Syndicated stakeholder engagement studies

Issue

A range of our clients were concerned that measuring the attitudes of stakeholders was expensive and often not targeted directly on the stakeholders that really mattered to their sector.

Solution

Populus developed a series of industry-focussed syndicated studies that benchmark and track the views of 100 key stakeholders. By asking leading companies in a particular industry to identify the MPs, journalists, NGOs, civil servants, and regulators whose opinions have the most impact on their sector, we ensured that we targeted only the most important stakeholders in the sector. By sharing costs across multiple subscribers, we ensured that our fees were affordable. We also ensured that the response rate of difficult to access stakeholders was maximised, because stakeholders tend to be more willing to participate in research which is on behalf of many players in a sector than in bespoke research on behalf of just one player.

Outcome

We have successfully applied this model to a range of sectors including banking, food manufacturing and retailing where many of the leading companies in these industries use our research year-on-year. We continue to expand the number of sectors covered by our syndicated stakeholder engagement programme. Subscribers to these annual tracking studies use the findings to benchmark their corporate reputations against their main competitors and track their performance on issues that are important to stakeholders when judging the reputation of companies. In addition, the findings are used to measure how well companies engage with stakeholders and how they can improve the quality of their engagement.