Influence through process design
Many organisations are structured functionally. Marketing here, sales up there, customer support down the corridor and operations over there. You are, however, one organisation in the eyes of your stakeholders and the influence you exert is a function of every single touchpoint they experience, not just via your normal marketing activity.
We work with you to map how your organisation can unify to influence your stakeholders more consistently and naturally.
We find that many entrenched processes run counter to our objective here. They detract from the organisation’s ability to exert influence, every month, every day, every single hour. So we’ll invest most time making sure these processes can continue to do what they were designed to achieve, but influence positively at the same time rather than neutrally or negatively.
The Influence Scorecard™ management approach
We founded the Influence Scorecard initiative, an open and collaborative project focused on articulating the ways in which the marketing and PR functions should integrate with the wider organisation to maximise the organisation’s ability to influence and be influenced, measurably.
The Influence Scorecard:
- translates influence (marketing and PR) objectives into operational goals
- helps to communicate the objectives and cascade them down to specific groups and individuals
- guides the selection of measurement criteria
- defines the ways in which these measurements can be made and presented for incorporation into the business performance management (BPM) process, reports and dashboards
- informs the mechanism for learning from these measures and the adjustment of the influence strategy then required.
The following diagram portrays the architecture for the approach following the workshop we hosted in New York, 30th November to 1st December 2009.
Influence Scorecard architecture - Influence Crowd LLP
The Influence Scorecard approach is unlikely to mature for a few more years yet, but that’s not the point. It already outlines a number of ways in which your processes should be transformed to improve your organisation’s effectiveness at influencing and being influenced, so we suggest you consider this a journey rather than a destination.
