1.2 External communication

An organization should periodically inform and consult its external stakeholders:

1. About how risks are managed;
2. To deal with stakeholders’ expectations about what the organization can actually deliver;
3. To assure them that the organization will deliver in the way that they expect.

Effective external communication and consultation ensures that stakeholders understand the basis on which decisions are made.

The ‘Risk profile’ should be developed through a comprehensive process, including review of risk information and reflecting recommendations from different sources. It is important that organizations consider each of their significant relationships with partners, contractors and third parties, and ensure that appropriate communication and understanding about respective risk priorities are achieved. Communication to external stakeholders about risk issues is crucial: misunderstandings on respective risk priorities can cause serious problems.

A regular and well-made risk management stakeholder relationship plan should take into account and determine its critical components: dissemination strategy and channels. With reference to the first element, the corporate site is particularly useful for external real-time risk communication. With respect to external periodic risk communication, parts of annual reports or quarterly reports (electronic and/or hard-copy version), are generally viewed as the main channels. Possible communication tools to share information with external stakeholders and to promote dialogue are as follows:

1. Corporate site;
2. Publications and papers;
3. Annual meetings;
4. Other external events (e.g. conferences, scientific meetings, workshops, seminars, days of study);
5. Corporate newsletters;
6. Messages integrated into ongoing corporate communications.

Whatever method is practiced, the communication goal should be to provide external audiences with a sound basis to make comprehensive assessments of reported data (see Section 1, Ch. 8).

Above all, a model of risk communication should integrate, instead of fragment, the risk-related information that an organization uses for external disclosure. The challenge is to inform the average member of the external audiences, while being fair and balanced in covering all critical perspectives.