The Stakeholder Stage

Often the terms "stakeholder" and "public" are used synonymously.

The first step in strategic management of public relations, there­fore, is to make a list of the people who are linked to or have a stake in your organization. Freeman calls this list a stakeholder map of the or­ganization. He suggests that a stakeholder map of a typical corporation consists of owners, consumer advocates, customers, competitors, the media, employees, special interest groups, environmentalists, suppli­ers, governments, and local community organizations.

You can draw a stakeholder map by thinking through the conse­quences your organization has on people and those they have on your organization. You can make this map more meaningful by doing what researchers call environmental scanning research. Environmental scanning can be done through public opinion polls, studying the mass media and specialized media, reading scholarly or legal journals, con­ferring with political or community leaders, or calling upon experts.

After thoroughly researching their stakeholders, public relations managers should rank them or assign weights to them to indicate their impact on the organization. They then should plan ongoing communi­cation programs. Communication at the stakeholder stage— ideally before conflict has occurred—is especially important because it helps to build the stable, long-term relationships that an organization needs to build support from stakeholders and to manage conflict when it occurs.

The Public Stage

As public relations managers develop communication programs for stakeholders, they can improve their chances for successful communication by segmenting each stakeholder category into passive and active components. Active publics affect the organization more than passive ones. When they support the organization, they also support it much more actively than passive publics. Active publics communicate with and about an organization that affects them, either directly with the organization or through other sources such as the media, other people, community and political leader and activist groups. When they feel an organization is unresponsive to their interests, they not only communicate actively but they behave actively in other ways. They may boycott a product, support government regulation, oppose a rate increase, or join an activist group. Other active public support the mission of the organization, and buy its stock, support its policies, or give it money.

Active publics also are easier to communicate with because they seek out information rather than passively waiting to receive it. Active publics are not easy to persuade, however, because they seek information from many sources and persuade themselves more than they are persuaded by others. In other words, active publics make their own decisions. Even passive stake­holders can become active, however, and should not be ignored. Thus, the organization should pay attention to all members of a stakeholder category but should devote most of its resources for public relations to those that can be identified as active publics.

At this stage of the strategic management process, public relations managers should do formative research on publics—research to plan a program. Focus groups are an especially useful technique at this stage. The focus group is a research technique in which several small groups of people affected by an organization are brought together to "focus on" and to discuss the issue that affects them.

Once active publics have been identified, public relations man­agers should develop programs to involve them in the decision-making processes of the organization—such as committees of employees or community residents or open hearings before decisions are made. If active publics are involved early in the process, their concerns can be addressed before conflict occurs. When their concerns are not addressed, many join formal activist groups to bring pressure on an organization through lawsuits, gov­ernment regulation or taxation, boycotts and protests, and media campaigns.