For many years now, there have been service delivery protests in the Fezile Dabi District Municipality, formerly known as the Northern Free State District Municipality. This generated ongoing bad publicity in the form of negative media reports, and it became increasingly clear that there was a problem regarding the reputation of the municipality. To help the municipality to manage its reputation, reliable and scientific information was needed about how the municipality was perceived by its stakeholders. In this study, the Harris-Fombrun Reputation Quotient (RQ) was used to investigate the stakeholders' perceived reputation of the municipality. Questionnaires containing items based on the six RQ dimensions were used to investigate the municipality's reputation among samples of the external stakeholders (i.e. community members) and the internal stakeholders (i.e. municipal employees). Among the findings, a lack of information a