The problem investigated in this thesis was provided by the Energy and Environment and Nuclear Energy and Safety divisions at the Paul Scherrer Institute. The client and division heads asked us to identify their external stakeholders in order to then create a communication concept with readily implementable ideas for action in terms of improving communication and outreach to the individual stakeholder groups. The priority and needs of their stakeholders were to be established, and an appropriate communication strategy for each stakeholder group was to be determined.

After the project's objectives and milestones were defined, our procedure was based on the Stakeholder Circle® model. We first identified and prioritized stakeholders by interviewing internal people. Interviews with external stakeholder group representatives were conducted to gain insight into the current communication, expectations, and preferences. A survey was sent out to PhD students at ENE and NES to learn how the divisions could better attract international talents for PhD positions. Collected data were analyzed to derive ideas for action to improve the divisions' external communication.

The result and benefit of our work to the client were firstly to have a list of prioritized stakeholders and summary of each stakeholders' satisfaction with current communication, their expectations, preferred channels, and ideas for improvement of communication, which were derived from the conducted external stakeholder interviews. Findings from the external interviews and PhD survey were presented in a communication plan, with different levels of communication depending on patterns recognized for each stakeholder group. We further indicated the channels that ENE and NES divisions use to keep stakeholders up to date for each level. Ideas on how the divisions best reach the individual stakeholder groups using different channels were further suggested. Lastly, recommendations for optimizing their external communication concept, including ideas and suggestions for improving overall visibility on multiple channels, such as social media and their web page, to better reach the various stakeholders and future talents, were made based on interview and survey responses as well as our own ideas.