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Recently a prospect asked us to describe our philosophy as a strategic communications firm. I had not done that explicitly before and thought the result worth posting in this space.Our philosophy is grounded in understanding stakeholders. Organizations have stakeholders, whether they acknowledge them or not, whether they want them or not, whether they manage their relationship with them or not. A stakeholder is any one or any group that is affected by the actions of an organization or that can affect the organization. Successful organizations effectively and actively manage the relationships they have with stakeholders. Unsuccessful organizations generally do not.When an organization launches a new initiative, it will encounter old stakeholders in new ways, and it will in all likelihood encounter new stakeholders. The success of the new initiative, in many ways, depends on how effectively the organization manages the relationship with those stakeholders.

Effectively managing relationships with stakeholders starts with identifying them and then understanding them empathically. That means understanding them as they understand themselves and seeing the relationship from their point of view. What are their purposes, interests, goals, passions, beliefs? How do they see your organization’s actions affecting those purposes, interests, goals, passions, and beliefs? Do they see your organization as aligned with their purposes and interests? Or do they see your organization as at odds with their purposes and interests? If they see the purposes and interests as aligned, what do you need to say or do to maintain that perception – if it is in your interests to do so? If they see the purposes and interests as at odds, what can you say or do to change that perception – again, if it is in your interests to do so?

Deeply understanding stakeholders, then, is fundamental to any communications campaign; it is, in fact, at the heart of the campaign. Ideally, one comes to that deep understanding by, first, interviewing an organization’s executives to map out who they encounter in carrying out the organization’s purposes. Then, having identified the stakeholders, one studies them in depth through direct encounters, secondary research, surveys, focus groups, and the like.

But frequently in the real world, organizations do not have the resources or time to conduct that sort of extensive research on stakeholders. Instead, they have to probe systematically the experiences of their own executives and managers with stakeholders to infer the stakeholders’ purposes, interests, goals, passions, and beliefs.

That is what we frequently do with clients. We methodically – and empathically – infer the current actions of stakeholders toward the client infer their reasons for their actions: their purposes, interests, goals, passions, and beliefs. Then we articulate the actions we would like them to take and specify what we would need to say and/or do for them to take those actions. By the time we finish this part of an engagement, we have the majority of our communications campaign planned. We know who we want to engage and how we will engage them with what programs and what messages. We begin, and end, with stakeholders.