Since stakeholders have a vested interest in CSR initiative, their primary role is to evaluate it with respect to continued and prospective funding, and growth and improvement opportunities depending on the level of program participation in which they are involved. For e.g. primary stakeholders who are the major decision makers would initiate evaluation effort followed by support from secondary stakeholders. Tertiary stakeholders being more would be interested in the findings of the evaluation.
Evaluation helps other stakeholders to develop increased knowledge or understanding based on the evaluation’s findings which might cause development of further insights into future decisions, thus leading to greater commitment.
2.8.1 Benefits of engaging stakeholders
Stakeholders on engagement raise points if discussion which throw light on different perspectives and yield useful, relevant and credible findings. Having stakeholders from different backgrounds like cultural, racial, ethnic, geographic, political, organizational and linguistic helps in consolidating diverse opinions, interests, concerns and priorities in the evaluation process to assess scope of process improvement. Involving stakeholders in the question development process, increases quality, scope and depth of questions. This builds opportunities for collaboration and assists in stakeholder engagement.
Pointers like time line of the CSR project, its sponsor, underlying purpose, allocated resources, expected outputs, external forces which might influence outcome along with program’s design and implementation can help stakeholders in understanding what is being evaluated.