Executive Summary
Managing goodwill is an important part of any organization, be that a for-profit or a nonprofit organization. At some point managing goodwill is an important aspect of stakeholder management as the management team involved in taking care of the organization’s reputation in terms of goodwill considers the different possible reactions of the stakeholders, especially the customers and clients, whenever new changes in existing policies and regulations get set. In such situations, any decisions that may negatively affect the stakeholders’ perception about the company including its products and services would most likely be considered for re-deliberation. This is truer for organizations that heavily rely on customer service quality and the perceptions of the clients and companies on the existing model to generate much needed revenues (i.e. to survive). The objective of this report is to study and critique a chosen business organization by focusing on their goodwill efforts and of course, the effectiveness of those efforts. The chosen business organization for this paper is Owens State Community College, a comprehensive community and state college situated in the state of Ohio in the United States.
Some of the most important aspects that will be discussed in this paper would be the type of attitude that the organization uses when it comes to stakeholder communication, whether the organization uses positive emphasis, the politics inside the organization, the different efforts that the organization make and the mechanisms that it uses in order to build goodwill, how the customers respond to those efforts and mechanisms, how the employees, managers, and basically every member of the organization were trained and are being trained to communicate goodwill, the organization’s areas of weaknesses when it comes to goodwill, instances where the organization has been exposed in a bad form of publicity, and lastly, how the employees, in general, respond to each other.
All in all, after conducting a comprehensive analysis of Owens State Community College’s goodwill efforts and mechanisms, it would only be safe to say that it is a business organization as well as an educational institution that has successfully generated a lot of goodwill, thanks to its client-centered program and service offerings, its highly effective communication techniques, and its consistency in providing the highest quality service, something which is rather unusual for a state community college.
