Everyone talks about the importance of stakeholder engagement but very few talk about best practice approaches to planning, execution and reporting. Traditional communications is one dimensional whereas stakeholder engagement is two-dimensional in that you are actively seeking feedback from stakeholders and not just convey your ideas to them. Here, in this blog we have mentioned how you can use online stakeholder engagement platform like the Engagement Hub to efficiently engage stakeholders in each phase of the project and thus yield great result.
- Planning Stage
To achieve your objectives and consider your reporting requirements, when you have a vision for the project in mind you must invest in planning for it accordingly. An element which is imperative to this stage is undertaking stakeholder mapping in which you can identify the stakeholders who should be included at difference stages of the project’s lifecycle, how best to reach them and what tactics are used to engage with them to encourage participation. Throughout the project’s lifecycle you can map out which features of your selected online stakeholder engagement platform to deploy at certain time. For instance, like the ‘overview’ to introduce them to the project, ‘community chat’ to ask everyone to collaborate together, ‘interactive mapping’ to enable them to pin feedbacks/ideas, etc. Ultimately you must think of reporting first and plan your engagement around this.
- Priority Definition
You may have strategic stakeholders who are involved during the planning stage. During the planning stage the strategic goals are endorsed, priority can be given to specific tasks within delivering and reporting on the consultation phases of a project. To begin with, the project manager can provide the strategic stakeholders with a secure private environment to continue pre-planning and collaborate during execution. This enables ongoing discussion of main priorities and how to work on these such that these fit into the strategic goals.
- Execution Phase
This is the phase when planning is to be brought into action and consultation is open to your broader stakeholders.
Once the consultation is in motion, strategic stakeholders and project managers can turn on/off features for different phases of a consultation to encourage active participation using features like ‘submission’ that allows for online submission of document, ask their queries using ‘frequently asked questions’, ‘interactive mapping’ to pin ideas and response to comments. Via the stakeholder relationship management tool, offline correspondence such as phone calls and drop-in sessions can also be logged.
To create awareness of expected timeframes, opt to use a feature like the ‘timeline,’ where the information is publicly displayed along with key dates.
Take the free test drive of Engagement Hub for 30 days. Visit the website – https://engagementhub.com.au/software-features for more details.
