Stakeholder engagement is very hard to define because it all depends on the openness and responsiveness of the organisation. There isn’t even a definition of stakeholder engagement on Wikipedia.
The closest you will get to a definition on Wikipedia will be on the topic of brand management (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brand_engagement)
And this is really the problem with organisations at the moment. Stakeholder engagement does not really exist as a main stream term but rather Brand management.
For me these two terms are not totally different but build upon each other. Every organisation needs to manage their brand(s) but also needs to engage with stakeholder on a different level then the brand level.
This is where stakeholder engagement comes in. Stakeholder engagement is to put it simple the evolution of the brand management. Stakeholder engagement not only pushes out the communication message but most importantly listens and provides feedback from a broader range of stakeholders then brand management can ever do.
So what should organisations do to “upgrade” from brand management to stakeholder engagement?
Well that is up them and their organisational capabilities as well as willingness to open up and let stakeholders take charge of certain discussion topics regarded the organisation.
But there are some vital rules of engagement to make sure that the fundamentals of proper stakeholder engagement are being build the right way from moment one.
This is what I will write about in the next few posts. So stay tuned.
Fabian
May 16th, 2008 at 1:24 pm
I cannot claim too much experience or expertise in relation to the idea of “stakeholder engagement” in relation to day-to-day business operations or brand management, but I have had a fair amount of involvement (both at the academic and professional level), over the past 13 years, in the process of “stakeholder involvement” as it pertains to the development planning and approval process, mainly in Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) under the Trinidad & Tobago Certificate of Environmental Clearance (CEC) Rules 2001.
While in many respects this form of stakeholder engagement is quite different to the overall ideas being discussed here, there are also many similarities in principle. Therefore my personal approach in deciding on definition of “stakeholder involvement”, would attempt to look at what it means in terms of (before-the-fact) development planning and seek to adapt it to the operations of business – both in terms of planned events (routine / day-to-day operations) and unplanned events (accident and incidents) – which (regardless of what entails in practice) is the intended purpose of the EIA process in the first place.
One development planning/EIA definition I usually use for “Stakeholder” is “Individuals or entities potentially affected by a development proposal, for example local populations, other developers, government agencies, NGO’s, donors and others”. In terms of stakeholder engagement, this is particular is usually applied to the inclusion of residents of settlements within the “zone of potential impact” and resource users of the surrounding and receiving environments during the planning stages, to increase the likely success of a development project, as well as identifying socio-cultural indicators or “red flags” (e.g., local or national conditions or issues that could affect the schedule or successful completion of a project). I believe that based on these general development conceptualizations, definitions, ideas and practical procedures can be formulated, on the basis of adapting the concepts from a business “planning and development” focus to an “post-approval / existing operations” focus.
While I am not prescribing the adaptation of pre-development planning concepts from EIA as necessarily the solution to all aspects of existing operations, it is still an area that has been looking at “stakeholder involvement” since its inception almost 40 yr ago, and I believe this is one area where the “learnings” from one aspect can be useful as the sustainability, social responsibility and environmental concepts become more mainstream in operational procedures of actual operating businesses.