Corporate Affairs Intelligence, Stakeholder-First

The Challenge

Corporate affairs is judgement under pressure. Will this decision be accepted, and by whom? How is the organisation actually perceived, rather than how it hopes to be? Who owns the narrative in our sector? What happens to stakeholder sentiment when something goes wrong? The teams who answer these questions well are senior and expensive, and their read of the stakeholder field is the product. But that read is usually assembled by hand, from scattered evidence, under deadline, and it is only ever as good, and as current, as the hours someone had to build it.

That creates two problems. The analysis is hard to repeat: the same acceptance question asked six months later starts from a blank page. And it is hard to defend: an intuition about where opposition will come from is difficult to put in front of a board, because the reasoning lives in someone’s head instead of in the evidence. Corporate affairs runs on judgement, but judgement that cannot be repeated or sourced does not compound.

Stromy built a line of intelligence products to change that: the recurring questions of corporate affairs, turned into repeatable, evidence-traced analysis.

Our Approach

Intelligence as a product, not a one-off report. Instead of a bespoke study each time, each recurring corporate-affairs question is built once as a defined analytical product, with a fixed method, a known set of inputs, and a consistent set of deliverables. You commission it, answer a short structured intake, and receive a branded report pack (a narrative report, a working data matrix, an executive summary, a dashboard) designed to be run again at the next decision point so you can track how the picture moves. It is the difference between hiring the analysis once and owning a repeatable instrument.

Stakeholder-first, because that is where the pressure is. The line is anchored in stakeholder intelligence. Stakeholder Acceptance Analysis maps a stakeholder population against dozens of acceptance drivers (political alignment, economic interest, media salience, community impact) to show, with every score tied to evidence, where acceptance is solid, where it is fragile, and where organised opposition is likely to form before a contested decision or major approval. Perception Assessment measures how an organisation is actually perceived across the groups that matter, clustering the evidence into the perception themes that genuinely exist rather than the ones a communications plan assumed, each scored on a transparent scale and weighted by stakeholder influence. Run either at intervals and it stops being a snapshot and becomes a trajectory.

The media and reputation picture, quantified. Beside the stakeholder view sits the media layer. Share of Voice quantifies where an organisation stands against its competitors for coverage, credibility and narrative ownership, weighted by source influence. Sentiment and Perception Analysis goes past a positive-or-negative read to show which specific topics and associations are driving sentiment, and which voices and channels carry the most weight. Together they turn “how are we doing in the media” from an impression into a measured, benchmarked position.

Evidence you can put in front of a board. The discipline is the same across every product: nothing is asserted that is not sourced. Every score links back to the evidence it came from, a human review stage lets your team or a Stromy analyst validate the scoring and add non-public context before anything is finalised, and the analysis is auditable end to end. This is the part corporate affairs teams care about most: the output is not a black-box number, it is a defensible case with its reasoning attached.

The Outcome

A corporate affairs team gains an intelligence capability that behaves like a product line rather than a series of favours. The stakeholder-acceptance and perception products are in service today, with the media and reputation products (share of voice, sentiment analysis) beside them. The line extends naturally toward crisis and regulatory work: crisis-communications support is taking shape, a crisis stakeholder-mapping capability that carries acceptance data into live-crisis response is in development, and the regulatory monitoring behind our government-intelligence engines already reads into the same corporate-affairs picture.

Because each product is repeatable and every finding is sourced, the value compounds. Analysis that once evaporated when an engagement ended now accumulates as a longitudinal record a team can return to and defend. And because the products are delivered into the same AI workspace where a team already produces its own briefings and decks (the intelligence layer behind partnerships like our work with Duke Strategies), the analysis never sits in a silo. It feeds straight into the advice that clients pay for.

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Explore the products: Stakeholder Acceptance Analysis · Perception Assessment · Share of Voice · Sentiment & Perception · all Intelligence products