Stewardship of Large organizations

Stewardship is one of many finely honed principles that public relations practitioners and academics use to understand the quality of the relationships between an organization and its various stakeholders and stake seekers. All too often the justifiable criticism of public relations efforts is that organizations ask customers and others to commit to support the interests of the organization. Stewardship reverses that equation. It is a concept used to constantly assess the quality of relationships. It is a management tool for challenging executives to respond to and support the interests of the individuals and groups whose lives the organization affects.

In the oldest sense of the word, a steward is someone entrusted with managing the interests of others. The term often refers in practice and in law to one individual (a steward) being in charge of land and animals for someone else. The steward is expected to follow the golden rule: Manage the affairs at hand for someone else as the steward would want to have his or her affairs managed by someone else. In this sense, the obligation to be a steward can range from the legal implications of being a steward all the way to merely doing so because it is the ethical or right thing to do. It obligates one entity to treat another's interests as though the interests of the second party are very important to the first party. The term has long stood for balancing self-interests so that instead of one interest exploiting another, the stronger or obligated interest serves the other interest. In addition to having implications for legal service, the term is often used in a religious context. In the simplest sense, this application advises that we should love and care for others as we would want to be loved and cared for. In an era where sustainability is a global ethic, stewardship asks that people look to the interests not only of people and resources living today but also those who will be living in the future. We have obligations today to wisely manage resources to ensure their abundance in the future. For this reason, stewardship opposes selfishness.

In 2001, Kathleen Kelly critiqued one of the enduring models of public relations programming, suggesting that it was inadequate because it did not include stewardship. This critique is relevant to existing relationships or emerging ones of various kinds. It extends the logic captured in the ROPE method of public relations. This acronym refers to stages in public relations programming: Research, Objective setting, Planning and implementing, Evaluation. Kelly reasoned that this model was insufficient because it assumed that new challenges were the constant focus of public relations strategists. In the context of fundraising and development, for instance, they were looking to new donors rather than necessarily working to ensure that the current pool of donors were satisfied by the quality of their relationship with the organization engaging in public relations. Kelly suggested that ROPE should become ROPES by adding stewardship as the last step in the process, which is not linear but circular. As Kelly concluded, “stewardship completes the process and furnishes an essential loop back to the beginning of managing relationships” (2001, p. 280).

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