Organizational Reputation Management

For an event to rise to the level of a crisis, several key requirements must be present: a crisis is typically important, unexpected, urgent, and, at the same, produces uncertainty about what to do next. An organizational process of responding to a crisis, known as crisis management, involves three stages: pre-crisis, crisis, and post-crisis. Since the best crisis is the one that never happened, an important part of organizational crisis preparedness is issues management – identifying and preemptively resolving issues facing the organization before they could develop into a full-blown crisis. For many organizations, most issues can be described by the ESG abbreviation: Environmental sustainability, Social responsibility, and Governance of the organization. In addition, for organizations that operate across different cultures, countries, and continents, it is important to take into account international perspectives, as issues may differ across the country’s borders. Whatever the organization’s operational environment is, however, the organization’s conduct must be legal, professional, ethical, and culturally appropriate.

Since reputation is one of the most important assets of any organization, it is important to measure and evaluate any changes in organizational reputation. Over the years different approaches were proposed for reputation measurement, such as Fortune’s ranking of reputation, reputation quotient, and RepTrak. However, these measures failed to take into account the diversity of publics the organizations have and the fact that different publics have different demands and expectations for the organizations. As a result, a new approach, relational reputation ranking (RRR), focuses specifically on a variety of different organizational publics and their diverse relationships with the organization. RRR, first, identifies key publics and their effects on the overall reputation; and, second establishes reputational measures specific for each public. In reputation management, it is also important to measure the return from the specific reputation-building activities and campaigns – such measures must integrate a variety of effects the campaign can produce on a variety of levels from communication outputs to business results as stated in the Barcelona principles. It is also important to build logical connections between all these effects. Such an approach to campaign evaluation is called levels of evaluation as it proposes to measure the results at different levels such as media, target audience, and organization.

Managing organizational reputation is a strategic process that can be represented through an acronym, F.O.C.U.S. In this process, F stands for finding the facts when the organization conducts research to better understand what the issues are. O stands for outlining the objectives when the organization develops plans of activities based on their research and organizes those plans into goals and P.S.M.A.R.T. objectives. C stands for conducting the campaign when the organization works on achieving its objectives through strategies and tactics. U stands for understanding the upshots when the organization evaluates the results of all their efforts and determines if their investments produced any returns. The final letter, S, stands for steering toward stewardship, where the organization works non-stop at maintaining relationships with the publics through reporting, reciprocity, responsibility, and relationship-nurturing strategies.

Public relations is managing relationships. Organizations have a lot of publics, such as customers, investors, and employees, and it is essential to build and maintain relationships with all of these publics in order for the organization to survive and prosper. For any relationship to be successful it must be mutually beneficial, with everyone involved receiving a benefit from being in a relationship. It also must be two-way symmetrical, with everyone involved having a say about the relationship. These relationships serve as the foundation for the organizational reputation. This makes public relations a strategic function of reputation management.

All organizations have their identities – the same way as people have DNAs. These identities affect how the organization appears to all different publics the organization interacts with – consumers, investors, suppliers, employees, and others. However, in the same way, as people are not judged simply based on their DNA, the perceptions of organizations may differ from their internal identities. This perception is known as the organizational image. The image is strongly affected by the relationships between the organization and various publics – consumers’ perceptions of an organization are shaped based on their shopping experience, but employees’ perceptions are affected by their work experience. Thus, the context in which identity is perceived by various publics and translated into an image is shaped by the organization-public relationship. When we add it all up – identity, image, and relationships across various publics the organization deals with – we arrive at reputation. As a result, we define reputation as a long-term belief that sums up the images about the organization from various publics based on their relationships with the organization.