Community relations

Corporate social responsibility (CSR), community relations, accountability, corporate citizenship, transparency, stakeholder engagement, (I could go on for a while here) are too often seen as nice-to-haves or nice-to-pursue by executives. Bottom line is, all of these are directly affecting your organization’s finances. How so? They’re all closely linked to your intangible assets. And even if they’re still not quite obvious to everyone yet, intangible assets are as impactful as tangible assets (sometimes even more) to […]

Although they’ve recently been most popular with resources extractive organizations (which have distinct environmental and social impact in their sourcing locations), stakeholder engagement tools and software can make a tremendous difference to firms that operate across numerous other industries. With this article I’ll be presenting various small and medium sized enterprises that fall within these other industries, more specifically in North American context. What’s the difference between entrepreneurship and social entrepreneurship? Simply put, entrepreneurship is […]

Have you ever heard of the NGO Accountability’s AA1000 Stakeholder engagement standard? Standards can be intimidating (and dull to read!), but it’s a fact that we all need standardization because it provides safety and reliability. As you may know, stakeholder engagement is crucial to an organization’s performance and essential for a good sustainability management. However, for stakeholder engagement to be useful, it needs to be designed and implemented in a credible way. That’s where a […]

Identifying and assessing your project stakeholders is a key step in order to build a good stakeholder engagement plan. And with reason: failure to identify who weighs in the balance and who doesn’t could lead to wasting a lot of time and money in the wrong places. Plus, it could also rhyme with work stoppages and important damage to your corporate image. Thankfully, through our work with clients, we’ve been able to put together a […]

Let’s face it, change management is one of the biggest threats to success while implementing new business software. Top risks of poor change management include: resistance to change, lack of resources, costs (delays, budget overruns), and failure to deliver expected results. To me, the number one risk is missing from the above. Why? Cause we’re leaving the process out of the equation. Beyond resistance to change, how can an organization guarantee that its staff will […]

Let’s talk about change for a moment. Most of us would probably agree that change a good thing, right? Until it happens to us, of course. Then we tend to fall back on the old “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” mantra. This attitude may be all well and fine for things like home appliances, but when it comes to surviving in the dog-eat-dog business world, there’s a golden rule that reigns supreme: If […]