Yell - corporate responsibility research amongst stakeholders

Client challenge

Yell, as a company, manages its corporate responsibility (CR) and reporting in the areas of the environment, the marketplace, the workplace, the local community and good corporate governance. Yell puts considerable resources behind its efforts to ensure that its corporate behaviour is responsible in the eyes of its key stakeholders.

As part of its structured approach to stakeholder engagement, Yell was looking for formal feedback from shareholders, employees, customers, analysts and the Yell Board. Specific research objectives were to: (1) determine what Yell’s stakeholders think Yell should do as a responsible company; (2) ascertain how well Yell communicates its current CR activity; (3) demonstrate that Yell undertake formal stakeholder engagement (as well as informal/ad hoc engagement); and (4) help Yell formulate their CR strategy going forward.

What did we do?

Article 13 began by identifying an appropriate representative sample of stakeholders both in the UK and the US and then, taking into account the research objectives, created a methodology combining qualitative and quantitative research covering the recommended stakeholder sample. Article 13’s experienced stakeholder engagement team also considered areas of risk that may arise throughout the process and proposed ways of mitigating them.

Phase one of the research involved qualitative telephone interviews with Yell Board members. Having developed a discussion guide using the research objectives and quantitative questions as a foundation, one of Article 13’s senior researchers carried out the in-depth interviews and wrote up a summary report of the findings, including recommendations on how to approach research with other stakeholder groups and the way forward for Yell’s CR strategy.

The second stage of the stakeholder feedback programme was a quantitative electronic questionnaire emailed to the representative sample of each stakeholder group. Article 13 used its own in-house electronic stakeholder research tool to invite representatives of each group to complete the relevant confidential questionnaire through a secure website. Submitted questionnaires were then stored and sorted by stakeholder group as well as total number of responses. Article 13’s technical team used specialised software to analyse results of both the open and closed questions, before a senior CR strategist developed a report for the client including an executive summary by stakeholder group answering the original research objectives outlined above and bringing together the beginnings of a stakeholder panel to demonstrate engagement and help develop/test CR strategy.

Innovation PLUS

Article 13 used its innovative in-house stakeholder research software and senior strategists to conduct a comprehensive stakeholder feedback exercise across two continents which provided evidence of the effectiveness of the client’s corporate responsibility activities for use in developing CR communications and moulding the company’s overall CR strategy.

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