Stakeholder engagement and management supports the development of strong, constructive, and responsive relationships. Thus, effective stakeholder identification, engagement and management should enhance project acceptance and ownership as well as strengthens the social and environmental sustainability and benefits of supported interventions. It is both a goal in itself – upholding the rights of citizens and others to participate in decisions that may affect them – as well as an effective means for achieving project outcomes, including those related to democratic governance, protecting the environment, promoting respect for human rights, and preventing and resolving conflict (UNDP, 2017).
Corporate communication is defined as activities involved in managing both internal and external communications in a workplace – this can include internal presentations, staff newsletters, media releases for journalists, investor correspondence, social media and more. The aim of corporate communications is to create a favourable perception amongst stakeholders the business depends on, such as investors, employees, or the public. In corporate communications, there are typically three principal areas which are interdependent in ensuring that the organisation successfully communicates with all stakeholders. These are management communication, marketing communication, and organisational communication.
Reputation consists of people’s opinions and perceptions of things. Thus, reputation is considered as very important to organisations yet difficult issue to classify or to specifically explain in academic literature: people are different, and an action that is thought of as justified by one person can be seen as unethical by another, whether in the private sector, public sector or not-for-profit. The reality is, nonetheless, that good reputation can increase an organisation’s sustainability and interest among customers.
Still, an organisation’s reputation does not consist of only what the customers’ opinions of it are. Also, employees, investors, funders, and even analytics have an impact on how the organisation’s reputation is seen. Building a reputation can be a long and complicated process, but to break it down it only takes, for example, few dissatisfied and loud enough employees and/or customers. Thus, to reach organisational goals and prosper, good reputation paves the organisational path to acceptance and approval by stakeholders.