stakeholder communications

Many organisations need to maintain contact with individuals, or other organisations, that have some form of stake or interest in the enterprise. As well as customers, these might be employees, agents or representatives in the field, suppliers, members or subscribers. By maintaining an up-to-date database of these stakeholders you can communicate with them quickly and easily, either selectively or globally, and on a programmed or ad hoc basis.

These communications may be bulletins, newsletters, product updates, lists of available publications or vacancies, stock lists, and so on. Distribution may be either electronically (as an e-mail broadcast) or by post (a personalised mailshot). Communications with stakeholders may be thought of as ‘push’ communications, whereas the fulfilment of requests from interested parties may be thought of as ‘pull’.

ABC can manage your database of stakeholders, either taking over an existing database, or building one from scratch from whatever sources are available, cleaning and reformatting as necessary. Once the database is live we will ensure that it is kept up-to-date and that records are categorised appropriately. The first is achieved by our clients funnelling all stakeholder changes straight to us, wherever they arise within the organisation, and ideally also by your stakeholders making direct contact with us, as your database centre, through the publication of our contact details but with your identity; thus the perception of data subjects is that they are dealing with you directly. The second is achieved by us working closely in collaboration with you to identify how best to classify the relevant groups, based on the nature of the communications you envisage to those stakeholders over time. Note that because of economies of scale, the size of your database, either initially or — more importantly — ultimately is relatively unimportant, since it is not ten times more difficult to manage a database of 10,000 records as it is one of 1,000, although this obviously depends on the nature of the data subjects and their volatility.

We can manage the entire communications process with your stakeholders, especially if this is to be electronic. All you need to do is brief us on who (which categories of stakeholders), what (the nature of the communication with them, when (the timetable or programme), and how (e-mail broadcast or mailshot); we’ll do the rest. This can include handling and monitoring any response, and any subsequent request fulfilment. Alternatively, since some of our clients prefer to use their own distribution contractors, we regularly work closely with a number of mailing houses, large and small. Or perhaps you need to make contact with individual (or small groups of) stakeholders, to remind them of a particular event or appointment, or to alert them to a short-term opportunity? One timely solution is to send a personalised SMS (text) message to their mobile phone. This is especially valuable where timescales are short, but product or service values are high.

More and more of our stakeholder communications projects now revolve around a monthly or bi-monthly e-newsletter, usually sent in HTML format. This enables communications to be presented in the most professional way possible, with most of the advantages of a printed mailshot, but with few of the drawbacks, especially in terms of time or cost. In particular they are not sensitive to volume; unlike postal exercises the marginal cost of additional recipients is virtually nil! Another major advantage of e-communications is that recipients can ‘click-through’ links provided in your communications, either to order publications or products, provide feedback, update their details etc. Many of our clients also benefit from the timeliness of e-communications, enabling them to send e-alerts, where the time from conception by the client to receipt by their stakeholders is measured in hours, rather than days or even weeks (for a good example of this type of project, click here).

An e-newsletter is an extremely attractive proposition for many organisations, since it becomes extremely easy to ‘drive’ readers to your website, including to specific webpages, or even to an ‘anchor’ on a particular page. Electronic newsletters can either be very simple, suggesting that the reader might care to visit this webpage or other, or they can be extremely feature-rich, with an attractive layout under a masthead, with creative use of fonts, colour, photography etc, very much like a page on a website (click here for an example). There is however one fundamental difference between such a newsletter and a webpage: a webpage is dynamic, whereas an e-communication is static. That is, a website can — and should — have its content continually revised, but once your newsletter lands in a recipient’s in-box it is frozen in time and cannot be changed. So if you quote a web address and that page gets moved, readers can no longer access it; or can they? Perhaps you’ve quoted a price which has changed. Luckily, we have a solution to these dilemmas, and this is where the power of data-driven communications comes in, ie. we embed a link in the newsletter or bulletin and whenever it is subsequently viewed, the reader will always see what you want them to see.

Many of our clients need their stakeholder data to be accessible by their own staff, either over the Internet, over their local area network or sometimes just on a single PC. The increasingly preferred solution is for us to upload data to the web where it can be accessed, globally or selectively, by anyone, anytime, anywhere on the planet — with the necessary user authentication, of course! This is the most versatile solution for organisations with either a field salesforce or staff that work away from the office, or from home. Another option is for us to provide a read-only copy of the database, which we refresh as often as necessary using a variety of data transfer methods. We can also tailor a database ‘front-end’ for our clients or, if preferred, they can merely feed the data we supply into their own programs or an Intranet, for lookup by the appropriate staff.

For stakeholder communications to be fully effective they need to:

• be derived from a database that is as comprehensive in scope as possible, kept in a permanent state of readiness, effectively segmented so as to enable targeted rather than scattergun exercises, and structured to be able to record feedback, if necessary
• be adapted to the needs of data subjects, whether these are e-mail broadcasts or postal mailshots, both of which should be personalised
• encourage the flow of information back to the database manager in terms of data amendments, changes in requirements etc

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