Sunday, 9 June 2013

A Way To Increase Stakeholder Relations

By Liliana Mills


During the era of the 1970s, or rather what you would call the decade of the mega projects, stakeholder relations did not much hold import in the carrying out of government projects. These projects encompassed institutional wide activities that covered the sectors of infrastructure and transport as well as provision of services necessary for modern development such as medicine. The subject of this article is to showcase the importance of stakeholder relations today and what can be done to improve it further.

Before delving into the way to improve relations with stakeholders, we need to know a simple definition of what constitutes a stakeholder. With respect to a certain social or development project, meant to alleviate or ameliorate certain ways of living, the stakeholder can be seen as somebody who directly benefits positively or is adversely affected in a negative or positive way. Let us take a farming productivity project for example.

For this project the stakeholders will be the farmers themselves as they have a stake or an interest in the project being successful or not. Indirectly, other stakeholders can be the surrounding populations in urban areas who will have more supplies of farm products. Either way, they are all affected by the success or failure of the project.

Whether or not persons involved in the project are directly or indirectly affected it pays to have a good working relationship with them. This kind of relationship can only be built over time and with a lot of trust. Social and development projects before they can be implemented need to have a good working relationship with people they want to affect and in the long run help.

Social marketing in a way will save project proponents time in terms of increasing good relationships with project beneficiaries. A modified approach of traditional business marketing methodologies, this kind of marketing focuses of increasing awareness to gain better advocacy and thus better relationships. Most noted for using this approach are the World Wide Fund and Greenpeace organizations.

Just like its traditional counterpart, social marketing also makes use of traditional marketing materials such as brochures and flyers which are disseminated in high traffic areas like airports and shopping malls. In hand with this, the distribution of flyers and such are usually accompanied with a short chat and interaction with the marketing officers so as increase information dissemination and awareness.

Further research needs to be carried out to solidify a direct perceived relationship between effective social marketing activities and better relationships with project beneficiaries and project targets. There is however a good increased sense of awareness and information when such activities are carried out, and this will in fact create a better foundation for furthering advocacy and the like.

The relative success therefore or failure of any social project or development project for that matter, will definitely be dependent on how strong or weak your stakeholder relations are and what you do to strengthen or weaken your relationships with beneficiaries. This however can be augmented or changed for the better alongside a good and focused social marketing program months or even years ahead of any proposed social change or even development project.




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