Creating stakeholder matrices or data analysis of your community or stakeholder engagement feedback can seem an onerous task if you don’t have the right tools to streamline your approach.
Here we look at 5 essential tools for stakeholder analysis to help you consolidate your data into meaningful feedback, manage your stakeholders effectively and provide the mechanism to inform your stakeholder engagement outcomes report.
1. Excel
Excel – the old favourite! Excel does a great job of organising and filtering your data. You can use formulas, filtering, colour-coding and create as many columns and rows as you need to manage your data. Many community and stakeholder specialists are also excel specialists as this tool has been the main-stay of data management for many years. However, it can be very labour intensive and requires a lot of manual analysis. There is some automation available, particularly with online integrations with other software systems but in essence it is really a manual process and can quickly become messy.
Versioning can become complicated and it lacks the full audit trail often needed for sensitive or complex stakeholder management.
And what if your hard drive or backup fails? Disaster!
Excel is still a useful tool, but online software is now far surpassing it in functionality and ease of use.
2. Engagement Hub
When you consult through an online engagement platform like Engagement Hub – all your data is already collated and organised for you. You can drill down to individual participants easily, print instant reports, track progress and tag your data automatically. Our tagging feature turns your qualitative feedback into quantitative data resulting in dynamic and rich insights.
Communication to your stakeholders can also be automated so your project updates can land straight in their inbox and you have a full audit trail to see how each stakeholder is interacting with you, their responses to surveys or consultations, how often they visit your site and the activity they undertake. Updates can even be scheduled to go live at a certain date and time so everything can be going live whilst you’re on the ground consulting on your project or at the media launch.
Engagement Hub is the only online consultation software that provides your own Stakeholder Relationship Management system (SRM). This unique feature, which can normally cost up to $25,000 a year alone, provides you with unrivalled access to data across your whole stakeholders, by user segments or feedback tags, by projects or individually.
Updating management on all stakeholder engagement becomes as simple as clicking a button to download all activity and data into an editable word document, spreadsheets and graphs.
Engage and manage your stakeholders in one, secure place and create your own consultation and stakeholder management system powered by Engagement Hub. View our demo site or book a free software demonstration here.
3. Altometer
Altometer uses data science techniques to help sort multiple sources of qualitative and quantitative data into clear insights. It uses machine learning to remove human error and speed up processing times.
It promises to help governments and large organisations process thousands of elements of data and be able to provide quick and reliable conclusions that can be taken forward into decision making.
4. Google Maps
We all know and use Google Maps or similar software for directions and locational information, but you may not know about ‘Google My Maps’ which allows you to create your own maps and layer your data onto the relevant locations on the map.
You can import your data directly from your Engagement Hub site or from a spreadsheet, add icons to visually segment your data (e.g. opposers, supporters, environmental concerns, waste concerns etc) and view all your feedback visually on a moveable, interactive map.
This is an excellent way to visually help you analyse or display your data and can also help you identify any locations within your target area that you haven’t received any or enough feedback from.
5. ABS Data
This list wouldn’t be complete without some form of benchmarking data. It’s always an important step in your data analysis to benchmark your data against societal data such as expected demographical statistics for your consultation area or group.
The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) data is derived from census data and represents the most comprehensive and accurate profiling information available country-wide.
You can use this data to set targets for participation in your consultation and to gauge whether your consultation data is truly representative of your target population within Australia. Check your government website for statistical data outside Australia.
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There are many tools out there to assist with community and stakeholder engagement. Read our ‘20 tools you need in your community engagement toolkit’ for more ideas.
Considering what tools you need for managing your data is just as crucial as the outward, external-facing software and tools you use for your engagement practices. Engagement Hub is the only software that bridges both functions and provides the tools you need to consult plus the tools you need to successfully manage your stakeholders and data behind the scenes.
To find out more, view our demo site or book a no-obligation, virtual software demonstration where we can demonstrate the unique features of the platform and Stakeholder Relationship Management system and how it can be fully customised to your organisation and projects.
