Reputation Management Plan

For this individual assignment you will choose an organisation with which you are familiar. This should not be an organisation you have written about in earlier assignments and should not necessarily be one you think is facing an issue. It might be an organisation for which you work, to which you belong, or one that is in the news. Positioning yourself as a consultant who has been tasked with providing an entire reputation management plan, you will develop a plan that goes from situation analysis to strategic and tactical recommendations. Your plan needs to be 2000 words long and addressed to your client, who in this case is the chairman of the board of directors. The chairman takes the view that ultimate responsibility for reputation management rests with the board, so s/he wants a plan that will enable the directors not only to maintain oversight of how the organisation is handling reputation issues but also to insist on the adoption of specific reputation management initiatives. For the purposes of this assignment, you should assume that the chairman is a former academic who expects not only logical arguments but also demands that those arguments are supported by suitable academic references. Therefore, you should provide a minimum of five relevant academic references.

Note 1: Why keep on about “relevant” references? Because the sources you use should have as their main focus the topic or argument you are setting out. It wouldn’t be relevant to lift a nice quote from a paper whose main emphasis was quite a different subject. Academic papers make statements in context, and you should respect the setting surrounding the statement you want to use.

Note 2: A link to a plan structure you might wish to use or adapt is posted separately in the Assessments section of the unit website.

Marking criteria:

Plan is workable

Plan provides a logical progression from situation analysis to Recommendations, with appropriate justifications and academic support

Plan objectives are sufficiently specific as to enable later evaluation

Plan is clearly written, with language appropriate to the client, showing a clear orientation to client needs and priorities throughout