What’s the coolest thing about working at the CEC? Without a doubt, it’s the opportunity to speak to a lot of communicators at different companies, in different industries, with different business models, and get a cross-industry perspective of their various approaches to shared challenges. So, when a member asks us a question, often we have the opportunity to provide insight into how someone else at another company tackled the same problem.
Recently, I’ve been working on a project on stakeholder mapping, and I’ve been keeping track of some of the challenges that members face, and the questions that they’ve asked. Below are some of the more interesting questions, matched up to some of the cooler approaches that we’ve been able to glean from other communicators in the network. This is an ongoing dialogue, so if there’s anything cool that you’re doing at your company, feel free to share it below!
Challenge #1
“We keep a running list of all of our stakeholder relationships, but it’s become pretty unwieldy – it’s currently about 1,000 strong! It doesn’t really help us make decisions about who to engage and who not to – how can we make it more action-orientated?”
“It would be way too difficult for us to think about every stakeholder that can have any influence over our company – there’d be too many of them. So, narrow it down a bit. We use our material issues as our starting point – we take the five strategic outcomes that’ve been identified by our executive team, and identify the stakeholders who will have the potential influence those outcomes. This helps us to be pretty targeted in our engagement – I wouldn’t recommend wasting time mapping every stakeholder who’s tangentially related to your company.” Read More »

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This post is shared by Anastasia Milgramm of our sister-program, the
Leaders Roundtable in San Jose. The mission: share ideas on the changing nature of the communications profession and understand what the best companies are doing differently.


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