries by post or email
- The database can be used for either printed reports or to publicize web reporting
- Names are categorized by country and occupation
- Names are researched and maintained by Context
- The database can be customized to reflect club members' interests

View graph of Occupational Distribution
View graph of Geographical Distribution


Cost:
- £2,000 one-off use
- £5,000 year's membership
- Bespoke services costed individually