• Automate workflows 
• Produce reports with impact
• Access and evaluate real-time insights. 

There’s no time for thumb-twiddling when maintaining a stakeholder relationship platform that so many teams rely on. (And, dare we say it, even enjoy using.) But we wouldn’t have it any other way.

Working in three-week sprints, our product team creates, tests, and rolls out features and functions that strengthen our product. Sometimes it’s about making little changes that make stakeholder management smoother. And other times it’s about maintaining our high levels of security.

New Features for 2025 

Focusing on the tasks at hand means we don’t always get around to writing about these core changes. Eep! That’s on us. But hey, it makes for a great round-up article. 

Here are the top nine shiny new things to arrive at Simply Stakeholders this year.

1. Customizable Stakeholder Reporting

Drag and drop blocks make it quick and easy to pick out complex compliance and regulatory information needed for your reports. When used with other Simply Stakeholders features, you can populate a blank report sheet in mere minutes. For reports that you have to send regularly to stakeholders, save the document as a template. 

How it helps

Reports generated within the Simply Stakeholders platform:

• Ensure accuracy: Using data you’ve already centralized

• Increase efficiency: No clicking between spreadsheets and external platforms
• Deliver relevant information only: Templates customized to your exact requirements.

2. AI Text Summarization

AI summaries deliver an overview of documents that are 80 words or more. Our customers like using this feature across the platform, but its value really shines when used with customizable stakeholder reporting. Depending on how much detail you need, you can ask the AI to produce an abstract of the entire document — or provide a short, medium, or long extract. 

How it helps

Easy-to-read summaries of long content are particularly helpful for:

• Reviewing lots of data: If there’s a lengthy Interaction record attached to the project or report 
• Getting things done quickly: Getting through a time-critical process or task.

3. Automated Workflows

Automated workflows set conditions around a process to trigger an action, so you don’t have to do it manually. You might use this when assigning tags, assigning stakeholders to contact groups, or sending email notifications.  

How it helps

When a team is pushed for time, it’s the smaller, quicker jobs that are overlooked. But these communication and organizational tasks are still important. Automated workflows ensure condition-based tasks are:

• Done: Completed, well…automatically — even when you’re at your busiest
• Error-free: Less manual processes means fewer errors and missed opportunities. 

4. Synonyms for Tags

The synonyms for tags function uses AI to identify similar-sounding tags, and groups them together.

Note: Only Administrators will have access to this function. 

How it helps

Good tag management:

• Brings clarity: Making it easier to find documents relating to a single topic or report in your stakeholder management system
• Minimizes risk: Stakeholder data records are less likely to miss key information, reports, or documents.    

5. Fresh User Interface for Stakeholder Interactions

Stakeholder interactions record, track, and manage stakeholders involved in a particular project. It’s a heavily used feature and needed a facelift — which we delivered in April. 

How it helps

Better user experiences within our stakeholder interactions component means:

• Greater project synergy: Users can see an individual’s records, as well as a timeline of the tasks and activities that sit with them, or with the stakeholder group they’re part of — which makes sense for the stakeholder engagement workflow 
• Time savings: Streamlining all of this information so it’s on a single page delivers an at-a-glance overview for time-poor team members.  

6. A Module Refresh for Outgoing Communications 

You can send more than just email communications through Simply Stakeholders, and so the previously named ‘group mail’ function needed a rebrand — now referred to as ‘outgoing communications’. We also gave the module a complete functionality overhaul, introducing more features to make managing your mail easier. 

How it helps

The rename communicates the broader scope and benefits of this module and what it can do, including:

• Bulk outreach without leaving the platform: Minimize the likelihood of information or contact detail errors by sending bulk email or SMS to a group of stakeholders from within the platform. 
• Multiple channels and formats: Email newsletters, project updates, event invites, and marketing materials can all be sent using Outgoing Communications.
• Message data reporting: See the number of opens, clicks, and unsubscribes.
• Better list management: it’s now easier to clean your list of inactive and unsubscribed stakeholders, as well as identify those missing key information, such as their email address.
• Build and save message templates: So you no longer have to create your email from scratch and can ensure uniformity across your communications.

7. Separating Complaints and Commitments Management

A commitment is a clear promise or agreement made between stakeholders. A complaint is dissatisfaction or concerns raised by an individual or group.

Commitments and complaints both rely on transparency and communication. But the steps (and emotions) involved when a commitment or complaint needs to be made, addressed, or solved are very different. Lumping these two processes together felt like starting on the back foot. So we separated them, giving each one its own section.

How it helps

Giving them their own workflows makes them easier to:

• Track: Keep track of what you’ve committed to and whether you’re meeting them, plus any grievances you’ve received and their resolution status. 
• Log: Record data relevant to complaints and commitments for reporting, auditing, compliance, and performance monitoring 

8. Table Reporting in the Custom Dashboard

Creating customized reports and dashboards is a key feature of Simply Stakeholders. And in July’s rollout, we added table reporting.

Pull out the relevant fields and data that you want to tabulate using the dreamy drag-and-drop function. Simply select the columns you want, rename them if needed, then add your newly created data table to the report.

How it helps

Our customers will enjoy:

• Less time spent on formatting: No column-width fiddling or extra formatting required
• More ways to display data in reports: Further customize your reports and dashboards — displaying the types of data that work best in table form.

9. More Features Within the Mobile App

The Simply Stakeholders app places a simplified version of your SRM in your pocket, so you can access it anytime, anywhere (even when you’re not connected to the internet). The app delivers core functionality while on the go. So with this in mind, we cherry-pick the available features, which in the August update meant adding contact groups and tags. 

How it helps

These new features within the mobile app mean:

• Data added sooner: You no longer have to wait to get onto the desktop version to add tags and contact groups
• Improved accuracy: The sooner you can add the data, the less likely you forget something important — or lose track of your notes.

If You’re Wondering Why You’ve Not Seen These Updates

Eight of these new or improved features are available only to customers on a Plus or Pro plan.

To enjoy the new additions, as well as exciting new features arriving as part of our future rollouts:

• Existing customers should contact the Customer Success team and ask to upgrade from the Core plan
• New customers should ask for the Plus or Pro plan when joining to get all these premium features right away. 

Try Simply Stakeholders! Book a personalized demo with our team and see our existing and new features in action! Get a Demo

You may already know that Simply Stakeholders was an early adopter of AI in stakeholder relationship management. We started experimenting with AI all the way back in 2017 (a lifetime ago in “AI years”!). That early start has given us a deep understanding of both the opportunities and the complexities of using AI in an engagement context: data quality, responsible use, and the impact on real-world engagement outcomes.

How Simply Stakeholders is Using AI Today

While much of the industry is only beginning to explore AI, Simply Stakeholders already uses several practical, reliable AI features that help teams work smarter every day. Our platform includes sentiment analysis that highlights the tone and trajectory of stakeholder conversations, as well as automatic issue detection to surface emerging risks or themes early. We also generate AI-powered summaries of interactions, giving teams fast, accurate snapshots of long notes, emails, or meeting transcripts. And because engagement data is often scattered across numerous interactions, our AI automatically detects stakeholders and organisations mentioned in your notes, ensuring they’re correctly linked and reflected in your reporting and analytics.

All of this is designed to lift data quality, reduce manual admin, and reveal insights that would otherwise be missed.

What’s next?

Over the past few months, I’ve been personally leading a series of customer account review sessions to dig deeper into how teams use our platform day-to-day. One challenge came up again and again: data quality—getting complete stakeholder records, keeping them accurate, and maintaining them over time. Add in time-poor teams, inconsistent data entry habits, and the sheer volume of information that engagement projects generate, and it’s clear why this is such a hot topic.

We’ve always invested heavily in simplicity (it’s literally in our name!), automation, and better onboarding and learning resources. But recent advancements in AI have opened up new, much more powerful ways to tackle this challenge—while still protecting privacy, complying with GDPR, and ensuring our customers’ data remains securely their own.

So we put our internal AI-Lab team on the case. And they’ve delivered something genuinely exciting.

Coming Monday: AI-Powered Data Enrichment

The first feature in our new AI enhancement package goes live Monday.

Our new AI-driven data enrichment will automatically detect and suggest the organisations associated with an individual stakeholder—making it faster and easier to create complete records from day one.

The benefits?

• Higher-quality data with minimal effort
• Faster record creation for busy engagement teams
• Richer organisation profiles, since Simply Stakeholders automatically shows every person and every interaction linked to an organisation

This is all about reducing manual admin and giving teams better insights—for the work they actually care about.

Next: Bulk Data Enrichment for Historical Records

After the initial release, we’re rolling out bulk AI enrichment. With just a few clicks, you’ll be able to bring your historical records up to the same standard as your new AI-assisted entries.

Think of it as hitting the “upgrade” button on your entire dataset.

What’s Coming After That?

Without giving too much away (I don’t want to steal the AI-Lab’s thunder!), you can expect new features focused on:

• Automated stakeholder mapping
• AI-driven risk and issue monitoring
• Smart insights and recommendations to help improve engagement processes and outcomes

All delivered through secure, privacy-first AI, fully aligned with GDPR and other regulatory requirements.

This next chapter moves us even further toward a future where your system works for you—automatically generating insights, spotting patterns, and reducing the admin load that has traditionally slowed down stakeholder engagement.

Our Focus for 2025–2026: “Automagic”

Our theme for the year ahead is Automagic—the magic that happens when AI automates the hard parts and surfaces insights you can’t easily get anywhere else.

We’ve always believed that stakeholder engagement tools should deliver far more than record-keeping. Audit-ready records should be a by-product, not the main act. Our mission is to help teams answer strategic questions like:

• Who should we be talking to right now?
• Where are the gaps in our engagement?
• What issues are emerging?
• What risks should we act on?
• How effective are our engagement efforts?

AI is unlocking a whole new level of intelligence inside the Simply Stakeholders platform—and we can’t wait to show you what’s coming.

If you’d like to see these new features in action or have questions about how AI can enhance your stakeholder engagement processes, we’d love to chat. Reach out anytime.

our company is celebrating its 20th birthday!

We’re taking a moment to reflect on our story — where we’ve come from and how we’ve evolved, and to share about an exciting new resource for engagement professionals, along with our 20th anniversary celebrating plans later this month (and you’re invited!).

Reflections on the Last 20 Years

Since we were founded in 2004, our company has grown to become one of the world’s trusted names in stakeholder software, creating two popular platforms, Simply Stakeholders and Darzin. 

Originally based in Sydney, our team of engagement professionals, customer success specialists, engineers, developers, and business analysts are now almost as global as our client base, with offices in Australia, the United States, and the UK.

We’ve come a long way since our founder, Allison Hendricks, set out to build a modern stakeholder platform that would replace the tools of her day (spreadsheets and basic databases!) as an engagement professional.

Over the last 20 years, we’ve proudly pioneered many of the tools, features, and best practices in the space of stakeholder engagement and stakeholder relationship management. 

Are You a Stakeholder Professional? Make sure you’re subscribed so you don’t miss out on important news, updates, and more insights like this. Subscribe

And there’s so much more to come, as we continue to evolve our products, incorporate new technologies, and rise to meet new challenges as the engagement environment changes around us — and around our customers. 

In the coming months, our customers will see new features, improvements, updated branding, and more of the content they love.

But first, we’ve already rolled out an exciting new resource for our customers and the broader engagement community…

New! Engagement Professionals Community

Earlier this month, we announced our brand new online community for engagement professionals all over the world

Sign up here. 

Our Engagement Professionals community is just getting started, but inside we already have:

• Member listings – A great place for networking and discovering new connections!
• Discussion room – To vent/chat about any issues facing you at work
• Share your thing! – A place to promote your event, resources, or wins
• Resources – Helpful online resources or frameworks
• Jobs board – A place to look for opportunities or advertise your openings
• Curly questions and conundrums – A place to ask tricky questions and work through challenges with your peers
• Feedback – A link to fill out a feedback form to help shape our community as we grow

Check out the community here and click the ‘Sign Up’ button to join us! 

You’re welcome to join us, share it with your colleagues, and start interacting in the spaces. It’s 100% free and open to all engagement professionals — you don’t have to be a Simply Stakeholders customer. We look forward to seeing you inside!

Global Festival of Ideas: April 30, 2024

To wrap up our 20th anniversary month, we’re hosting a FREE Global Festival of Ideas event for engagement professionals on April 30

Click RSVP to join the event here! 

This Festival is part of our bigger vision to help grow an online global community of people working in stakeholder relationship management. The event includes:

• A line up of industry experts from all over the world (Brazil, Canada, USA, South Africa, UK, Europe, NZ & Australia)
• 12 hours of non-stop learning, ideas, and innovation
• Back-to-back with 15 minute presentations
• Breakout rooms and spaces to continue the discussions, debates, and peer-to-peer learning

A huge thank you to all of the speakers who have generously agreed to share their knowledge and expertise with the community. 

We hope you’ll join us to hear from some of the leading professionals in stakeholder engagement and relationship management. And we hope you’ll stick around for the community so we can continue the discussions and knowledge sharing even after the event ends. 

Who’s Speaking?

Looking for more event details? Check out this amazing lineup of speakers for the Festival of Ideas event!

Lucy Cole-Edelstein Engagement and strategy advisor Lucy will be presenting a session, “3 wise monkeys in reverse – the top 3 tips for actually engaging (as opposed to busyness and box ticking)”.	Max Hardy Founder & Director at Max Hardy Consulting Max will be sharing his expertise and experience in the stakeholder engagement and management space.	Colby Taylor Engagement Director Colby will be talking all things communication and engagement!
Julie Castle Co-Founder & Director at Struber Julie will discuss “The engagement precedent predicament”, “Resourcing engagement for the future”, and “Engagement interfaces and integration”.	Doug Horne Head of Marketing & Communications Doug will be sharing his knowledge about communication in business.	Anne Pattillo Founder & Director Anne will be sharing about all things strategy and engagement.
Nicholas Davis Partnerships & Advocacy Manager Nick will be discussing the future of sustainability in business.	Hugo Bonilla Director, Corporate Social Performance Hugo will be discussing “The value of data driven stakeholder engagement for corporate teams to drive the sustainability agenda” and “Sustainability reporting overload”.	Iain Walker Executive Director of The newDemocracy Foundation Join Iain as he discusses “How will democracy in Australia change over the next five years?”.
Kyle Redman Director of Research & Design Kyle brings a unique perspective on democracy due to his years of research and experience at newDemocracy Foundation.	Hugo Diogo Communities & Social Performance Manager Join Hugo as he talks about all things energy and renewables.	Jolie Wills CEO & Co-Founder at Hummingly Join Jolie as she combines science and storytelling with practical solutions for the complex challenges leaders and teams face in our new world of work.
Jill Hannaford Executive General Manager Join Jill and her unmatched experience in the stakeholder engagement world to learn how you can utilize stakeholder engagement in business.	Joel Levin Consultant & Managing Director Join Joel as he discusses “Intelligence both Artificial and Real”.	Margaret Harvie Founder Join Margaret as she discusses “Perspectives from an engagement practitioner on the recent Community Engagement Review – Renewable Energy”.
Amanda Newberry Founder & MD Join Amanda as she talks about ‘tough projects’ in her 10 years of experience.	Amanda Wild Group Account Director Join Amanda as she talks about all things stakeholder engagement.	Rachel Fox Engagement & Social Impact Join Rachel as she discusses all things stakeholder engagement.
Vivien Twyford Director at Twyfords Join Vivien as she discusses 3 short stories of significant failures in community engagement consultancy life.	Paul Kooperman Director at TEDxMaldon Join Paul as he presents on “community engagement – we’re doing it wrong”.	Katie Kinder  Customer Success Account Executive at Simply Stakeholders You’ll see Katie throughout the festival as she is one of our event facilitators!

To read the full speaker profiles go here. 

How to Join

Go to the event page in our online community and click “RSVP”. This will get you on the list! We’ll send you a confirmation email and reminder emails leading up to the event.

Note that if you’re not already a member of our free community for engagement professionals, you’ll be redirected to a page to log in or sign up (this should only take a minute!). 

We cannot wait to see you on the day!

Thank You for Being Part of Our Journey!

Finally, we just wanted to say a HUGE thank you for being part of Simply Stakeholders — no matter what role you’ve played over the last 20 years. 

Whether you follow along with our content because you care about best practice stakeholder engagement, whether you’re one of our valued team members, or whether you’re one of our incredible customers making a real impact by building better stakeholder relationships…

…we’re so glad you’re here and look forward to continuing on this journey together!

First, let me shed some light on “the new Simply Stakeholders” and why we shifted our product strategy towards bringing our two platforms Darzin and Simply Stakeholders closer together.  

Four years ago, we created Simply Stakeholders for what we thought was the growing influx of companies and businesses that were very new to stakeholder engagement and stakeholder management tools. We wanted to give them a step up from spreadsheets and CRM systems that really aren’t designed for managing complex stakeholder relationships.  

What surprised us was that governments and companies of all sizes were attracted to Simply Stakeholders because of its simplicity of design with built-in smarts and automation, and most importantly, how easy it was to adopt and roll out across their teams. Some of them had tried other stakeholder management platforms that were either too complex and never used, or too simplistic and didn’t give them any reporting or analytics.  

Discover Simply Stakeholders’ Powerful Features From advanced stakeholder mapping and relationship health tracking to sentiment and qualitative analysis, each feature works together to help your organization get more from your stakeholder relationships. Explore Features

Fast-forward four years and we decided that we should take our learnings from Simply Stakeholders and apply it to our other platform Darzin, as those customers could also benefit from more automation, a better user experience and some of the innovations we were building for Simply Stakeholders customers. 

And in that design process, a new, combined platform emerged. Simply Stakeholders Version 2. 

The new Simply Stakeholders is built around four key themes: 

• Visibility 
• Productivity 
• Collaboration 
• Flexibility 

Initially, Stakeholder Management platforms attempted to resolve the challenge of Visibility. Stakeholder data was scattered across multiple tools including email, spreadsheets, websites, and more. Just getting a view of who the stakeholders were, and who was interacting with them was a time-consuming challenge. This was a challenge that Darzin, Simply Stakeholders, and other stakeholder management platforms have been tackling for many years and there are a range of solutions available. 

In designing the new platform, we wanted to aim higher – to shift the narrative and emphasize the “so what” of this challenge. What do teams need to focus on now that they have an organized picture of their stakeholders? 

Our pioneering work with Stakeholder Mapping in both our platforms showed us that projects and work was more successful when our customers utilized the strategic insights from the stakeholder analysis and mapping. So, we wanted to take that further – dive deeper into the who, when, and why of stakeholder engagement. Providing visibility on not only who was being engaged, but also who wasn’t being engaged, and measuring the success of those engagements against the health of the relationship. 

Powerful Stakeholder Mapping With Simply Stakeholders Discover who is important for your work right now and easily segment your stakeholders with Multidimensional Stakeholder Maps, 3D Relationship Network Maps, and Relationship Health Scores. Learn More

While solving the Visibility issue, traditional Stakeholder Management platforms have only amplified productivity and collaboration problems. They have created large amounts of data, with little insight or knowledge that can be gained from them, as well as creating quite a data entry and maintenance burden on already busy teams. 

Despite all the great things Stakeholder Management platforms have done to unify the stakeholder data, they fall short of enabling teams to do their best work. 

In designing the new platform, we wanted to address this productivity and collaboration challenge through expanding our use of Artificial Intelligence, automation and workflows. We had successfully used some of those technologies in Simply Stakeholders, and wanted to see how we could provide the power of Darzin within that lens of simplicity and ease-of-use. 

With this next evolution of Darzin/Simply Stakeholders, teams now get the best of both worlds – a clear picture of stakeholders, their sentiment and relationship health, along with a productivity toolset that makes teams more strategic and collaborative, within and across teams. 

A stakeholder management system that has the ability to grow with you. The core features are always there – like issues tagging, sentiment analysis, stakeholder mapping and interaction tracking. But the more advanced features are all tucked neatly out of the way until they are needed. This flexibility that is embedded in the design of the new version gives teams the ability to quickly deploy the solution, provide a customized experience for individual teams, and scale their stakeholder engagement efforts. And the flexibility doesn’t stop there. Each user has the ability to tailor and craft their own user interface and experience, to boost adoption and have a system that your team will actually want to use. 

The next chapter for Darzin and Simply Stakeholders 

Over the coming months, our team will continue to expand on an already unparalleled Stakeholder Relationship Management platform – one we believe fundamentally alters the way organizations will manage their important stakeholder relationships. A single workspace that makes teams more productive, more impactful and brings them closer to their stakeholders than ever before. 

If you’re interested in learning more about what we have planned next, book a meeting with one of our team members for a first-look demo at the future of Simply Stakeholders and Relationship management success. 

Get a Demo Ready to Try Simply Stakeholders For Yourself? Reach out and book a personalized demo with our team! Book a Demo

The platform has expanded, and our team and customers have grown worldwide.  Working alongside you, in partnership, we will continue to improve this platform to ensure it keeps delivering value to your teams and to your success.

Take a look back on 2022 with Simply Stakeholders!

Discover Simply Stakeholders’ Powerful Features From advanced stakeholder mapping and relationship health tracking to sentiment and qualitative analysis, each feature works together to help your organization get more from your stakeholder relationships. Explore Features

• Now you can create Teams and add users to them
• Share taskboards with your teams
• Mark a taskboard as your Favourite
• Identify your overdue tasks easily
• Sort your custom fields with the new dragging function
• Drag & drop to manage file attachment
• Set the Default Country Code!

Check out this video for more!

Get a Demo Ready to Try Simply Stakeholders For Yourself? Reach out and book a personalized demo with our team! Book a Demo

• Customize your dashboard view
• Team management, organize your work and permissions per teams
• Send personalized bulk emails new options available in group mails!

Check out this video for more!

• Easily import your communication records
• Automatically link your records to the relevant stakeholders
• Set mandatory fields for your users – to ensure that they are entering all the important data.

Check out this video for more!

• Auto Save you won’t miss out on any information, we got you covered!
• Create folders for your docs and get super organised with your attachments
• Profile pictures to identify your stakeholders easily
• Save your filters and waste no time in your search!

Check out this video for more!

• Link stakeholder relationships and gain insights into factors that might influence your stakeholders’ sentiment towards the project.
• Save time with the updated data entry feature
• New security options available

Check out this video for more!