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.

 

The Issues Stage

If an organization has had effective public relations at each of the previ­ous two stages of the process of strategic management, it will have re­solved most of the problems with publics before they become issues. A public perceives a problem when something is missing that it would like to occur—such as clean air, a good community, or a successful organiza­tion. Publics make issues out of problems that have not been resolved.

When publics make issues out of problems, they typically use the mass media to bring attention to their cause. They do this by staging events such as protests, marches, strikes, and sometimes even hunger fasts and violent demonstrations.

When organizations delay public relations programs until the issue stage, they usually are forced to develop programs of crisis communica­tion. In addition, they begin to campaign against the activists asym­metrically, the activists do likewise, and the conflict degenerates into a shouting match and campaigns to convince passive publics to support each position. Passive publics seldom are involved enough to take a po­sition on the issue, however, although they may form weak, negative at­titudes toward your organization.

Sometimes, one side can declare a short-term victory—by defeating legislation or winning a lawsuit, for example—but seldom does the other side give up. The only means of resolving issues at this stage is through negotiation and "horse-trading" with the activist group.

Ideally, however, organizations do not wait until the issues stage to deal with problems. Instead, they set up a program of "issues manage­ment" to identify issues while they are still problems and to manage the organization's response to the problems and issues. Issues manage­ment programs should be managed by the public relations department in cooperation with a corporate or organizational planning department.

 

The Objectives Stage

 Every public relations program should begin with an objective that it intends to achieve—that is, it should be managed by objectives. Sometimes, public relations practitioners set process objectives for their programs, objectives such as the distribution of five press releases, the holding of ten meetings with community leaders, or the staging of an event by a specified date. By themselves, process objectives have little value unless previous evaluation research has shown that these com­munication processes contribute to desired communication outcomes. Instead, you should specify outcome objectives for public relations pro­grams, objectives that specify the kind of effect a program should have.

Practitioners frequently assume blindly that their communication programs will change attitudes or behaviors. These objectives often take years to accomplish. Only simple behaviors generally can be changed in the short run. Since changes in attitude and behavior take so long to accomplish, they are not terribly useful objectives.

Instead, communication theory and research suggests that public relations practitioners should look for changes in the cognitions of public—in the way people think or in the ideas or beliefs they have— before looking for changes in attitudes and behaviors. Changes in people's ideas can be achieved shortly after a program or campaign has been completed. The "understanding" that results from cognitive change also contributes over the long run to "agreement" in attitudes and behaviors. Thus, you should choose from the following taxonomy of effects when you develop objectives for a public relations program, emphasizing the first behaviors in the short run and the later objectives in the long run.

Communication The organization and a public exchange messages. Stories are placed in the media and publics read them; publics read an advertisement, attend a special event, and read a brochure; manage­ment has a dialogue with leaders of an activist group and reads the re­sults of a public opinion poll.

Retention of the Message This objective also can be called accuracy of communication. The public or management retains or comprehends a message from the other. Each side can articulate the ideas of the other, even though it does not share the idea, evaluate it in the same way (atti­tude), or behave in the same way.

Acceptance of Cognitions The public or management shares the ideas or beliefs (cognitions) of the other about the nature of a problem or issue. They do not necessarily agree about what to do about the problem or even behave in the same way. Thus, this objective also can be called un­derstanding, which is different from the next objective of agreement.

Formation or Change of an Attitude (Agreement) The organization and public evaluate solutions to a problem in the same way—they share attitudes or intend to behave in the same way. One has persuaded the other or both have mutually persuaded each other—that is, they agree.

Complementary Behavior The organization, the public, or both change their behavior in a way that improves the relationship between them.

 

The Planning Stage

At this stage, public relations managers translate objectives into actual programs or campaigns. Creativity is important at this stage. One should ask what kind of technique will communicate most effectively with a public and how the technique should be executed. At this stage, also, practitioners often find cases and examples of the public relations programs of other organizations to be useful in stimulating ideas for their own programs. In looking at cases, however, practitioners should look for examples of programs that have achieved the objective they seek for the kind of public with which they are dealing. No program should be copied simply because someone else did it before—or be­cause it worked in achieving a different objective for a different public.