We help clients to manage risk and unlock value by engaging effectively with governments, regulators, and other external stakeholders. We live in an age of transparency.
- Successful organisations understand that reputation is no longer about spin; it’s who you really are.
- They engage radically with society because there’s significant value at stake. In fact, the long-term financial performance and sustainability of organisations are intrinsically connected with how successfully they truly integrate with society.
We help clients to organize, set priorities, and mobilize to work collaboratively with government bodies, regulators, local communities, and nongovernmental organizations.
- Prioritizing issues for external engagement
New regulation can put value at risk, but it also creates new opportunities (such as stimulus packages) and unlocks new growth levers. A rigorous, quantified assessment of the value at stake from these risks and opportunities—over both the short and the long term—is critical to prioritize an organization’s outreach efforts. We help our clients quickly anticipate, identify, and understand the key regulatory issues that may affect their industries, leveraging an in-depth understanding of industry profit pools, as well as unique insights into the levers that governments and regulators might consider implementing in their sectors.
- Building superior capabilities to map and manage external stakeholders
To execute the strategy, companies must proactively engage with a broad range of external stakeholders—regulators, consumers, the media, local communities, NGOs, and financial institutions. We help clients to identify critical stakeholders, understand their overt and obscure agendas and priorities, and map out each group’s influence within the decision-making process. We move stakeholders away from an “I win, you lose” mentality, instead creating a collaborative environment that builds long-term trust and encourages trade-offs and “win-win” solutions. And we help clients translate their positions into messages that will be credible and compelling to the relevant audiences, presented in formats ranging from detailed position papers to short “political factoids.”
- Mobilizing the organization
Implementing an external-affairs strategy requires organizational momentum and drive, and top-management involvement is often critical to success. We help clients raise the profile of the corporate-affairs/external-affairs function so that it is commensurate with its real importance. We have developed practices and processes to create cross-functional momentum on issues with significant value at stake. Our approach includes allocating sufficient resources, recruiting the right talent to the team, and putting in place processes to ensure that stakeholder engagement actively supports the strategic priorities.