Hi Everyone,

As requested by the Council on Monday I attended the session on ICANN’s reputational study.

My report is below, let me know if there are any questions.

Regards,

Peter

Wednesday April 10^th, 12.30 – 13.30

ICANN Reputation Audit – Interim findings

Goal:

- Establishing a reputational baseline as ICANN’s presence in the world expands.

- What do we right, what wrong, what to improve.

Part of a survey series

4 objectives

- Imagine and reputation of ICANN (int. and ext. view)

- Uncover perceptions with respect to the management team

- Establish baseline metrics

- Deliver evidence based insights and recommendations

Reputation audit model (I3) based on:

- Identity

- Image

- influence

Methodology:

- Start in Toronto

- 14 senior internal stakeholders interviews

- 25 External interviews

- Data synthesized

- Survey instrument based on that synthesis

- 327 respondents

- 525 media items analyzed  and pushed through rating system

Summary of results

- Multi-stakeholder: very favorable

- Internationalization, communication and new gTLD services have most room for improvement; big difference in perception between internal and external stakeholders.

- Influencers (media etc.) are neutral in most categories which would lead externals to fall back to their own (biased perceptions)

- Very favorable media coverage on the international aspects of ICANN by the media

- Numbers are in general pretty low

- 37% of internal and 40% of external stakeholders say that they are critical of ICANN

- Media coverage is more or less 33% for unfavourable, favourable and neutral with a slight tendency towards positive

- Trust and ethics rate higher amongst external stakeholders than internal stakeholders (54% thinks ‘ICANN is a company I trust’)

- Very interesting (but too detailed to report) overview of the engagement perception: especially the order is essential

- Is ICANN truly global? About 25% says yes

- 61% does not think the ITU is an alternative

- The perception on the new gTLD services is very poor. Both internal and external perception ratings hover around 65-70% Just Fair/Poor

- Internal stakeholders find direct contact (meetings) most valuable communication channel for corp comm. External stakeholders prefer indirect channels (newsletters etc.)

Peter Van Roste General Manager CENTR - Belliardstraat 20, 1040 Brussels, Belgium tel +32 2 627 5550 - fax +32 2 627 5559 www.centr.org – twitter: centrnews