For making project a success, it is important that stakeholders interact with each other and with the project facilitator to share their thoughts and ideas. Mapping and planning are required to support effective engagement processes; it is a challenging task to carry out stakeholder engagement in an efficient manner. You need to have a stakeholder strategy in place for obtaining optimum level of stakeholder engagement.
Here, in this blog we have written a few tips to help you improve your stakeholder engagement:
- Be inclusive and categorise by interest and influence
When creating your engagement plan, make sure that all stakeholders are identified correctly and considered as per their influence and interest. In other words, it is important to know your stakeholders and how they relate to the project execution. It is imperative to analyse and categorize stakeholders using mapping.
- Publicise your engagements
You can use multiple channels to promote stakeholder engagement. Some of the channels include: websites, news and blogs, social media, signage, mass media etc.
All these mediums help reach and create relationships with your stakeholders.
- Acknowledge and respect people
In order to manage stakeholder engagement in a better way, someone has to act as the single point of contact; you can become the ‘go-to-person’ within the community should anyone have any queries about anything.
- Make engagement simple
Not everyone has the time to provide feedback through complex forums and long surveys, ensure that options are varied to make it simple to everyone.
Mix it up with pinning tasks, quick polls, short surveys that don’t require much time.
- Keep engaging with stakeholders
It is imperative to keep informing your stakeholders on a timely basis. Make it a habit to inform your stakeholders before, during and after the consultation with clear messaging and transparency.
So, these are a few positive steps that can help improve your stakeholder engagement. Isn’t it time to utilize an online stakeholder engagement platform for engaging your stakeholders in an efficient manner. Engagement Hub is one such centralized, integrated and secure online solution that enables you to inform, collaborate and engage with stakeholders and community 24/7.
