A stakeholder is an individual or group that is involved and interested in a business’s performance. Stakeholder perceptions can affect and be affected, both positively and negatively, by business projects, operations, and decision-making.
Key stakeholders within a business include customers, employees, investors, shareholders, suppliers and key associations.
Without stakeholders, a business would cease to exist, so it is important that organisations consider their stakeholders’ interests when implementing strategy, creating marketing campaigns, and managing risks.
Stakeholder perceptions research provides you with honest and constructive feedback on the perception of your brand and reputation so that you can identify areas of improvement, understand stakeholder attitudes, and ensure stakeholders are satisfied.
Why are stakeholder perceptions important?
It is becoming increasingly important for organisations to identify their stakeholder’s expectations and perceptions to understand more about the relationship they share with those who have influence over their success.
The opinions and insights provided by stakeholders allow businesses to make informed decisions, create organisational goals, and build an effective development strategy.
In essence, it helps ensure that your stakeholders are bought into your vision, mission and values.
What difference can stakeholder perception research make?
It means that every move you make as an organisation is done knowing that you have the support or feedback of those that matter. That can make a critical difference in an organisation’s success.
Stakeholder perception research provides organisations with answers to questions you’ve perhaps always wanted to know, but daren’t ask, by turning conversations with shareholders, partners, suppliers, customers, and the media into understandable and straightforward reports and data charts,
How does stakeholder perception research work?
Our team start by designing an interview schedule, built in collaboration with the client. This will typically consist of key questions about the business vision, mission and values and finding out whether they resonate with stakeholders. We also take deep dives into areas of the business that you wish to explore and gauge thoughts and feelings about them.
Once an interview framework is decided upon (called a topic guide), we work with our clients to pull together a list of potential stakeholders to interview before our team then get to work scheduling interviews.
Interviews are kept anonymous. This works well as it means stakeholders are safe to open up and tell us their thoughts and feelings during the qualitative research interviews.
Once interviews take place, we then professionally transcribe the interviews and run an analysis on them. We then produce a report that is split out by themes and areas of feedback, alongside recommendations on how to take the research forward.
Typically, our clients run these qualitative research projects every 24-36 months.
For more information about stakeholder perceptions research, get in touch with us today!