Effective stakeholder management is key to building trust, strengthening partnerships and delivering sound outcomes based on a shared vision. Understanding the perceived impacts and opportunities of a proposal to your different stakeholder groups is fundamental.
During the engagement process, how you group, record and analyse the different stakeholder groups can be time-consuming and sometimes difficult to track without the right tools.
There are stakeholder relationship management tools, such as Engagement Hub, that are designed to capture this data readily, act as a depositary of all offline and online activity and provide a mechanism to communicate with your stakeholders.
Getting it right before you begin engagement
Fundamental to sound stakeholder management is the process of:
- identifying your stakeholder groups and address any barriers to involvement
- define the real or perceived issues, impacts, benefits and opportunities for each stakeholder group and develop a matrix which identifies the intensity
- determine the level of participation and influence in relation to the decision-making process based on the IAP2 spectrum
- understand the communication channels to best reach your stakeholders to ensure fair and equitable participation
- develop a tactical communications and engagement plan which includes the methods and tools to attract high-level participation from each stakeholder group identified
- keep them informed and engaged during the consultation
- Also, provide acknowledgement of participation and inform them of the outcomes
Stakeholder management is a priority
Engaging and communicating with your stakeholders throughout the consultative process is absolutely imperative.
Failing to recognise stakeholders and their feedback can lead to additional conflict if not managed in a timely fashion and ultimately can impact the overall outcomes and lead to mistrust.
The right software for effective stakeholder management
Managing stakeholders is a continuous process which can be very time consuming, however, is fundamental to achieving sound outcomes. Investing in a community relationship management tool helps you manage everything online in one central location – say goodbye to using Excel spreadsheets!
A key feature of Engagement Hub is the built-in stakeholder relationship management tool as part of the complete online end-to-end solution for community engagement.
Contact us for a detailed proposal, book a demo to organize an online screen share and discussion of your objectives, or to explore the features in detail on our Engagement Hub demonstration site.
