6 Summary

This week you have learned about the different ways in which voluntary organisations address the needs of their stakeholders and that organisations often need to make difficult choices about how intensively they work with their various stakeholders.

Stakeholders can have differing levels of interest in a particular issue and widely differing levels of power to influence an organisation or project. Because voluntary organisations are often much more publicly accountable than organisations in the private sector, they often find it a challenge to balance the needs of their many different groups of primary and secondary stakeholders. Many organisations have scarce resources too, which adds to problems in communicating with all the groups. Organisations have a wide range of methods they can employ when communicating with their stakeholders in order to better manage their relationships and expectations. In Week 6 you build on the concept of power introduced here and examine a stakeholder group in more detail – service users and beneficiaries.

In Week 5, you have learned about:

• who stakeholders are
• the differences between primary and secondary stakeholders
• how to map stakeholders
• how power and interest can be mapped for different stakeholders
• some theories and methods of managing stakeholders’ competing interests
• methods of communicating with stakeholders.

You can now go to Week 6 [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)] .