...Helping Your Organization to Optimize Stakeholder Benefits and Avoid Conflicts...
Our goal is to help you, as needed, with:
- Stakeholder identification (employees; shareholders; prospective investors; communities; affected groups; supply/value chain);
- Socio-economic situation analysis/impact assessment, involving identification of positive and negative impacts of your activities on your stakeholders;
- Stakeholder engagement (see later below for full discussion of this crucial step);
- Benchmarking of your corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities against key indicators relating to the core issues identified (i.e. environment; labour practices; community involvement; fair operating practices; consumer and supply chain issues, etc.);
- Strategic Community Investment Planning: If you are investing in communities as part of your corporate social responsibility or mitigation efforts, we help design investment processes in a participatory way that responds to community needs and improve corporate-community relationships. We have developed detailed Operations Manuals for community revolving grant funds;
- Local Business Development Planning: Often job creation in affected communities is a major issue. We develop and oversee strategies to stimulate creation of direct, indirect and induced jobs. Induced jobs refer to those that are supported by increased discretionary income in a community (e.g. hairdressers; mechanics; etc.) We have developed detailed revolving/matching grant facilities to support job creation;
- Identification and integration of appropriate policies, programmes and procedures that promote ethical and socially responsible decision-making and activities;
- Communications plan development, designed to your stakeholders that you are taking measures to be responsible, and integrating feedback mechanisms.
Our Approach to Stakeholder Engagement:
...Helping your company to optimize community benefits, minimize negative impacts and avoid conflicts.
Intensive Stakeholder Engagement is incorporated into virtually every assignment we undertake to optimize CSR and to avoid costly delays and disruptions of projects arising from stakeholder dissatisfaction are avoided. Our Stakeholder Engagement and Social Assessment assignments have had direct, demonstrable positive impacts on the success of our clients’ programmes and projects. When the potentially high consequences of stakeholder alienation (e.g., conflicts; delays; disruptions; reputational impacts; loss of share value) are factored in, early investment in stakeholder engagement makes smart business sense.
SE need not be expensive or time-consuming: Our Stakeholder Engagement) methodology utilizes a highly specialized rapid appraisal approach developed over many years to capture vital socio-economic conditions, issues, complexities and opportunities in a cost and time effective way. As a result, we are able to highlight critical strategic issues and opportunities. We combine several investigative tools and methods, as appropriate, combining both qualitative and quantitative approaches that include the following:
- Secondary source materials analysis;
- Identification of “lessons learned” from other organizations/jurisdictions;
- Stakeholder mapping;
- Institutional (organizational) analysis;
- Key informant interviews across many sectors;
- Focus groups (often disaggregated to gain inputs from different groups (e.g., youths; women/men; business community; etc.) ;
- Case studies;
- Search conferencing;
- Workshops and seminars;
- Facilitation;
- Targeted quantitative surveys;
- Human resource capacity evaluations;
- Computerized evaluations.
Overall, our services are designed to help organizations work on being credible to their stakeholders – their employees, customers and investors. We help organizations identify who the key stakeholders are, and what is most important to them, through a transparent process of stakeholder engagement and establishment of measurable performance standards.
