Threats to reputation are more costly than they used to be, but they are also more avoidable. A central principal when it comes to protecting or rescuing a company’s reputation is to focus not only on the substantive issues critics are raising, but also on the public’s “outrage.” Consultants who know how to predict, prevent, and reduce outrage — myself among them — are in high demand and short supply.
This program aims at replacing the pricey consultant. (This isn’t as foolish or charitable as it may sound. If your problem looks serious, you’ll probably hire the pricey consultant too — and you probably should.) When your company is in reputational trouble, locked in controversy, the program will help you figure out how to reduce stakeholders’ outrage. And when your company isn’t in reputational trouble yet, but you’re afraid you might be headed that way, the program will help you predict how much stakeholder outrage you are likely to face, and then plan a strategy to prevent it.
— Peter Sandman
Features
- Breaks reputation management down to bite-size manageable pieces.
- An “outrage meter” provides “how are we doing” indication throughout.
- Additional background and explanation in Sandman's words on demand.
The program takes your company step by step through the selection and characterization of stakeholders, then helps you decide how much outrage is likely down the road. The results section displays the predicted outrage by stakeholder and by outrage component. Don’t like the answers? The management section lets you try out alternative strategies to get your outrage down.
If you have the courage to interact with this software openly, it will point the way for you to make dramatic improvements in your relations with communities, activists, governments and other stakeholders … and equally dramatic improvements in your chances of avoiding the communication setbacks that have cost industry billions of dollars in the last decade alone. Hundreds of examples and anecdotes from Sandman’s consulting on environmental, health and safety controversies, all at the touch of a button.
Sandman’s hallmark is counterintuitive advice that sounds perfectly obvious after he’s done explaining it to you. Now he has put his unique approach to reputation management into a computer software package. He has even found a way to provide a rough quantification. You tell the program what you plan, and the program tells you how much outrage you’re likely to face if you do it.
Demo presentation about
OUTRAGE
This demo is a Microsoft Windows Help file and requires Microsoft Windows 95 or later. It is a zipped (compressed) file and so you must have a program that allows you to “unzip” a compressed file (such as WinZip or PKZip).
Other presentation
This other presentation about the OUTRAGE Prediction & Management software requires PowerPoint. If you do not have Microsoft PowerPoint, you will need to download and install the PowerPoint viewer (a self-extracting viewer program) to be able to see it. (If you have PowerPoint, please download only the presentation.)
- Download the PowerPoint presentation (outrage.pps; 1.275 MB)
- Download PowerPoint viewer (ppviewer.exe 2.664 MB)
How to Order
Let me be frank here. As computer-types measure time, the Outrage software dates back a couple of generations. It is still available, and in my judgment still useful, but its platform is pretty badly antiquated. The company that developed the software with me, a safety consultancy called Qest, was purchased in 2005 by GHD, a much bigger operation. GHD is considering the development of a new product that will merge a pared-down version of Outrage with other stakeholder relations and shareholder relations tools. As part of the deal to make that happen, I hope to be able to release the original software as shareware — especially since it incorporates many hundreds of examples from my consulting.
If you want to know more about Outrage (or its successor), contact Emily_Lazzaro@ghd.com.au.
