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Issues Management Plan

For your Issues Management Plan assignment, you will need to research:

  • The issue(s)
  • The organization
  • The publics / stakeholders
Key Research Goals:
  1. Find evidence to support your selection of an issue
  2. Develop an awareness of the variety and nature of potentially useful information sources, and how to find them
  3. Use a variety of tools to research the issue and find all the relevant voices and perspectives

Issues Research Tips

Things to remember:

  1. Try to orient yourself around the information landscape -- who is creating and sharing information about the issue, in what format, and where are they sharing it? This will help you decide where to search.
  2. Remember that a lot of relevant information is either not available or easily findable on the Web -- use library resources as well as websites.
  3. When searching in the Library and on the Web, consider your search terms carefully -- good keywords make the difference in finding good results. Add keywords related to specific aspects of the issue, stakeholders, contexts, audiences or points of view.

News and Opinion

Use these tools to search for an issue and explore what makes it an issue.

You can examine traditional media and social media to gather both qualitative and quantitative data as evidence of your issue.

Social Media search tools
Use these to search for background to the issue, public perceptions, related issues etc. 

Industry Information

Find information about companies, organizations and industries.

Academic Sources

If you want to explore an issue more deeply, you might want to search the academic literature (including books and journal articles).