Spring, 2010; Source: Journal of Public Policy & Marketing | The Spring 2010 issue of the American Marketing Association’s research publication—Journal of Public Policy & Marketing—contains several articles on “stakeholder marketing.” Executive summaries of the articles are available online. Several clearly have content that speaks to concerns of the nonprofit sector and the readership of the Nonprofit Quarterly.
One piece on “triple-bottom-line firms” describes their approach as “improvements for the ‘weakest-link’ stakeholders . . . [constituting] improvements for the system as a whole.” Another article describes a model for determining the metrics for measuring the impact of stakeholder marketing as part of corporate social responsibility, with a framework around these five questions: “Which stakeholders have a legitimate interest? (A: audience); What is that interest? (G: goal); What inputs, commitments, and actions are needed to realize the consensus goals? (R: resources); How should it be decided whether the interest has been catered to? (E: effectiveness); [and] How can it be evaluated whether the use of resources to cater to the goal is optimal (E: efficiency).”
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An article on understanding stakeholder responses reminds corporate managers that employees are a primary though often ignored component of a corporation’s stakeholders. Like much of the literature on CSR, there is something of a rosy tint to the combination of making a profit and serving multiple stakeholders’ interests. Nonetheless, there are insights from the corporate world that nonprofits might be able to put to good use in their advocacy strategies to get corporations to pay real attention to the bottom lines beyond profit.—Rick Cohen
