Edelman’s Australian Corporate practice works with our clients both to protect and strengthen a company's relationships with, and reputation among, stakeholders whose views directly affect its mission and goals. These may include increasing shareholder value, engaging employees, deepening customer loyalty, developing a corporate reputation, and aligning government and public interests.
Our stakeholder engagement approach is based on the premise that a company's reputation and its brands are increasingly interdependent and that the business environment demands open, honest and transparent communications to build trust.
We are data driven in our approach. Edelman programs often include research in benchmarking attitudes and opinions and indexing the strength of relationships among critical stakeholder groups such as employees, partners, suppliers, customers, investors, regulators, legislators, NGOs, media, community leaders, and the public at large.
We then work with our clients to prioritise needs and formulate measured strategies to address these as required. Our recent work has included positioning CEOs and senior management as industry thought leaders, benchmarking and tracking stakeholder relationships with major corporations, driving important change-initiatives through the workforce, managing mergers and restructures, and facilitating dialogue with community groups, NGOs and the wider operating environment.
NGOs and other stakeholders are placing an increasingly higher premium on companies' ethical conduct, as well as the impact their conduct has on the environment and society. To that end, Edelman identifies opportunities for our clients to pursue constructive engagement with NGOs and other stakeholders that monitor companies' sustainability and CSR strategies. We foster productive working relationships between companies and civil society that are based on transparency, knowledge-sharing and business innovation.
More specifically, Edelman offers expertise in the following sub-practices:
- Stakeholder Engagement
- Internal Communications and Employee Engagement
- Financial Communications
- Government and Public Affairs
- Issues & Crisis Management
- Corporate Social Responsibility Communications
