For the past couple of decades, third sector organisations have registered a fast growth over the world with a focus on social, economic and political concerns whilst holding a presence in public matters. This study is mainly focused on non-profit organisations (NPOs). Organisations supporting social concerns on a not-for-profit (NFP) basis. Nowadays, NPOs are a social trend where people with different backgrounds and purposes aim to get involved in. Their participation is to either assist a community or a cause (as a contributor), or to obtain assistance when being part of a community (as a beneficiary). Nonetheless, the challenges as well as the opportunities faced by NPOs are widely acknowledged in both practice and theory, with a special focus on the different organisation’s participants involved, that is, stakeholders. In order to “do the right project” whilst “doing the project right” (Williams & Samser, 2010, p. 38), NPOs need the support and collaboration of stakeholders to obtain funds, operate, meet a community needs, and survive in the market. Aiming to find out how are relationships between stakeholders and NPOs managers stablished and maintained, the study analyses the managerial approaches undertaken by the organisation’s employees towards stakeholders. Further, in order to identify the characteristics of entrepreneurial project-based NPOs, the study explores the organisation requirements to properly develop within the mentioned sector. By hence, the NPO concept is analysed within the entrepreneurial context to understand and recognise the stakeholder management practices employed in such scenario. There is limited literature drawing on stakeholder management within NPOs. However, there is even less research done studying the link between NPOs and entrepreneurship. For the purpose of this study, which is to contribute to the general body of knowledge by analysing stakeholder management in an NPO within the entrepreneurship field, this study has selected a Swedish NPO as a main focus. With grounds on the existing literature discussing stakeholder classification and participation in the mentioned type of organisations, this study identifies the different groups of stakeholders and their different meanings to the organisation. At the same time, the lack of research in entrepreneurial project-based NPOs is highlighted, encouraging further research in related areas. This research is based on a single case study of an NPO operating in Sweden, given the particularity and uniqueness of the phenomenon studied. Qualitative data is collected through the implementation of unstructured and semi-structured interviews with top management team (TMT) members and managers in the NPO selected as study focus, a total of five people contacted out of twelve employees. Then data is analysed and the study findings are presented and linked to existing literature. Further, the suggestion of five propositions for further research are presented. Finally, the study conclusions are outlined, along with the managerial and theoretical implications, and the study limitations.

Made available in DSpace on 2016-03-15T19:26:36Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Marcelo Pires Fernandes.pdf: 425391 bytes, checksum: 82c6fd61293544d4f47d5a6eec0f6580 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2008-02-12 / The research problem to be studied is related to the way companies from the services industry use customer databases to discover useful knowledge about their customers, in order to improve the development of relationship strategies with them. This issue is important mainly because due to the increasing of concurrence and customer demand, the company needs to relate differently with their customers, so that thy can keep in its portfolio the most profitable ones. In this way, the theory has suggested a deeper integration among distinct disciplines as Relationship Marketing, CRM and Data Mining. In this current study, it was investigated the way the theory presents and describes database analysis processes and, as a result, some proposals were found out, that segment the processes of discovering knowledge in databases in stages like problem understanding, data understanding, data preparation, data modeling data, model evaluation and deployment. The target population was composed by companies from the services industry from São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro cities and a quantitative research was made by applying a questionnaire to 67 professionals from the target population. In this research, themes as utilization level from stages of process of discovering knowledge in databases, utilization level of data mining techniques and utilization level of relationship strategies were investigated. It was discovered that the companies researched have a high utilization level of the stages of knowledge discovery identified in the theory, just only a small part of the data mining techniques are uniformly used by the companies researched and, at last, the strategies with the highest utilization levels are that related to the acquisition of new customers and identification of profitable ones. This last discover was a little bit surprising, because it is opposed to the way of thinking of some authors who defend companies should focus on their relationship strategies in the customer retention. These results can be used to support companies, in subjects related to the development of customer relationship strategies, based in an integrated analysis of business issues, customer information, as well quantitative models of analysis from this information, in order to turn it into useful knowledge to the making decision. / O problema de pesquisa a ser investigado está associado ao modo como empresas do setor de serviços utilizam bases de dados para descobrir conhecimento sobre o cliente e embasar o desenvolvimento de estratégias de relacionamento. Este tema é importante, visto que em função do aumento da concorrência e da exigência dos clientes, as empresas precisam tratar seus clientes de forma diferenciada, de forma a manter em sua carteira aqueles mais rentáveis. Neste sentido, a literatura tem sugerido uma integração cada vez mais intensa entre disciplinas como Marketing de Relacionamento, CRM e Mineração de Dados. O presente trabalho estudou o modo como a literatura apresenta e descreve processos de análise de bases de dados e algumas propostas foram encontradas, propostas que segmentam o processo de descoberta de conhecimento em bases de dados em etapas como entendimento do problema, entendimento e preparação dos dados, modelagem dos dados, avaliação do modelo e implementação da solução desenvolvida. O universo estudado foi o de empresas do setor de serviços que atuam nas cidades de São Paulo e do Rio de Janeiro e uma pesquisa quantitativa foi realizada por meio da aplicação de um questionário a 67 respondentes. Nesta pesquisa, foi investigado o nível de utilização das etapas dos processos de descoberta de conhecimento em bases de dados, as técnicas de mineração utilizadas, bem como as estratégias de relacionamento adotadas com clientes. Constatou-se que as empresas pesquisadas possuem um alto nível de utilização das etapas de descoberta de conhecimento identificadas na literatura, que elas utilizam de forma uniforme apenas algumas das técnicas de mineração de dados identificadas na literatura e que, do ponto de vista de estratégias de relacionamento com clientes, as estratégias de aquisição de novos clientes e identificação dos melhores clientes possuem um nível de utilização superior ao de estratégias de retenção de clientes (considerando resultados da amostra). Esta última constatação, de certo modo, contraria o pensamento de algumas correntes teóricas, que defendem que as empresas devem focar suas estratégias de relacionamento na retenção de clientes. Estes resultados pode servir de apoio aos gestores das empresas, no que se refere aos processos de desenvolvimento de estratégias de relacionamento com clientes, sustentados em análise integrada dos aspectos de negócio envolvidos, informações sobre o cliente, bem como modelos quantitativos de análise destas informações, de forma a transformá-las em conhecimento útil para a tomada de decisão.