Defining your stakeholders is critical to targeting the right audiences and creating messaging that will do what your objective states. So what are stakeholders, how does this play into my work, and how do we use these stakeholders to target effectively?
What are stakeholders?
Stakeholders according to Linkedin, “Primary stakeholders are the people with a direct interest in an organization, for example, employees or investors. Secondary stakeholders are people with an indirect interest, such as the local community or the media.”
Essentially, stakeholders are the audiences and people interested in your organization, and my goal as a PR practitioner is to reach out to these stakeholders.
My client and their Stakeholders
As I work for my client, the University of Oklahoma Recruitment and Admissions office, I developed a stakeholder statement narrowing my target audience.
Our stakeholder statements are as follows:
- Prospective Student, high school senior, 17-19 years of age female, 4.2 high school GPA, outstanding ACT scores, income: $50,000/year, single parent household, urban, first generation.
- Prospective transfer student, 19-20 years of age, male, 3.4 GPA, a sophomore in college, income: $80,000/year, from rural Oklahoma, parents attended college, attends very small college currently.
Messages We Need to Convey
So, for our first stakeholder, we want to emphasize that this is a first-generation student and that the University of Oklahoma offers great merit-based scholarships. This applies to our first stakeholder because of her high GPA and great test scores, allowing her to easily gain these scholarships.
Considering her age, it is important that we use the right channel. The University of Oklahoma primarily utilizes social media to reach prospective students. We also can utilize mail to reach the student, as she lives with her mother. As a first-generation student, it is also important to get the parents interested, so while they check the mail, they may see those stats and encourage their child to apply.
For our second stakeholder, our objective is to convince this student to leave their current small college to expand at the University of Oklahoma. For this stakeholder, it is important to market bigger colleges’ opportunities. Since the University of Oklahoma may be a bit more expensive, we could bring up the transfer scholarship, cutting the cost significantly. A great channel for this stakeholder would be mail-ins, a physical thing for him to glance at and think about. Another channel of communication would be email. Normally, I would suggest social media. However, with the volume of posts on social media, our targeting may get lost in that volume. This is a big commitment, so we want to have information readily available and able for him to reference as he thinks about his decision. I think focusing on professional organizations, student clubs, and other programs that a smaller college may not offer is important.
Why Does it Matter?
As my last blog post mentioned, aligning your messaging with your organization’s overall vibe and tone is important. You don’t want to ditch the established aspects of your organization; you want to focus on the ones that align with your target audience. OU is a very community-driven university, so we want to really play this aspect up to our stakeholders to grab their attention. Targeting is all about finding traits of your organizations that match the audience you want to reach out to.
Other resources
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