At Rhema Multicultural Centre, we often support communities navigating uncertainty, whether due to public health concerns, policy shifts, or sudden disruptions. We realized that clear, timely, and culturally sensitive communication is essential in these moments. That’s why I created a risk communications framework: a practical guide to help us share accurate information, build trust, and respond with empathy when it matters most.

Introduction 

The goal of Rhema Multicultural Center’s stakeholder assessment is to uncover stakeholders’ perceptions of risks, identify risk mitigation strategies and develop effective messaging that will lead to an alignment. It is pertinent to understand the perception of new immigrants towards the risk of mental wellness and how best to manage it. The research methods we have considered efficient includes opinion polls, focus groups, one-on-one dialogues, and informal interviews, all geared towards understanding the best approach towards risk management and communication.

Research Choices

To create a strategic and effective risk communications campaign, targeted research is expedient. In Rhema Multicultural Center, the most functional methods will include opinion polls, focus group study, and informal conversations on social media platforms and on a one-on-one basis. General opinion polls will be helpful in getting a general overview of stakeholder’s perceptions of the risk opportunity. Focus groups on the other hand are critical to digging deeper to understand the factors that have conditioned stakeholders’ thought process. Informal methods will be helpful in getting natural and factual responses that are not influenced by a setting.

RMC will take a qualitative approach to undertaking this research because its focus is to investigate and uncover potential risks and mitigate them with strategic realignment and strategic messaging. The qualitative approach will be instrumental in uncovering these “webs of beliefs” that create a mentality that girds stakeholder’s choices.

Adopting these mental models helps to understand how stakeholders perceive risk, what they consider to be risky, the myths and assumptions and how they arrived at these conclusions. A win for RMC in its research quest is that it will be easy to establish trust because most volunteers and team members are racial minorities and people who were newly landed immigrants.

Focus Groups

These focused interviews are relevant because they provide a platform for stakeholders to express their opinions in a structured and coordinated manner. Many stakeholders may be positively disposed to sharing information, thoughts and beliefs in focused interviews because they are hopeful that some well-intentioned research can bring about a desired outcome for the group. Focus groups will provide RMC’s Strategic Risk Communications Team with information that will highlight gaps and this will provide the team with a sense of direction  on strategy and key messaging.

Challenges 

• There is a tendency for participants to align with the ideas and thoughts of a vocal person in the group.
• Some stakeholders who feel or act differently may not be motivated to share so they do not feel like the odd one out. For example, I once attended a focus group meeting and to break the ice, the panelists talked about pets. I mentioned that I loved dogs and would not mind owning a Siberian Husky. A couple of my friends sent direct messages and laughed at my comment. They believed I wanted to sound cool because Africans are not so big on pets. I did not like their remarks and this affected how I provided my responses throughout the study.

Solutions

Create focus study groups based on answers provided on opinion polls so that like-minded people will be in the same group and can discuss freely.

Opinion Polls

Opinion polls are great for getting a general overview of the risk perception of stakeholders. It is very useful for garnering popular opinion and it also helps to determine which risk mitigation strategies stakeholders are likely to accept or refuse. For RMC, these polls will help understand the approach to take in the campaign strategy. For example, an opinion poll will tell us if we should be educating people about risks they are not aware of or if we should be getting creative in offering risk mitigation strategies.

Challenges

• Opinion polls are not deep conversations so it is limited in helping the team understand the behaviors or factors that inform such choices or mentality.
• Opinion polls may not reflect the true thoughts of stakeholders who would have needed to ask follow up questions to understand the question or context better.

Solutions

• Add instances or contexts in the questions to help stakeholders understand better.
• Create scenario-based questions.

One-on-One dialogue

This research method is an informal engagement strategy that is intended to produce more natural and objective answers. When stakeholders don’t know they are being recorded or when they do not feel the need to sound intelligent or be politically correct, they are likely to provide answers that reflect the true reality of their situations and their thoughts.

Challenges

• This method may require anonymity since the stakeholder may feel blindsided if they ever find out they were quoted.
• This method may also be subjected to an ethical review based on the information gathering method.
• Another challenge is that the stakeholders may not really think of providing their answers carefully or offering the best explanations since they consider the context to be a very casual one.

Solutions

• Casually mention your intentions and let recipients know you are asking as a friend or acquaintance.
• When possible, assure them that their thoughts are like samples and will not be traced back to them.

Informal Interviews

RMC has the opportunity to engage existing community members who fall in the stakeholder category on a one-on-one basis to understand their perceptions of risks and its classifications in terms of intensity. Community members have an existing relationship with the center and they are likely to be interested in helping with research.

Challenges

• Stakeholders may not speak freely in this context because they may worry about being perceived unfavorably by the program advisors.
• Stakeholders may not be able to decline if they are not interested in the research because they have already received a lot of favors from the center.

Solutions

Send a bulk email asking for volunteers to participate so that interested stakeholders can come forward willingly.

Stakeholder Perception Management

With the research options conducted, key messages will be created for a communications campaign that will be anchored on the fact that common issues like social alienation and isolation are risk factors for mental illnesses. This risk awareness campaign will precede other strategies to mitigate the mental wellness risks. The storytelling technique will be adopted to create a personalized experience that may be informative for immigrants that have conflicting opinions on mental wellness. RMC will also launch a testimonials campaign where old community members and volunteers will talk about how the integration strategy has alleviated mental health risks that they would have faced.

Conclusion

With the stakeholder’s perception of risk assessment, Rhema Multicultural Center Strategic Risk Communications team will be better equipped to create strategies that will align stakeholder’s perception with the communications messages. Through creative storytelling, testimonials, educational messages, the RMC team will be able to produce better outcomes through strategic realignment.