If you’re in the phase of your project where you’re starting to plan your stakeholder engagement strategy, and wondering which style of stakeholder meeting is best, read on.

This article covers:

• The different types of stakeholder meetings
• Tips for preparing for each type of stakeholder meeting
• On-the-day suggestions to ensure the meeting is a success
• How stakeholder software helps organizations facilitate stakeholder meetings.

You’ll also hear from Simply Stakeholders’ CEO Allison Hendricks, with first-hand insights on how to keep meetings calm and productive, even when controversial topics are up for discussion. 

Let’s begin by understanding what stakeholder meetings are and how they originated.

Stakeholder Meetings — Why They Matter

Stakeholder meetings are important to your project on two levels.

• From a regulatory and compliance perspective: Depending on the nature and scope of the project, consulting with communities, employees, shareholders, and citizens may be mandated to fulfil legal and compliance obligations.
• From a decision-making perspective: Stakeholder contributions bring fresh insights and experiences to the project that can inform better decisions and positively influence outcomes.

So, who should attend a stakeholder meeting? 

Gather together any relevant stakeholder individuals or groups, internal or external. Because the  meeting is a forum where everyone with a vested interest in the project and its outcomes can: 

• Be kept informed: Regarding the project’s progress
• Align expectations: So discussions are approached respectively and productively
• Air or address key concerns: To establish common ground and meaningful outcomes.

They’re a chance to hear each voice and create two-way dialogue essential to building meaningful stakeholder engagement. 

Active listening and meaningful dialogue can only happen when the meeting is well planned, well run, and productive. And historically, staging productive stakeholder meetings wasn’t (and sometimes still isn’t) all that easy. 

The Town Hall Meeting Format (And Why It Desperately Had to Change) 

For a long time, town hall meetings were the only form of community consultation. Predominantly used by government departments and larger organizations, in-person town halls were popular until the mid-2000s. Then fears around safety and questions around productivity saw the format evolve. Meetings moved to an online format or to open-day sessions that facilitated smaller group discussions. 

But on or offline, ‘town halls’ still refer to meetings that attract a large audience and are chaired or hosted by officials linked to the project. The latter usually sit up front or on a stage and deliver information to the audience. 

Given the structure described above, town halls regularly failed as a consultation method. With officials driving the meeting, stakeholders often reported feeling lectured to, or that they’d been presented with a fait accompli. Town Halls just weren’t seen as an opportunity to contribute in a two-way dialogue. 

The high level of control or token Q&A sessions at the end of a meeting would lead to frustration, mistrust, and antipathy. Stakeholders felt unheard, resulting in anger and resentment towards the project and organization. Consequently, town halls were recognised as largely counterproductive and fell out of favor as an effective stakeholder meeting style. So, what’s replaced them?

Stakeholder Meeting Styles 

With town halls viewed as unproductive and unworkable, modern stakeholder engagement favors the following meeting styles to meet project goals, fulfil required stakeholder commitments, manage risks, and ensure positive progress within a project. 

Kick-off Meetings for Internal Stakeholders

At the very start of a project, kick-off or launch meetings involving internal stakeholders bring the core project team together. 

The purpose of this meeting is to:

• Confirm the project’s purpose and goals
• Highlight milestones and ideal timelines
• Ensure everyone involved is clear on their responsibilities
• Announce and clarify key people within the project and their roles.

Workshops — Flexible Format, Issue Specific

Useful for gathering ideas and problem-solving, workshops invite relevant stakeholders to table ideas that address a specific project challenge. Workshops are a proactive way to make sure people are heard. They also encourage creativity and provide a chance for organizations to hear outside perspectives. 

Flexible in style, a workshop can run for a couple of hours, involve a small group of stakeholders, and be held in a municipal building. Or it can be a large, multi-day event with hundreds, sometimes thousands, of people joining in. Really, the scope and size of a workshop reflects the complexity of the topic that needs workshopping. 

You may have heard of the ‘world cafe’ format

This style of workshop is more deliberative. Participants join small table group discussions on various sub-topics around the main topic under consideration. 

World cafes work by intentionally connecting multiple perspectives on a topic and engaging participants in several rounds of small-group conversations.

Open Days or Surgeries — Town Hall Reimagined

Useful for larger-scale stakeholder meetings and consultations, open days or (for governments) surgeries echo the town hall structure, without the potentially divisive panel-audience format. Instead, presentation boards or handouts are placed around the room, and senior stakeholders — C-suite, planning, finance, engagement officers, etc — circulate and talk with members of the public and local community. 

The drop-in, go-at-your-own pace approach is generally seen as a less polarizing method for information sharing, building or maintaining relationships, or repairing any damage done. They’re also an effective way to facilitate more one-on-one conversations between participants and subject matter experts.

Stakeholder Interviews — Small Scale, Loose Agenda

Interviews involve no more than 1- 4 stakeholders. They’re ideal for encouraging more reserved stakeholder groups to contribute their views, concerns, and ideas, or getting into greater detail on a particular topic. But their strength is also their downfall. With only a handful of voices being heard, opinion, perspective, and decisions may be limited. 

It’s a good idea to have tentative questions or topics you’d like to address with the stakeholder. But interviews work best when the agenda is loose, and the stakeholder can drive the direction of the discussion.

Status Update or Check-In Meetings — Success, Challenges, and Projections

These meetings are to keep stakeholders informed about the project progress. Status update meetings may cover:

• Project successes so far
• Any changes to the project scope
• Any challenges or barriers the project faces
• Solutions being explored to overcome challenges
• Financial forecasts and data relating to the project to date.

The frequency of these meetings is driven by hitting (or missing) milestones and a timetable for reporting the overall progress of the project.

Stakeholder Meetings Are Better, But Not Perfect

Workshops, interviews, and open days are popular current formats, but they’re not without their drawbacks. 

People still want town hall-style meetings to discuss proposed projects and plans. There is a demand for having a cross-section of stakeholders in the same room so people can hear and evaluate perspectives they may not have considered. But without careful control, these meetings can spiral into shouting matches or echo chambers. 

On the other hand, smaller meeting styles allow a greater freedom to speak, but people may feel the conversation is being too forcefully led or too tightly controlled. 

Ultimately, whatever the format, careful planning is the key to making your stakeholder meeting effective. 

Preparing For a Stakeholder Meeting

It’s a corporate-world sin to call a meeting that could have been an email. Best not to be guilty on that score. But when a meeting accommodating a cross-section of stakeholders is called for, you’ll want to make sure your house is in order before sending out those meeting invites. 

Here’s what to consider when preparing for a stakeholder meeting.

Identify Key Stakeholders

A stakeholder is any person, group, or organization impacted or influenced by, or having a legal or other right to be consulted and involved in the work you’re proposing to do. Within these groups, you’ll need to work out who your key stakeholders are. There is a subtle difference. 

A key stakeholder is one who presents a higher potential risk or reward. In short, they’re critical to the success of your project. These are the people who need an invite to your meeting. 

Recognizing who these people, groups, and organizations are starts with creating a whole stakeholder list. Narrow the list down using these key stakeholder identification techniques.

Set Clear Objectives and Goals

Being very clear about the purpose and scope of the meeting is the most critical preparatory step. It helps in two ways. 

The first is practical. Clear meeting goals and objectives keep the event on track. Should discussions veer off course (which they inevitably will), a clearly stated objective and goal gives the meeting chair a focal point to bring everyone back to. 

The second is psychological — managing stakeholder expectations. They may be ready to rock up to your meeting with an idea or opinion, completely irrelevant to the topic on the agenda or the goal you want the meeting to achieve. 

Setting meeting objectives and goals helps attendees understand what to expect and what to bring to the meeting. This helps minimize the risk of the meeting veering off course or people leaving frustrated because they expected a particular (and different) outcome that was never a possibility.

Circulate an Agenda or Questions

Depending on the type of stakeholder meeting you’re running, you may want to send an agenda or questions you hope to address to meeting attendees beforehand. Giving stakeholders a chance to consider the points set to be raised paves the way for thoughtful, valuable, relevant discussion during the meeting.

Choose an Appropriate Location

The meeting place influences how at ease and energised attendees feel. As meetings are an opportunity for open and honest dialogue, you want to make sure the venue facilitates that. 

Some points to consider when choosing a location are:

• Is the room big enough to accommodate everyone comfortably? 
• Is it accessible for people with disabilities or those who have mobility challenges?
• Is recording equipment (assuming you’re using it) in the most unobtrusive place? So people focus on you and the discussions rather than worrying about the camera. 
• Are the chairs comfortable enough for people to remain seated for the duration of (what could be) a long meeting? 
• Is the venue easily accessible by public transport?

Assemble Necessary Materials — And Test Digital Ones

What are the physical and digital things you need for conducting the meeting? Think about items for people to refer to so they have the information they need during the meeting. Or materials you need so that you can collect, analyze, and evaluate the meeting while it’s in progress and afterwards.

Hardware and handouts may include:

• Information boards or models 
• Paper and pens for participants to take notes
• Cameras and microphones, if the meeting is being recorded
• Printed flyers, booklets, or single-page handouts for each attendee
• A strong and stable internet connection for any part of the meeting that’s virtual.

Stakeholder Meeting Best Practices

You know who’s coming to your meeting, the style of the meeting, and how you need to prepare. But what about when the day rolls around? How can you ensure you and your stakeholders have a positive, productive experience that delivers solid outcomes all round?

Here are four meeting best practices that will help ensure a meeting that runs smoothly and makes the most of everyone’s time. 

1. Make a Positive Start

Your opening sets the tone. So welcome people to the meeting and thank them for their time. It’s the polite thing to do. If you’re in Australia, then your introduction should include a Welcome to Country acknowledgement.

If you have a panel or presenters, introduce them before outlining the agenda. You should also use the start of the meeting to preframe the conversation. 

Preframing isn’t about manipulating the discussion or making people feel boxed in. It’s about managing stakeholder expectations and ensuring everyone is on the same page when it comes to the meeting objectives and goals.  

2. Facilitating Effective Communication — Listen, Share, Respond

Stakeholder meetings are only useful when individuals and groups actively participate in dialogue. Use these methods to nudge positive stakeholder communication along. 

• Active listening: Focus on what’s being said rather than thinking about the next question, allow pauses, non-verbal cues, and keep eye contact.
• Share insights: Whether it’s data, analysis, or forecasting, be transparent to encourage open and honest communication.
• Engage in discussion: Be prepared to answer questions that arise and address concerns.
• Prepare open-ended questions: To lead the conversation or encourage hesitant stakeholders to contribute.
• Remain on topic: Leading a meeting means helping participants stay focused on the point of discussion and minimizing distractions. 

3. Managing Feedback and Issues

Not every stakeholder, individual, group, or organization may have the same expectations and opinions about the project or plans you want to discuss. You can lay the groundwork for minimizing potential conflict by using strategic stakeholder relationship-building techniques. But meeting facilitators shouldn’t shy away from acknowledging and defusing challenging stakeholder feedback or issues in the moment. 

When debates kick off, it’s important to handle them tactfully but clearly, so differences of opinion or disputes don’t derail proceedings and (hopefully) get resolved.

During your meeting, try to:

• Allow time for questions and answers 
• Acknowledge differences of opinion rather than dismissing them
• Identify common ground during moments of escalating tension
• Give stakeholders the means to confidently and comfortably offer feedback
• Record feedback and issues
• Bring people back to the meeting agenda.

4. Verbal Summary and Wrap-Up

Signal the meeting is drawing to an end by spending a few minutes summarizing the main discussion points, agreed actions, and next steps.

If possible, tell attendees when they can expect a copy of the meeting minutes or where they can find information regarding the outcomes of the meeting. (On a website, via email, a typed letter, follow-up phone call, etc.)  

Finally, thank everyone in attendance for their time and participation. 

Post-Meeting Follow-Up

When you’re in the middle of a meeting it’s not always possible to process everything that’s said or decided. Following your meeting, take these post-meeting steps to help people see that all the talk is resulting in action. 

Summarizing Meeting Outcomes

Circulate a meeting summary promptly once the meeting ends. Ideally, you already know how your stakeholders prefer to be contacted. If in doubt, send an engaging email.  

Include the meeting minutes in this correspondence, along with a summary of the key discussion points, main outcomes, and action items. For action items, you may also need to let people know how they can track any progress. 

Action Item Progress Tracking

Stakeholder relationship management software that includes task management makes it easy for organizations, governments, and non-profits to assign and track tasks raised during a stakeholder meeting. This ensures transparency and allows stakeholders to keep organizations accountable. 

Perhaps progress is tracked using online tools. Accountability may come from communicating that progress via:

• Email or printed newsletter updates
• Phone calls or follow-up meetings
• Detailed progress reports.

Again, how this information is best communicated should be guided by stakeholder preference. 

Using Software for Stakeholder Meetings

Stakeholder meetings have evolved way beyond the original, clunky town hall format. The power of stakeholder collaboration in ensuring the success of a project is better understood. And this has led to engagement practices, forums, and meeting methods that better facilitate two-way conversations, leading to more broadly endorsed and meaningful outcomes. 

Technology has played an important role in the evolution of stakeholder meeting methods. Video calls, improved and less intrusive recording methods, and the ability to manage volumes of data more effectively help to capture reliable accounts of meetings and interactions. As a result, meetings are more accessible, transparent, and productive.  

Level-Up Your Stakeholder Meetings

When you’re ready to see how stakeholder relationship management software can assist during your meetings, let us know. The Simply Stakeholders team is ready to help and walk you through a demo of our communication and collaboration tools.

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

When the success of your project relies on community stakeholder support, a solid community engagement plan is vital. And by ‘solid’ we mean one that:

• Elicits levels of community participation that give you the responses and requisite social licence (SLO) to operate
• Builds and maintains trust between the organization and the community stakeholders affected by the planned project.  

This guide champions the three core stakeholder relationship principles that should underpin every community engagement plan. And it offers practical suggestions on how to include those principles in your framework. 

Looking for information on how to write a community engagement plan? Then stick around. We’ve got that, too. But let’s start with the basics. 

What Is Community Engagement?

Community engagement is the strategic approach an organization takes to build relationships with community-based stakeholders. It focuses heavily on developing communications and managing interactions, but shouldn’t be confused with a stakeholder communications plan. 

Done well, community engagement drives positive collaboration that achieves specific outcomes for the organization and for the community.  

The UN’s Community Engagement Guidelines sum up community engagement as follows:

“Community engagement” is a strategic process to directly involve local populations in all aspects of decision-making, policy development and implementation to strengthen local ownership, capacities and community structures as well as to improve transparency, accountability and optimal resource allocations across diverse settings.”

Who Are Community Stakeholders?

There are two community stakeholder categories: a community of place and a community of interest.

Community of place stakeholders: These are groups based on common geography, such as country, state, region, suburb, or neighborhood. Project managers and stakeholder engagement officers may refer to them as ‘neighbour stakeholders.’

Community of interest stakeholders: These groups share a common interest, such as customs, values, religion, lifestyle, etc. Common interest stakeholders may include citizens, businesses, residents, investors, employees, and so on. 

The type of community stakeholder group you’re liaising with influences how you shape your engagement plan and the strategies you’ll use to engage them.

How Community Engagement Drives Project Success

Depending on the scope of the project, community engagement may form part of meeting legal obligations. For example, involving First Nations groups when Native Title land is involved is a legislated form of community engagement; without it, the project sets itself up for failure. However, in this article, we’re focusing more on why community engagement plans are a wise ethical business decision.  

Research by KPMG and the Project Management Institute proves there’s a strong link between stakeholder satisfaction and project success. And this makes complete common sense. Stakeholders who are actively involved in a project are more likely to support it, resulting in the organization or project gaining SLO. But community acceptance is only one aspect of why community engagement matters. 

Robust community engagement paves the way for:

• Increased trust: Engaging with community members demonstrates trust-building openness and transparency 
• Positive social responsibility: Understanding and appreciating local social, environmental, and economic factors increases naturally as a result of community engagement.
• Better decision making: An engaged community offers information and perspectives that the organization may not have considered.
• Successful conflict management: It’s easier to pinpoint and navigate potential conflicts, find common ground, and overcome obstacles to keep the project moving forward.  

The Long-Term Benefits of Gaining Stakeholder Trust

Trust isn’t gained overnight. As with any human relationship, it takes time to earn and build it. We’ll look in detail at how to achieve that, but let’s take a moment to understand why gaining stakeholder trust is often project-critical and the long-term benefits of putting that work in early.

Embedding the three key principles of community stakeholder management in your plan unlocks a project-long, life-cycle of benefits. 

Increased Participation and Commitment

A  community that trusts an organization or government is more willing to participate actively and consistently. Requesting that participation is often the starting point. But over time if trust remains solid and a relationship is built, free-flowing, two-way dialogue ensues. This invaluable interaction ensures consistent collaboration, which potentially leads to greater outcomes for both parties.   

Stronger, More Sustainable Relationships

When a community participates and commits, quality decision-making is easier. Those calling the shots are kept fully informed. In the long term, this means fewer changes or reviews — the best solutions and options are already in place. 

And when change is needed? Finding and implementing solutions is simpler due to the strength and depth of the relationship. Ongoing partnerships and collaborations often result in positive change for the lifetime of the asset or project.  

Improved Reputation and Credibility

Strong, sustainable relationships naturally lead to improved reputation and credibility. The community trusts you, and projects are successfully completed.

There’s a knock-on effect from successful community stakeholder engagement. Outsiders see an organization with SLO, transparency, and strong governance —  important aspects for attracting new collaborators, resources, and future project support. 

The 3 Key Trust-Building Components Every Engagement Plan Needs

Creating a solid community engagement plan that delivers the long-term benefits just mentioned means embedding these three fundamental stakeholder management principles into your plan.

1. Transparency

Transparency should never be only a compliance check-box exercise. It’s an ethical business decision that leads to stronger outcomes. 

Organizations and local governments that are forthcoming with the goal, processes, and expected outcomes of their project reduce the likelihood of stakeholder confusion, anxiety, and distrust. And research shows repeatedly that transparency builds stakeholder trust and confidence.

Embed transparency into your plan by:

• Providing clear and consistent information: Without overwhelming stakeholders.
• Choosing appropriate means of communication: Make these accessible and appealing to the community.  
• Publishing contact details: Ensure organization representatives and project leaders are contactable and available for consultation.
• Staying in touch: Share evidence, metrics, and evaluation methods as well as updates on how progress is being monitored.
• Addressing challenges head-on: Taking early action when challenges arise, ideally before they become public, and being honest about setbacks.

2. Feedback Loops

It’s one thing to engage a community and claim to have listened. It’s another to create a feedback loop that collects, analyses, and acts on the input provided by the community concerned.

Whether it’s through interviews, surveys, written correspondence, or another stakeholder meeting format, the first step is gathering the perspectives of the community. Then create the loop. 

Choose the most efficient tools and relatable professionals to analyse the feedback. Wherever possible, act on it to remedy or improve the situation. Then feed those changes back to the community.    

Embed feedback loops into your plan by:

• Identifying the key community stakeholder groups: Who you need feedback from and at what stage, as well as deciding the best communication channels. 
• Defining the project goals and metrics: So feedback questions and methods align with stated goals and can be clearly communicated to stakeholders.
• Centralizing feedback: Use stakeholder feedback and sentiment analysis tools, such as Simply Stakeholders, to capture and review feedback.
• Summarize and distribute feedback: Acknowledge feedback gathered and be proactive about next steps. 
• Set feedback schedules and milestones: Dates and timelines for additional feedback and when any action prompted by feedback will be completed.

3. Authentic Storytelling

Any marketer will tell you that people buy from people. Sure, reported information and data give people the nuts and bolts details. But human-centred testimonials, case studies, and real-life stories make the project relatable. Your community engagement plan shouldn’t be without this trust-building component. 

Immersive content, such as photos, videos, site talks and walks, and community events, enhances awareness and helps people connect to the project on a personal level. Storytelling also allows you to frame the narrative, helping those who are sceptical see a different perspective.

Embed storytelling into your plan by:

• Developing a narrative: Think about how you want stakeholders to think or feel about your project or organization.
• Understanding your stakeholders: Knowing what motivates them and what they value will make it easier to find relevant stories.
• Highlight positive change: As the project progresses, show people at a local and community level what changes they can see or feel already.  

Real Results: When a Community Engagement Plan Works

Simply Stakeholders provides stakeholder relationship management (SRM) software for several large and potentially divisive energy industry projects. Wind farm developments are often the most complex. 

For these projects, community engagement plans are more than a regulatory necessity. They’re a critical part of progressing the project. Without community engagement and support, the project is likely to stall or worse, fail.  

For one large Australian wind farm developer, using Simply Stakeholders allowed them to easily:

• Manage stakeholder data
• Gain stakeholder insights and predict potential issues
• Track complex stakeholder relationships
• Record stakeholder sentiment. 

The developer needed specific tools to support community consultation and track engagement. As befitted a project of this complexity, this engagement included conducting community meetings, sending project updates to stakeholders, and visiting landholders and neighbours to keep them up to date with the project progress and maintain trust and relationships.

They included stakeholder management software in their community engagement plan as a central source of truth holding all vital data, including everything relevant to the community and their feedback. The result? The developer maintained transparency and trust throughout the project 

Read: Stakeholder Software for Wind Farms (a case study). 

Building a Community Engagement Plan

Trust is at the centre of a successful community engagement plan. And trust is fostered by using these three key stakeholder relationship components: 

1. Establish and maintain transparency
2. Establish feedback loops
3. Include authentic storytelling. 

Stakeholder relationship management software can support the design, framework, and implementation of your community engagement plan. 

When you’re ready to take the next step and create the plan itself, we’re here to help.

Our comprehensive guide Mastering Your Stakeholder Engagement Plan dives deep into the benefits, strategies and processes needed to create your own plan – even for complex, high-stakes engagement.  

Community engagement is a cornerstone of vibrant societies. It fosters a sense of belonging and active participation among citizens. This engagement is crucial for building strong, resilient communities.
Community stakeholders play a vital role in this process. They bridge the gap between government, business and residents. Their involvement ensures that diverse voices are heard and considered.
Civic participation and social engagement help ensure more effective community initiatives. These efforts can drive significant social change and policy reform. They empower individuals to take collective action on issues that matter.
Roles like Community Engagement Specialists and Directors are essential. They facilitate dialogue and collaboration within communities. Their work is pivotal in creating sustainable and impactful community programs.

What Is Community Engagement and Who Are Community Stakeholders?

Community engagement is the active collaboration between individuals, groups and organisations. It’s aimed at addressing local needs and creating shared benefits. This dynamic process fosters connection and understanding within the community.
Key aspects of community engagement include:

• Civic Participation: Encouraging citizens to actively participate in decision-making processes.
• Social Engagement: Building relationships and networks that support community health.
• Public Engagement: Involving the public in issues that affect them directly.

Community stakeholders are the individuals and groups involved in this process. They can be local residents, business leaders, or members of nonprofit organizations. Their contributions are crucial for successful engagement.
Stakeholders bring diverse perspectives to the table. Their unique insights help craft more effective solutions to community challenges. This diversity enhances the richness and depth of the engagement process.
Involving diverse representation of stakeholders also strengthens accountability and transparency. This collaboration builds trust and ensures that the community’s needs are met effectively. Good community engagement usually has the added benefit of enhancing community resilience and cohesiveness.

The Importance of Civic Participation and Social Engagement

Civic participation is essential for vibrant and thriving communities and democracy. It empowers citizens to voice their opinions and influence public decisions. This involvement fosters a sense of belonging and shared responsibility among individuals.

Social engagement improves connections and cooperation within communities. It reduces isolation and enhances mental well-being. Through social interactions, diverse groups learn from each other, enriching the community’s cultural fabric.

Both civic and social engagement have significant impacts. They create opportunities to:

• Strengthen community bonds and networks.
• Enhance transparency and accountability in governance.
• Encourage collaboration and shared responsibility.

When citizens actively participate, communities can address challenges more effectively. This engagement leads to more responsive services and policies. Ultimately, community members feel valued and empowered, contributing to a more inclusive and democratic society.

Key Roles: Community Engagement Specialist, Director, and More

Community engagement requires skilled individuals who bridge gaps and foster dialogue. These key roles ensure that communities thrive through effective collaboration.

A Community Engagement Specialist excels in facilitating communication among diverse groups. They organize events, workshops, and forums to encourage participation. Their work fosters understanding and cooperation among community members.

Another crucial role is the Director of Community Engagement. They oversee strategic planning and implementation of initiatives. This involves ensuring stakeholders are appropriately identified and mapped, suitable engagement strategies are in place, and coordinating with stakeholders to ensure projects align with community needs and goals.

Various positions support community engagement efforts:

• Grassroots organizers mobilize local action.
• Outreach coordinators enhance visibility and awareness.
• Policy advisors work on aligning community initiatives with regulations.

These roles contribute significantly to strengthening community bonds. They ensure voices are heard, facilitating meaningful change. By working together, these professionals drive collective success and development, enhancing quality of life for all involved.

Examples of Successful Community Initiatives and Outreach

Good examples of successful community engagement can be seen across multiple sectors, initiated by local community groups themselves, not for profit organisations, businesses and government. Projects typically involve:

• Health and wellness programs improving local health outcomes.
• Environmental campaigns promoting sustainability.
• Cultural events encouraging community diversity and understanding.

Industry associations often award and recognise good engagement practice, for example recent the Engagement Institute’s Core Value Award winners.

Strategies for Effective Community Involvement and Grassroots Activism

Effective community involvement relies on inclusive strategies that invite broad participation. It begins with identifying community needs through a structured stakeholder analysis and dialogue with a range of stakeholders. Understanding these needs is key to devising relevant strategies.

Grassroots activism thrives on collective action and local empowerment. Successful activism often involves educating community members about pertinent issues, thus fostering informed engagement. This empowers residents to voice their concerns and drive change.

Key strategies for fostering involvement include:

• Providing clear information on why people should participate – the importance of the project, or how their contributions will be used, which decisions they can influence.
• Selecting the methods of engagement that make it accessible for a diverse range of stakeholders to participate.
• Collaborating with local organizations to expand reach and impact.
• Utilizing social media platforms to connect and mobilize involvement.
• Encouraging volunteerism to boost local engagement.

Community efforts should always prioritize transparency and accountability. This builds trust and encourages ongoing participation. Regular feedback and adaptable approaches ensure strategies remain effective amid evolving community dynamics. Ultimately, successful community involvement enhances democratic governance and empowers citizens as active stakeholders in their local environment.

Measuring Impact and Celebrating Achievements

Measuring the impact of community engagement initiatives is essential for understanding their effectiveness. It helps stakeholders see tangible results and refine their strategies. Regular evaluation guides future planning and engagement efforts by highlighting what works best.

Celebrating achievements motivates continued participation and strengthens community bonds. Acknowledging both big and small successes fosters a sense of pride and ownership among participants. Recognition boosts morale and encourages sustained involvement in community activities.

Key steps for measuring impact and celebrating achievements include:

• Setting clear objectives and key performance indicators.
• Gathering feedback from community members and stakeholders.
• Documenting progress through reports and visual media.
• Hosting events to recognize and reward contributions.

These practices enhance community cohesion and inspire ongoing commitment to shared goals.

Conclusion: Building Stronger Communities Together

Community engagement plays a vital role in creating cohesive and resilient societies. By involving diverse stakeholders, communities can address local challenges more effectively. Genuine collaboration fosters trust and mutual understanding among all stakeholders.

Active civic participation enhances decision-making and promotes transparency. When citizens are engaged, they feel a sense of ownership over the outcomes. This sense of belonging encourages ongoing involvement and dedication to community initiatives.

In embracing collaboration, communities unlock new ideas and innovative solutions. As residents work together, the bonds formed lead to a more vibrant and inclusive environment. Community engagement can help build a foundation for lasting success and shared prosperity. Together, we can nurture stronger, healthier, and more connected neighborhoods.

And the answer is yes, actually. You can. 

But to find the figure you’re looking for, you need to consider factors such as the needs of different stakeholder groups, the size of your team, and the complexity of your project.   

In this article, we’ll discuss what you need to consider when working out a budget for stakeholder management, as well as look at potential returns on investment, and the tools and software you might need to budget for. 

But first, let’s define what we mean by budget. Because in the world of stakeholder management, it’s way more than allocating a financial cost. 

The True Meaning of Stakeholder Management Investment 

Stakeholder management involves setting up collaborative processes that bring long-term benefits, for example:

• Strong networks and relationships. To further the goals of the organization and be there to draw on in times of crisis.
• Expectation management. By making strategies and goals available and easily accessible to all stakeholders expectations are managed, minimizing potential conflicts.
• Greater collaboration. With smoother processes, information sharing, and clear communication lines, teams and individuals can find more opportunities to collaborate and innovate.  

At a project focused level, this means:

1. The organization’s aims and objectives within the project are met.
2. Every voice involved in the project, or impacted by the project’s outcomes, is heard.

Creating the right environment for collaboration might mean spending money. But it often involves setting up opportunities that drive collaboration. So it’s more than money. It’s about spending time and effort to involve stakeholders in your process, and evaluating what business resources you have or need, in order to make that happen.

Great stakeholder management is an investment in your organization’s success. From strong and strategic relationships to empowering innovation, it has the power to make or break your work. 

Really, it’s more than a monetary thing. 

– Simply Stakeholders

Stakeholder Management is Strongest With a Strategy in Place

Particularly if you want to see a return on your investments. 

Whether the success of a project relies on financial or non-financial resources, one thing is true: Everyone involved will want to know what benefits will come their way as a result of their investment. 

The good news? There’s a clear correlation between effective stakeholder management and the level of return that a business, organization, or government can expect to see. (An epic example of this is on the way.) But achieving great results means having a robust stakeholder strategy in place.

What Is A Stakeholder Strategy?

A stakeholder strategy is a clear framework for project managers and consultants to work within. It outlines the needs and interests of all stakeholder groups, as well as the organization’s broader goals and objectives. 

Strategy directly impacts stakeholder management investment. Understanding each stakeholder group involved in the project (or affected by it) makes it easier to evaluate which groups are vital to achieving the desired outcomes, and which are a little less…critical. The weight each group carries is reflected in the budget.

Deciding How Much to Invest 

A traditional guide project managers might use to guide how much to invest in each stakeholder group is the Power/Interest Grid influence/interest matrix. 

It looks like this.

Each stakeholder group is placed into one quarter of the matrix, which are:

• High interest, low influence
• High interest, high influence
• Low interest, low influence
• Low interest, high influence.

Depending on where they fall in the matrix, you then decide whether to:

• Merely keep them satisfied
• Ensure the group is managed closely
• Monitor the group throughout the project
• Simply keep them informed.   

Given the pace and complexity of some organizations, the 2×2 grid way of mapping stakeholders isn’t really fit for purpose. Or it should be used in conjunction with other stakeholder mapping diagrams in order to build a clearer picture of the stakeholder groups. From there, it’s easier to assess how much weight each stakeholder group carries, and the influence they’ll have on a specific project or within the organization. 

Using these tools, you can start to divide your budget accordingly. It’s a helpful starting point and can be a useful method to justify the amount of budget for each stakeholder group.

What Are You Budgeting?

An idea we touched on earlier was that budgeting for stakeholder management is more than assigning a dollar value. When it comes to working out how much to invest, you also need to consider these non-financial assets. 

• Time and effort: How much total time is needed for the project, and how might the complexity of the project affect the time and effort needed?
• Personnel: Which existing individual staff members and teams are needed, and how will this impact their day-to-day duties? Or do you need to hire contractors or temporary staff?
• Systems: Will the project require the use of existing workflows and processes, or are new ones required? 
• Resources: Whether it’s paper and printing, or access to company vehicles and buildings, what resources are essential? And how might their use during the project impact general day-to-day operations that also rely on them?
• Technology: Will the current technology, such as phone lines, internet access, and software platforms, support the project? And how much extra pressure might the project put on these systems?

Budgeting is fiddly. And this is true when looking at the non-financial assets of a budget. It often means reallocating existing resources to make the project happen. For example, employees may need to spend days or weeks working on the project, at the expense of their day-to-day responsibilities. 

When working out what the business can afford to invest in changes like this, a good question to ask is: How long can you sustain this new work process without impacting existing operations?

Using existing resources that don’t incur extra costs to the business is always going to be music to a financial officer’s ears. But successful stakeholder management generally requires some cash to be splashed. (Responsibly and within reason, of course.) So what can you expect to have to pay for?

The Financial Cost Of Different Tools and Resources

Digital tools and software have simplified stakeholder collaboration. (There’s really no need to keep using spreadsheets.) And there are a plethora of tools and resources you can choose from, depending on the size and complexity of your project, whether you need new processes or solutions that will integrate with existing legacy methods. (Like the first one in our list.) 

Interviews and Surveys

These feedback mechanisms can be done in person, over the phone, or online. Some have a higher price tag than others. 

For in-person interviews, costs might include:

• Venue hire: Convenient and comfortable enough for conducting interviews
• Refreshments: For staff and interviewees who may be there for a long time
• Recording equipment: Video and sound recording, or audio only, or pens and paper
• Printing: If the survey or questionnaire isn’t digital.
• Incentives: Encouraging people to take part.

If you’re not holding in-person interviews or surveys, then your costs might involve paying for postage to reach stakeholders. Or if you’re digitally inclined, you need to budget for the cost of hosting your survey on an appropriate platform and emailing it to stakeholders. 

Going digital is often a good option for projects:

• With smaller budgets, 
• That are restricted by time
• That are environmentally conscious. 

For example, online meeting apps such as Teams or Zoom, might be more a cost-effective and convenient way to run interviews with stakeholders. And for surveys, online survey platforms are reasonably priced (anywhere between free and $300 depending on your needs) and deliver responses immediately and securely.

Find out more about stakeholder feedback and why it’s an essential element in effective project management.

Customer Relationship Management Software

Customer relationship management platforms (CRM) help an organization or business manage interactions and processes related to the customer. They assist the business or organization in completing the obligations they need to provide to that customer, which largely focuses on the sales process. 

Some popular CRMs include HubSpot, Salesforce, and Monday. And while these are useful for organizations that need to chart their sales process, it doesn’t really translate into effective stakeholder mapping, such as being able to segment stakeholders. (Useful for when organizations need to make targeted investments in building stakeholder relationships.)

Pricing can start from as little as $8 per month, with the cost increasing based on the size of your team and the functions you want to access. 

Project Management Software

ClickUp, Asana, and Jira are just three examples of project management software, but there are literally thousands of options. They’re designed with tools that help individuals and teams manage projects and workflows, and may include:

• Task management
• Project calendars
• Budget tracking
• Chat functions  
• Time tracking
• File sharing.

Customizing your project management software to show the most relevant data and reports can save time and ensure all stakeholders have the relevant information without delay. 

Similar to CRMs, these platforms offer various plan levels based on the complexity of the project, your needs, the number of people using the platform, and whether you want to be billed monthly or annually. 

There are lots of variables, but costs could be as low as $7 per user per month or as much as $30,000 per person per year.

Stakeholder Relationship Management

Blending the best bits from CRMs and project management software, stakeholder relationship management software (SRMs) include tools and functions that help businesses and organizations manage stakeholders and the interests of each stakeholder group. 

Some of the functions you’ll find on an SRM include:

• Data tracking
• Budget tracking 
• Task management  
• Report generation
• Stakeholder mapping
• Workflow automation 
• Grievance management
• File holding and sharing
• Communication functions.

SRM pricing is as variable as CRMs. Perhaps more so, as the software capabilities can offer a huge amount of dashboard and module customization that meet the specific needs of the stakeholder groups involved. 

This is why you’ll often see SRM businesses, such as Simply Stakeholders, offering free trials, or extending an invite to get in touch.

Simply Stakeholders Vs the Alternatives Compare Simply Stakeholders to other stakeholder management systems,such as spreadsheets, CRMs and even other stakeholder software. Are we right for your organization?

Return On Stakeholder Management Investment

Calculating return on investment (ROI) normally means looking at the ratio of benefit to financial cost. But stakeholder management ROI is a little different. (As we saw from the Harvard Business REview example.) There are tangible and intangible benefits.

Tangible benefits may well include an improved dollar figure or saved resources after the completion of a project. But it’s more likely that the ROI you’ll see is an intangible benefit. We’ve shared examples of intangible benefits in our article 6 Ways Stakeholder Management Software Delivers ROI, but in summary, ROI might arrive in the form of:

1. Time saved
2. Knowledge collection and sharing
3. Strong and profitable relationships
4. Process and workflow consolidation
5. Risk and error reduction
6. Improved compliance. 

So what might this ROI look like in the real world?

2 Examples of SRM Investment Paying Off

Businesses and organizations of all sizes, from the private and public sector, invest in SRM and SRM software. The effects might be subtle and internal only, or far-reaching, affecting employees and clients alike.  

Here are two such examples from Simply Stakeholders clients — one in the non-profit sector and the other from the corporate and external affairs sector.

The first is The Nature Conservancy, based in Long Island, and its community engagement program. By investing in SRM, they improved their planning and organization, which enabled them to begin tapping into new stakeholder groups.

In a short period of time, they were able to improve their outreach and attract more stakeholders to engage with the group, compared to their pre-SRM days. 

Read The Nature Conservancy case study.

The second example comes from one of the world’s largest furniture brand. With 200,000 employees, they wanted an SRM to facilitate collaboration and map internal relationships. 

By investing in SRM, collaboration between team members and departments increased. Some of these interactions happened between employees who had never met before. 

Read A Better Way to Manage Internal Stakeholder Relationships case study.      

So now you know why it’s important to invest in stakeholder management, the correlation between stakeholder management, strategy and ROI, and what that ROI might look like, let’s get down to the brass tax of the topic.

What percentage of your budget should you invest in SRM?

How Much Of Your Project Budget Can You Expect To Invest In SRM?

The answer to this is ‘it depends’. And while this might sound like a cop out, it really is difficult to put a dollar cost or percentage range for how much of your budget you should spend.

The following factors all affect the final cost.

• Number of users 
• Complexity of the project
• Modules and functions needed
• Existing processes and workflows and how they’ll integrate
• Need for training and support for any new systems put in place.

Ballpark figures and loose industry insights

Market tracking of CRM software, which is a larger market than SRM and has been available for longer, offers some spending insights. 

Use the following figures to decide whether part of your budget, the majority of it, or all of it should be invested in SRM.    

CRM Statistics To Guide Your SRM Investment Decisions

• The US is the largest adopter of CRM software. (DigitalSilk) 
• The CRM market is expected to reach $131.90 billion in revenue by 2028. (DemandSage)
• Nearly three-quarters of total CRM spending comes from companies with more than 1,000 employees. (HG Insights)
• Companies with revenue of $5 billion or more account for more than half (52%) of spending in the CRM market. (HG Insights)
• Companies with a revenue of $1 – $10 million make up just 0.5% of CRM spending.
• This tier is where the majority of CRM buyers sit, indicating how important relationship management software is for small businesses. (HG Insights)

What’s undeniable is that the CRM market is growing. (At an annual rate of almost 11% according to some reports.) Companies and organizations that are serious about streamlining their processes working more efficiently, and better managing customers are turning to this increasingly sophisticated software. Most of which, now boast AI capabilities. 

The insights also show us that every size of company is investing — large and small businesses; global and local. This technology isn’t reserved for a single industry or organizations with astronomical revenues. Its usefulness is far-reaching.

The most pertinent question, therefore, isn’t whether you should invest in stakeholder relationship management. It’s what do you need the technology to do for you, to achieve the ROI you and your stakeholder groups expect to see?

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

Stakeholder engagement in healthcare is not just about gathering stakeholder input. It’s about fostering a collaborative environment where stakeholders feel valued and heard and treating all stakeholders with dignity and respect — from senior leadership at hospitals to the patients they serve.

Let’s look at the importance of stakeholders in healthcare, who the stakeholders are, and how to build relationships through stakeholder engagement.

What Is a Stakeholder in Healthcare?

Healthcare stakeholders include individuals, groups, and organisations that have an interest in healthcare outcomes. That may include research institutions, public health organisations, and even the entire population within a geographic area. Generally, however, the following four groups are considered the main stakeholders in healthcare:

Patients

Patients are the most valuable stakeholders in healthcare, as their investment is the highest. The security of their personal data and health outcomes depends on healthcare systems and providers.

Patient feedback is crucial for improving the standard of care, which makes them a powerful influence in healthcare and underscores why creating a positive patient experience is so important.

Providers

Providers include individuals — like surgeons and nurses — and health institutions like hospitals and Urgent Care Clinics.

Providers balance patient outcomes and risks, evaluate treatment options, and manage treatment costs. Providers also navigate how systems like Medicare impact patient care.

Payors

Payors include local hospital networks, private insurers, and Medicare. Their focus is cost containment while ensuring the quality and appropriateness of treatments.

Policymakers

Policymakers include state and federal government entities. They develop and oversee standards for care, and monitor patient outcomes to ensure providers are providing quality care.

The Importance of Stakeholders in Healthcare

Stakeholder involvement in healthcare drives successful outcomes in several ways:

Enhancing Decision Making

Involving stakeholders ensures diverse perspectives are included in decision-making processes. For example, imagine a government proposal to construct an Urgent Care Clinic in rural Queensland. This project would require input from area residents about the clinic’s location, as well as guidance from healthcare professionals on how to fill provider roles at the clinic.
Designing services and facilities that better serve the needs of all stakeholders also depends on inclusive decision-making. By engaging patients, providers, administrators, and community members, healthcare organizations can ensure facilities are both functional and accessible, while aligning with real-world needs.

Improving Risk Management and Cost Control

Engaging experienced stakeholders early in planning can help mitigate potential risks and reduce project costs. Unexpected risks and costs are often well-known among stakeholders who have learned through trial and error.
Stakeholders in leadership roles also play a critical part during crises such as a pandemic. Their insight and guidance not only help manage risks under pressure but also facilitate preventative healthcare measures that reduce long-term costs and support healthier communities.

Building Reputation and Trust in Healthcare

Meaningful engagement fosters trust and builds a positive reputation among communities and stakeholders. Trust is also critical for patient-provider relationships. People who don’t trust healthcare systems or providers are unlikely to seek treatment when they need it.
When stakeholders are involved in facilitating better overall outcomes for the community, such as through preventative healthcare initiatives, trust grows stronger. This reputation for proactive, patient-centered care positions healthcare systems as reliable, responsive, and committed to public well-being.

How to Identify Stakeholders in Healthcare

Stakeholder engagement in healthcare begins with identifying who your stakeholders are. Stakeholders will vary based on the scope of an initiative or engagement. For example, the construction of a major hospital could involve key stakeholders such as:

• Local, State and Federal/Central governments
• Community members
• Health related NGOs
• Medical specialists
• Associated healthcare providers
• Tenants in the facility
• Investors
• Health system leadership
• Suppliers
• Construction firms
• Municipal planners

The stakeholders associated with a patient’s routine, ongoing medical care generally are far fewer: the patient and providers, family members, and payors.

Once you have your lists of stakeholders, you can develop a plan for stakeholder engagement.

Creating a Strategy for Stakeholder Engagement

Here’s how to get started with your healthcare stakeholder engagement plan:

Assess Stakeholders

The stakeholder assessment process is similar to how marketers create customer personas — you’re looking at what matters to stakeholders, their expectations, and how they influence or experience outcomes. As you uncover these details, you can begin to segment your stakeholders by shared qualities and map out how stakeholders connect to each other.

Evaluate Sentiment

Stakeholder sentiment is how stakeholders feel about a project or issue. They may be enthusiastic, distrustful, or even ambivalent.

By tracking stakeholder sentiment over time, you can better understand your engagement strategies. For example, if a stakeholder group initially seems resistant to a project, and you launch an email campaign that helps them overcome objections, you might see a significant improvement in sentiment.

Create an Engagement Plan

With the information you’ve gathered, you can plan engagement strategies that speak to every stakeholder, through the most effective communication channels.

5 Pillars of Stakeholder Engagement in Healthcare

Keep these principles in mind when engaging with stakeholders in healthcare:

1. Put the Patient First

Prioritise the needs and experiences of patients and actively involve them in healthcare decisions. This approach is part of person-centred care, which is the foundation for healthcare standards and quality in Australia.

Person-centred healthcare emphasises the importance of treating patients as a whole, rather than just treating their symptoms or medical conditions. Treating patients with dignity and respect and seeking their input and feedback improves outcomes for patients and caregivers.

2. Encourage Multidisciplinary Collaboration

Collaboration across stakeholder groups enriches perspectives, improves decision-making, and ensures comprehensive care. Stakeholder groups can even include people with no formal affiliation to a healthcare system, such as community residents.

For example, Public Health Networks often play a coordinating role in cancer care across a region. To succeed, they must work with hospitals, clinics, specialists, and other organizations that each provide different elements of care. One of their biggest challenges is developing and maintaining a stakeholder register to track which groups provide which services, while also building relationships to understand how best to support them. In many cases, their role is to actively facilitate collaboration between these external parties to ensure care is integrated and patients receive the support they need.

3. Utilise Technology and Analytics

Use data and analytics tools to make real-time decisions and offer reporting for stakeholders. Technology facilitates collaboration across different geographies, improving the speed and accuracy of information sharing — but make sure your technology protects sensitive data and includes compliance management functionality.

4. Focus on Multi-directional Communication

A top-down approach won’t work for healthcare stakeholder communication. At every point in the stakeholder relationship, you should welcome and invite feedback. Free-flowing communication ensures positive collaboration, helps manage expectations, and gives stakeholders a greater sense of ownership in outcomes.

Consistently follow up on stakeholder enquiries to demonstrate that their opinions matter, and thank them for their contributions.

5. Evaluate and Refine

Successful stakeholder engagement involves continuous evaluation. That means reviewing your engagement efforts and making improvements as needed. This is another initiative that benefits from the involvement of stakeholders. Consider asking stakeholders how they felt about:

• Communication during projects
• The cadence of project updates
• Recognition of their feedback and opinions

Any information you collect from stakeholders can help you refine your engagement strategies.

Simply Stakeholders: Your Partner in Stakeholder Engagement

Improving stakeholder engagement in healthcare may seem like a daunting task, but with the right software, it’s not difficult. Simply Stakeholders includes all the features you need to identify, assess, and engage stakeholders, and track every stakeholder interaction.

When you’re ready to simplify stakeholder engagement, we’re here to help. Reach out — we’d love to hear from you!

Municipal government software streamlines operations and strengthens connections with communities. From budgeting and citizen relationship management to compliance tracking and performance analytics, this software is indispensable for driving innovation and stakeholder engagement.

Whether you’re overseeing building regulations, public works, community services, or budgeting, municipal government software can make your work easier.

What Is Municipal Government Software? 

Municipal government software is a platform that helps city staff reduce paperwork, minimise manual errors, and free up time for more strategic tasks. Key capabilities include:  

• Administrative support: Automating tasks such as licence renewals, approvals, and integrations with national databases.
• Data management: Collecting, storing, and analysing large volumes of data, enabling municipalities and councils to track performance and plan for future needs.
• Citizen engagement tools: Portals, mobile apps, and platforms that allow residents to report issues, request services, or offer feedback directly to their local officials.
• Financial management: Budgeting, forecasting, accounts payable and receivable, and integrated payment systems for ratepayers.
• Regulatory and compliance tracking: Integrations with legislation, environmental standards, and public safety guidelines.

Benefits of Municipal Government Software Adoption

Automating labour-intensive processes means your staff can focus on higher-level tasks. Filing applications, issuing licences, and tracking inquiries can all be handled electronically, reducing manual paperwork. Municipal government software also consolidates departmental data into unified dashboards, allowing project managers to generate detailed, real-time reports with a few clicks.

Municipal government software encourages better citizen engagement with user-friendly portals and mobile apps that bridge the gap between local governments and residents. You can also use the software to track compliance, identify bottlenecks, and reassign resources as needed.

Challenges of Municipal Government Software Adoption

While the return on investment (ROI) can be substantial, the upfront and ongoing costs of procuring, deploying, and maintaining software can be a barrier for municipalities with limited funding. A lack of internal IT resources can also make it difficult to roll out municipal government software. 

Security and Compliance Considerations

Municipal operations often involve personally identifiable information (PII), financial records, health details, and more. Breaches can undermine public trust and result in heavy fines. Key areas to consider include:

• Encryption and access controls: Data should be encrypted both at rest and in transit. Clear protocols on user authentication and role-based access ensure only authorised personnel view sensitive information.
• Regulatory compliance: Verify that your software supports compliance with local and national regulations. Look for vendors who regularly update their software to align with evolving standards.
• Vendor reputation and certifications: Evaluate prospective software providers on their track record and security certifications. 

ROI and Cost-Benefit Analysis

To understand whether municipal government software is a wise investment, create a cost-benefit analysis that assigns a dollar value to potential benefits and challenges, such as:

• Software onboarding and team training
• Eliminating manual processes and paperwork
• Fewer production bottlenecks

Consider intangible benefits, too, like higher employee morale and citizen satisfaction. While these benefits may not have a dollar value, they influence the success of your projects.

Implementation Best Practices

Below are some best practices for choosing, using, and assessing municipal government software:

1. Conduct a thorough needs assessment. 

Identify the problems you’re trying to solve. Do you want to boost citizen engagement, improve financial forecasting, or understand the impact of your marketing efforts? Get input from various teams to ensure you choose a software solution that aligns with your requirements.

2. Create a detailed implementation plan.  

Map out each phase of the project, from software selection and installation to staff training and launch. Clearly define roles, responsibilities, and timelines, as well as contingencies for potential pitfalls.

3. Provide ongoing training and support.

Offer continuous learning sessions, guides, and Q&A forums, especially during the early adoption stages, to help staff feel confident in using the new tools.

4. Monitor progress and reassess periodically.

Post-implementation, track key performance indicators (KPIs) like production milestones, time savings, and citizen satisfaction. 

Transform Municipal Management With Simply Stakeholders 

Simply Stakeholders helps municipal teams enhance collaboration and communication, collect and implement data, and enhance citizen engagement. When you compare Simply Stakeholders to the alternatives, it’s clear that Simply Stakeholders is the best-fit solution with all the features municipalities need for managing projects and citizen engagement.

Contact Simply Stakeholders today to learn how we help municipalities improve outcomes and build citizen relationships.

When stakeholder relationships are important to your organization’s goals, managing these stakeholders is challenging and meaningful work where you can often make the biggest difference for your project and organization. It’s also an opportunity to develop skills that will make you a valuable asset in any role, project, and workplace.

In this blog, we share how to deal with difficult stakeholders, some strategies that will help you build positive stakeholder relationships from the start, and our top tips to restore stakeholder relationships when they break down.

Common Causes of Stakeholder Challenges

It’s important to realize that stakeholder challenges always happen for a reason — and getting to the heart of the issue is generally the first step towards resolving them. Common causes to watch out for include:

• Communication Breakdowns: Failing to communicate in an accurate or timely manner can fuel existing tensions, increase conflict, and leave stakeholders feeling undervalued or ignored
• High Expectations: If stakeholder expectations aren’t met (either because they were unrealistic or you failed to properly communicate your project’s objectives and limitations), they may lose confidence in your project or organization 
• Lack of Engagement: When stakeholders don’t participate in your consultation, you’re going to see less buy-in, misaligned visions for the project, and difficulty making decisions (because you’ll be missing important stakeholder knowledge and perspectives)
• Competing Priorities: It’s normal for collaborators to have different goals and agendas, but this can become a source of conflict if they prioritize personal goals over the project’s stated objectives
• Distrust: Many of the above issues (miscommunication, mismatched priorities, etc.) will erode trust over time, making it even harder to work with your stakeholders

Strategies to Build Positive Stakeholder Relationships

Strong, positive relationships with your stakeholders mean that difficult situations are less likely to lead to difficult stakeholders. Proactively apply the following strategies to improve your stakeholder relationships and get ahead of any potential issues before they happen.

Proactive Engagement

It’s important to engage stakeholders and build relationships proactively — before crises or challenges occur. It’s always better to engage stakeholders early on so that you can understand their goals, concerns, and motivations. This will ensure you have more time to build strong stakeholder relationships (and insights to help you be strategic). Plus, early engagement will give you the chance to identify and manage risks (reputational, financial, legal, and others) that might lead to bigger problems down the track.

As part of your stakeholder engagement process, you can ask your stakeholders targeted questions that will reveal their underlying priorities, such as: 

• If you had to choose one part of the project to get right, what would it be?
• What trade-offs would you consider acceptable in order to get the project done?
• What past experiences (good or bad) have you had with similar projects?

Clear, Consistent Communication

Your stakeholder relationships will thrive when you get your communications right. Stakeholder communication methods will be different for every project, but the principles remain the same: 

• Be Clear: Remember that your stakeholders may have cultural or knowledge barriers (such as project terminology) that make it harder to communicate, so you’ll need to accommodate their needs
• Be Transparent: Transparent communications involves consistency (share regular project updates), timeliness (notify stakeholders promptly about decisions), and honesty (be upfront about any challenges)
• Be Open: Embrace two-way communication and provide plenty of opportunities for your stakeholders to share their feedback with you
• Track Everything: If you don’t yet have stakeholder software, you could use a simple stakeholder register to track your communications and a stakeholder engagement matrix to evaluate your stakeholders’ response

Dynamic Stakeholder Registers With Simply Stakeholders Get organized with a powerful stakeholder register that records stakeholder contact lists, segmented groups, relationships, and interactions in one centralized location. Easily import historical data and use plugins to automatically build your lists from Outlook or Gmail. Learn More

Set Realistic Expectations

Since unmet expectations are a common cause for stakeholder challenges, it’s worth applying some specific strategies to help set realistic expectations with your stakeholders. These tips should help guide your approach to stakeholder communications and relationships:

• Be Upfront: Engage early on to ensure stakeholder perspectives are used to establish timelines, deliverables, and outcomes
• Don’t Assume: Ask your stakeholders what they expect from your organization and project (via surveys, focus groups, and interviews)
• State What You’ll Need: If you need something from stakeholders, be clear about what you need, when you need it, and why it matters (even if it seems obvious)
• Say What You’ll Do: Get clear on your organization/team’s role in the project and what you’ll deliver (and if there’s anything you can’t/won’t do)
• Stay Positive: Let stakeholders know if it’s not possible to meet an expectation, and redirect their focus towards issues they can influence or control
• Build Alignment: Where possible, find ways to align your interests with stakeholder interests, even if this requires some negotiation and compromise

Techniques for Resolving Stakeholder Challenges

Even your strongest stakeholder relationships may be rocked by an unavoidable or unexpected challenge. Resolving these challenges quickly and effectively will help you retain or rebuild those relationships and minimize any negative impacts on your project. The following techniques will give you the best chance of a quick (and mutually agreeable) resolution.

Practice Active Listening

The default mode of listening involves hearing the other person’s message and paying just enough attention to provide a socially acceptable response. But active listening requires more skill, more attention, and more effort. It involves:

• Focus: Paying close attention to what they’re really saying (including thoughts and feelings that aren’t being stated) without distraction
• Proof: Demonstrating your attention through eye contact and facial expressions (if face-to-face)
• Feedback: Asking clarifying questions and rephrasing what they’ve said to make sure you understood
• Empathy: Acknowledging any concerns, emotions, and perspectives (whether or not you agree)

Even if active listening doesn’t resolve the issue, your stakeholders will feel more understood and are more likely to be satisfied with the interaction.

Tip: It’s a good idea to keep a record of stakeholder feedback (ideally, in your stakeholder system) so that you can track any recurring themes and issues. Keeping a history of past interactions will also help you (and your team) continue the conversation with stakeholders — without missing a beat.

Collaborate to Solve Problems

Stakeholder participation can lead to more creative ideas, increased buy-in, and the opportunity to find a solution that works for everyone. A good process for this can involve:

• Discussion: Discussing project objectives and stakeholder goals to find common ground
• Brainstorming: Working together to brainstorm potential solutions
• Evaluation: Objectively evaluating the pros and cons of each solution (and their impact on the project and stakeholders)
• Selection: Selecting the most fair and realistic solution

Analyze and Prioritize Issues

It’s not always possible to tackle every stakeholder issue or concern at the same time, especially if different stakeholders care about different things. You must prioritize which concerns to focus on first based on an objective analysis of each issue. Criteria for analysis might include:

• Impact: How many people and processes are affected?
• Feasibility: Do we have available resources to tackle the issue?
• Urgency: How will the issue impact deadlines? Will it get worse over time?
• Alignment: How closely does the issue align with organizational goals and values?
• Risk: What are the potential negative consequences if we don’t address it?
• Complexity: How complex is the issue? Could it be a quick win?
• Compliance: If we don’t resolve this issue, will there be regulatory/legal repercussions?

You could use a scoring system or matrix to quantitatively analyze your issues. But the key here is to stick to the facts and follow the same set of criteria for each issue so your decision remains objective.

Guide: Stakeholder Analysis Curious about stakeholder analysis — what it is, why bother with it, and how you actually do it? Confused by all the info out there and want it broken down in easy-to-understand terms? You need our Super Simple Guide to Stakeholder Analysis. Read the Guide

Set Boundaries When Needed

Part of knowing how to deal with difficult stakeholders is knowing when enough is enough. Active listening, collaboration, and prioritization won’t always be enough to resolve your stakeholder difficulties. Some stakeholders may continue to make unreasonable demands or even share misinformation about your project. When this happens, you’ll need to set clear boundaries so that your project can move forward. Setting boundaries with stakeholders will require:

• Calm: Keep it professional and respectful, even if the other person becomes emotional
• Gratitude: Demonstrate the ways you’re already using stakeholder input to shape your project
• Clarity: Communicate the facts (publicly, if needed) to avoid further misinformation
• Assertiveness: Be clear that some solutions aren’t feasible without a magic wand and/or unlimited resources
• Acceptance: Accept that you won’t be able to make everyone happy

By setting boundaries, you send a clear message to stakeholders that their efforts aren’t going to get the result they want. And taking a strong stance will show your other stakeholders how you handle yourself in challenging situations. 

Tools and Frameworks to Support Stakeholder Management

Stakeholder management tools refers to frameworks, methods, and software systems that support the stakeholder management process. With the right set of tools, you can more effectively manage your stakeholders, identify issues, build relationships, and work through conflicts. Essential tools include:

Stakeholder Mapping

Stakeholder mapping refers to the process of placing stakeholder attributes (e.g. influence, relationships, impact, knowledge) onto a chart to better understand those stakeholders. They can be used to track changes, segment stakeholders into groups, identify trends, and compare different stakeholders. 

Our favorite stakeholder mapping methods (both available inside Simply Stakeholders) are useful tools to support stakeholder communications in different ways:

• Relationship Network Maps: Track the connections between different stakeholders and your organization so you can strategically build and strengthen stakeholder relationships
• Multi-Dimensional Stakeholder Maps: Generate charts based on six stakeholder attributes to identify stakeholder interests, anticipate potential conflicts, and prioritize your engagement efforts 

Free Webinar: How To Get Actionable Insights From Your Stakeholder Mapping Want to dive deeper into more topics like this? Watch our free webinar replay. Watch the Webinar

Stakeholder Relationship Management (SRM)

A Stakeholder Relationship Management (SRM) system is a category of relationship management software that’s built to track and manage stakeholder relationships. Unlike CRMs like Hubspot that are built for the sales process and tracking customer relationships, SRMs like Simply Stakeholders can track all your relationships and are designed to support the stakeholder engagement process. 

SRMs can help you engage stakeholders more efficiently, thanks to features like tracking, analysis, mapping, and task management. But the right SRM will also help you deliver a better stakeholder experience that leads to more satisfied stakeholders by:

• Tracking Preferences: Track how your stakeholders want to be contacted (including any accommodations needed)
• Analyzing Interactions: Read between the lines with automatic AI-driven sentiment and issues analysis
• Integrating Communications: Make it easier to communicate regularly with built-in tools for communications
• Encouraging Feedback: Easily collect feedback via survey tools, with each response attached to the right contact
• Tracking Grievances: Keep track of every grievance, task, and commitment so you don’t miss a thing
• Supporting Conversations: With a detailed history of past interactions, keep your conversations going with all the context you need 

Free eBook: A Guide to Effective Grievance Management Want to dive deeper into more topics like this? Get your copy of our free eBook. Get the eBook

Tips for Building Trust Over Time

We’ve touched on the importance of building strong stakeholder relationships that can withstand potential challenges — and ways to resolve issues and repair relationships when things go wrong. But a lot of the techniques and strategies we’ve discussed come back to one thing: trust.

Trust strengthens stakeholder relationships. A lack of trust can down those relationships. And difficult stakeholders are often stakeholders that don’t trust you because you haven’t handled their concerns or problems effectively.

Trust is key, but often hard to come by (especially in the public arena). But you can make it as easier for stakeholders to trust you by:

• Meeting Your Commitments: Show up consistently, do what you say you’ll do, and don’t promise something you can’t deliver on
• Showing Capability: Put your expertise, skills, and resources on display
• Building Connections: Establish positive relationships with people that your stakeholders already know and trust
• Being Open: Provide meaningful opportunities for stakeholder input and inclusion, have honest conversations, and let stakeholders know if you face a setback
• Being Human: Appreciate your stakeholders, be generous and empathetic towards them, and make sure they know that they matter
• Doing the Right Thing: Courageously choose fairness, integrity, human rights, and values over what’s easy or comfortable

Free Webinar: What is Stakeholder Relationship Management? Want to dive deeper into relationship management? Watch our free webinar replay. Watch the Webinar

How Simply Stakeholders Helps You Deal with Difficult Stakeholders

There’s so much you can do to minimize the likelihood of stakeholder problems — and to be prepared so you know how to deal with difficult stakeholders when challenging situations arise. When you show up with positive strategies for relationship building, tools for stakeholder management, and skills in conflict resolution, you’ll be able to work through the challenges and get the best possible outcomes for all parties.

Looking for a stakeholder relationship management tool? You’ll love Simply Stakeholders’ built-in stakeholder mapping, analysis, issues tagging, sentiment analysis, relationship health monitoring, and grievance management. Plus, with a complete history of your stakeholder interactions, you can always go back to see where your relationship went wrong and how you can fix it.

Book a demo with the team to learn more!

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

This structured resource is ideal for recording all your stakeholder data in one place, as well as gaining some quick insights that can enhance your project communication strategies and help you tailor your stakeholder approach.

So, let’s take a closer look at what’s included in a stakeholder register template and how you can apply this tool for smarter stakeholder engagement, more effective communications,and more successful project management.

What Is a Stakeholder Register Template?

A stakeholder register template is a fillable spreadsheet or document used to catalogue the individuals or groups involved in a project. 

It usually includes fields for:

• Stakeholder identification and contact information
• Assessing impact/influence/interest
• Tracking the engagement and communications
• Any other information critical to the project

The data tracked in stakeholder register templates is invaluable for project managers and stakeholder consultants because it can help them plan a consultation or engagement, set priorities, make decisions quickly, and track stakeholders throughout the project process. 

When Should You Use a Stakeholder Register Template?

Because it’s such a useful tool for planning, the best time to access a stakeholder register template is at the start of your project. As you fill out your stakeholder register, you can begin to identify:

• Potential teams, partnerships, and alignments between stakeholders
• The resources you’ll need for your consultation
• How you’ll categorize and prioritize stakeholders
• How much time you’ll need to allocate to engage key stakeholders
• How you’ll define success for your project and consultation
• What communication strategies you may need to use
• What actions you’ll need to take to achieve your project and consultation goals

Beyond this, your stakeholder register is a tool you should reference and update continuously — with every decision, every stakeholder interaction, and any time you uncover new information about your stakeholders.

Key Elements of a Stakeholder Register Template

Let’s break down the main components of a stakeholder register template, including stakeholder identification data, stakeholder assessment details, and stakeholder engagement data.

Stakeholder Identification Data

This component of your project stakeholder register template should resemble a stakeholder contact list. Here, you can include any details needed to identify your internal and external stakeholders and preferred methods of contact, such as:

• Name
• Role title
• Organization(s)
• Location 
• Postal address
• Email address
• Phone number

Not sure who to add to your stakeholder register? Stakeholders are the people, groups, and organizations that are impacted by, have an influence on, or an interest in your organization, project, or work. This may include shareholders, employees, senior management, customers, community members, partner organizations, suppliers, government representatives, media groups, the general public, and more. 

Overwhelmed by the sheer volume of contacts you need to record? Start by identifying those individuals who you believe to be your key stakeholders — you can always adjust this later on.

Impact Assessment

The next part of your stakeholder register template should support you to assess your stakeholders to determine your priorities and tailor your consultation. Your impact assessment can include stakeholder mapping values, such as their level of:

• Impact: Higher levels of impact should be assigned to the stakeholders that are most likely to be directly affected by your project or organization
• Influence: Higher levels of influence should be assigned to the stakeholders that are most able to influence your project outcomes or organization
• Interest: Higher levels of interest should be assigned to the stakeholders that have a right to be engaged or consulted based on their interests (not those that are most interested in your project)

To demonstrate how you can assign these values to stakeholders, we’ve included an example impact assessment below. 

Example Impact Assessment: Offshore Wind Farm Project

Want more insights into stakeholder engagement for the renewable energy industry? Check out our piece on the stakeholders in offshore wind energy projects.

To further classify your stakeholders, you can also note in your register whether a stakeholder is considered to be internal (inside your organization), external (outside of your organization), primary (directly impacted/influential), or secondary (indirectly impacted or influential).

Needs Assessment

A stakeholder needs assessment involves gathering and analyzing data about what your stakeholders expect or require from your organization, project, or consultation. It can help you align with stakeholder requirements and expectations wherever possible. Use your stakeholder register to assess and record your stakeholders’ needs, such as:

• Engagement methods: If known, note how your stakeholder expects to be involved in the project or consultation.
• Resource requirements: Note down any resources (time, finances, equipment, staff) your stakeholders may need to access throughout the project.
• Communication frequency: Note how often each stakeholder should be contacted (weekly, monthly, as needed, etc.).
• Communication methods: Note preferred methods of communication, such as email, phone call, LinkedIn, online chat, face-to-face chat, etc.
• Languages: If you need to use multiple languages to communicate with stakeholders, it’s a good idea to track this in your register. 
• Accessibility requirements: Note any ways you may need to accommodate stakeholders with disabilities or other barriers to participation so that they can access your project or engagement process.

Engagement Data

Lastly, your stakeholder register template should include a section for you to record all your stakeholder communication and engagement data. This includes:

• Emails (sent and received)
• Phone conversations (notes or transcripts)
• Event attendance
• Feedback, comments, form submissions, and survey responses
• Plus, any other stakeholder interactions you may want to track

How to Use a Stakeholder Register Template Effectively

So, how do you actually get started with your project’s stakeholder register template? Here’s a step-by-step process (and some handy tips!) to help you put your register into action:

Step 1: Stakeholder Identification Workshop

You’ll need to start by identifying who your stakeholders are so that you can add them to your register. One popular approach is to host a stakeholder identification workshop, which involves working with project teams and key participants to brainstorm a list of all potential stakeholders. This may iclude employees, customers, regulators, community members, shareholders, investors, and more. Your goal should be to ensure you don’t overlook any key stakeholders. Add any identified stakeholders (and analyses) to your stakeholder register template.

As part of this workshop, you should also analyze and map your stakeholders (based on factors like interest, impact, influence, criticality, etc.) so that you can begin categorizing stakeholders for prioritization and tailoring your engagement strategies.

Step 2: Gather Data

One of our top stakeholder management tips is to track everything! So, once you’ve identified your stakeholders, you should begin a practice of documenting all your interactions and any relevant data you can gather on them. 

Collect and input accurate, up-to-date data in your stakeholder register template, ensuring that your communications and interactions are assigned to the relevant stakeholder.

Step 3: Integrate Other Tools

Consider how your stakeholder register template could be paired with other project processes and consultation tools, such as:

• Communication Plans: Refer to your stakeholder register when planning tailored communication strategies and messages for different stakeholder groups.
• Risk Assessments: Use your stakeholder register to find contacts that may help you identify, reduce, or mitigate risks in your risk register — and examine your risks from the perspective of different stakeholders.
• Stakeholder Maps: Provide additional context to the findings in your stakeholder maps to help categorize and prioritize your stakeholder lists.
• Event Registers: Bring a copy of your stakeholder register to any events, focus groups, or workshops organized for your stakeholders so you can directly enter feedback and interactions into the spreadsheet.
• Project Planning: Determine who should be involved in (and consulted on) your project and at what stage.
• Project Documentation: Use your stakeholder register to document all relevant project communications and activities (including any input from your stakeholders), so that this information is easily accessible for reporting.

Step 4: Reference Continually

It’s clear that a stakeholder register template is a tool you can (and should!) reference throughout your project and consultation, from project meetings and planning, to analyzing, strategizing, and reporting.

Make sure you have an easy-to-access copy of your stakeholder register on hand and ready to reference. Although you may want to reference a paper copy on occasions, most project teams will prefer a digital version of their stakeholder register that’s always up-to-date and easy to share with colleagues.

Step 5: Revisit and Revise

Lastly, project managers and consultation professionals should regularly revisit and revise the template throughout the project life-cycle to ensure that:

• Any new stakeholders are added
• Any old stakeholders are removed
• Stakeholder assessments are still correct (e.g. level of impact, influence, interest, etc.)
• Stakeholder needs and preferences are accurate
• The latest stakeholder interactions and engagement data is being recorded

The Stakeholder Register Template as a Communication Tool

As you’ve seen from the steps above, simply creating a stakeholder register (step 1) is just the beginning. When you apply your register in different ways, it becomes a powerful tool for project management, stakeholder consultation, and communications. In fact, one of our favorite applications of a stakeholder register template is as a communication tool that allows you to… 

Adapt to Changes in Stakeholder Interests

Projects are dynamic and stakeholder interests can shift over time — equally, your stakeholder register should be a living document that tracks these changes as they occur. Each time you revisit and update your engagement strategies, reference your up-to-date stakeholder register to ensure your communication remains relevant and effective. This includes noting any changing interests, communication preferences, previous interactions, priority shifts, and emerging issues.

Document and Integrate Feedback

As you communicate and engage with stakeholders, use your stakeholder register to record any feedback you receive. Then use this record of feedback to revise your approaches and improve future interactions with stakeholders. 

Bridge Gaps Between Stakeholders

Your stakeholder register should provide an accurate snapshot of your stakeholders, allowing you to identify commonalities, alignments, and potential conflicts between different groups. With clear stakeholder data and analyses at your fingertips, your register can help you avoid conflict, address disputes, and foster collaboration between stakeholders.

Benefits of a Thoughtful Approach to Stakeholder Management

In addition to supporting your stakeholder analysis, management, and reporting processes, your register can help you foster inclusivity and encourage a more collaborative environment. You can take a more thoughtful approach to stakeholder management when you apply your stakeholder register to help you:

• Identify which stakeholders are participating and which stakeholders aren’t
• Uncover stakeholders that may face barriers to inclusion and need additional encouragement or accommodations (this is especially useful for supporting DEI programs)
• Discover which stakeholder groups haven’t had an opportunity to provide input, but should (a critical stakeholder engagement best practice)
• Document cultural considerations that may impact how you approach stakeholders
• Gain detailed stakeholder insights that improve communication outcomes, such as what messaging and timing works best for specific audiences
• Reference previous conversations with stakeholders to demonstrate active listening and that you care about their concerns and issues
• Track commitments so you can follow-through and build trust with stakeholders

For example, consider a non-profit organization undertaking a community health initiative in a diverse neighborhood with historically underserved populations. Their goal is to improve health outcomes, while ensuring equitable access to services for all community members. They could use a stakeholder register to:

• Identify Stakeholders: Intentionally seek out and identify groups that might otherwise be overlooked based on demographics, cultural background, faith, sexual orientation, ability, level of education, and other personal characteristics..
• Track Requirements: Track cultural and linguistic considerations, accessibility requirements, power dynamics, relationships, beliefs, communication preferences, and more
• Plan the Engagement: Intentionally plan an equitable engagement with culturally responsive communication and improved accessibility for health screening events and materials.

By using the stakeholder register in this way, they can measure participation rates across specific groups as they work towards their goal (equitable access and improved health outcomes), and evaluate whether this approach has been successful.

A More Advanced Stakeholder Register

Although a basic stakeholder register template in Excel or Google Sheets is a good starting point for some projects, others will require a more advanced approach to recording, analyzing, and managing stakeholders than a simple spreadsheet can offer. 

Stakeholder management software like Simply Stakeholders includes a stakeholder contact register, along with more advanced features that integrate with the register. For example, Simply Stakeholders’ register integrates with:

• Stakeholder Network Mapping: Visualize the stakeholders in your networks and how they intersect with one another on 3D stakeholder relationship maps
• Multi-Dimensional Stakeholder Mapping: Assign criteria for stakeholder needs, impacts, sentiment, influence, and more (and visualize this criteria on charts)
• Stakeholder Communication: Integrate surveys, forms, emails, communications, and more into your stakeholder register
• Stakeholder Analysis: See insights into stakeholder sentiment, issues, themes, and more

If you’re ready to upgrade to a more advanced stakeholder management solution, book a demo with our team.

Use Your Stakeholder Register Template to Its Full Potential

A stakeholder register template can make all the difference for project teams that need a dynamic resource for communication and engagement. If you haven’t already, be sure to download our free starter template below:

Finally, to get the most from your stakeholder register template, make it an evolving tool that you continually adapt to project conditions. With up-to-date, properly organized stakeholder data, you will be in a much better position to successfully manage stakeholders and deliver a successful project. 

The term “secondary” infers that these stakeholders are lesser-than, minor, inferior, or unimportant. But this couldn’t be further from the truth. In fact, you probably have more secondary stakeholders than primary stakeholders, and their collective potential influence is going to be substantial. 

Whether you need to come up with a list of primary and secondary stakeholders, or you’re curious about how you can better engage your (often overlooked) secondary stakeholder groups, this guide is for you. We share definitions, examples, and practical tips to help you identify and engage your secondary stakeholders. 

What Is a Secondary Stakeholder?

Stakeholders include the individuals, organizations, and groups that may be impacted by, have an influence on, or an interest in your project or organization. 

A secondary stakeholder may indirectly influence or be indirectly impacted by your organization’s activities. Common types of secondary stakeholders include local community members, advocacy groups, government entities, media groups, NGOs, and industry associations. 

They may include business stakeholders that don’t have a direct financial stake or decision-making power in your organization, and they’re not involved in your day-to-day activities. However, they may still have an interest in your actions, operations, and broader impacts, and be able to influence your reputation.

Primary vs. Secondary Stakeholders

You could define as any individuals, organizations, or groups that aren’t your primary stakeholders. A primary stakeholder is likely to be directly impacted by your project or organization and/or directly able to influence your decisions and outcomes. 

It’s easy to remember the difference between primary and secondary stakeholders: primary stakeholders are directly influential/impacted, while secondary stakeholders are indirectly influential/impacted.

Understanding both groups is critical for comprehensive stakeholder management, with both primary and secondary stakeholders requiring some level of engagement. 

Secondary Stakeholder Influence

It’s important to realize that although secondary stakeholders don’t exert direct influence, their potential for indirect influence shouldn’t be overlooked. Secondary stakeholders can indirectly influence your project, work, or organization, through:

• Social influence: Organizing social media campaigns, encouraging boycotts, creating petitions, and speaking up at community forums can cause social acceptance of your organization or project to increase or decrease.
• Advocacy: Lobbying for new regulations, requesting stricter enforcement, providing evidence to regulatory bodies, and filing complaints or reports with oversight agencies can impact your work.
• Public perception: News coverage, editorial content, and investigative reporting can help to shape what the public thinks and how they behave towards your project or organization.

It’s also worth considering recent research on the growing popularity of social media and the internet. These new channels have amplified the influence of secondary stakeholders — making them more important to the engagement process than ever before.

Examples of Secondary Stakeholders

Each organization or project will have a slightly different set of secondary stakeholders, each with specific ways they indirectly influence or are impacted by your project. But to help you start thinking about who your secondary stakeholders might be and how you can engage with them, we’ve included some common examples below.

Trade Unions

Trade unions are organizations formed by workers to collectively represent their interests (within a company, across multiple sectors, or across an entire industry) and negotiate with employers. They’ll likely support your project if it could lead to better working conditions, increased pay, and professional development opportunities for workers. However, if any issues come up that impact their members, they may:

• Provide legal support or advice
• Lobby for legislation changes
• Organize strikes or collective actions

By engaging and consulting with trade unions, you can identify potential issues ahead of time, minimizing potential brand reputation damage and costly project delays.

Media Groups

Media group stakeholders include any organizations and individuals that may create, distribute, or control media content (on digital, radio, print, or television) in relation to your project or organization. By distributing and framing information, they can shape public narratives, determine what stories are prominent, decide how issues are framed, and expose potential issues and controversies. 

By managing and engaging with media groups as secondary stakeholders, you can proactively build relationships with journalists, allowing you to:

• Share information on project milestones, significant developments, and opportunities for consultation
• Reach your other stakeholder groups via news publications
• Avoid misinformation with consistent messaging across all channels
• Respond quickly with accurate, helpful information in a crisis

Government Entities

Local councils, state governments, federal governments, elected officials, and their internal organizations are another secondary stakeholder that can potentially impact your project and organization. Their concerns include regulatory compliance, environmental impacts, employment standards, transport impacts, and other key issues their voters are focused on.

Building relationships and engaging with government entities can help you to:

• Stay up to date on relevant legislative changes
• Share your perspectives on policy changes that may impact your project or organization
• Ensure your organization is meeting regulatory standards and submitting reports on time
• Document interactions and relationships with government representatives

Communities

As a secondary stakeholder, communities generally include those stakeholders that work or live in the same region as your project or organization. That said, they may also be defined as people with shared interests, religion, values, or customs. These communities may indirectly impact your project by influencing government decisions, protesting or challenging your decisions, granting or withholding acceptance, and influencing access to local suppliers and workers.

Community engagement can allow you to tap into local knowledge and resources that benefit your project and help you make better decisions. Members of the community can help you identify potential issues early in the process, and contribute important historical and cultural context. With meaningful input from your communities, you can get their perspectives and increase the likelihood that your project goes smoothly and that your organization makes life better for these communities.

NGOs and Interest Groups

Non-government organizations and special interest groups could include environmental organizations, indigenous groups, human rights groups, non-profit charities, health and safety groups, think tanks, research institutions, and industry-specific groups.

Each of these secondary stakeholders may play a different role in your project and consultation, depending on their specific interests and methods of influence. It’s worth exploring which groups will expect to be informed about your project and expect to have a say in your decisions. Then proactively engage with those groups, providing relevant opportunities for them to participate in your work and offer their perspectives.

General Public

The general public stakeholder includes any member of society with an interest in your project or organization that does not fit into your other primary or secondary stakeholder groups. They want your organization to contribute to the good of society by following the appropriate legislation, protecting the environment, and treating employees well. Their impact typically comes from their purchasing power, word-of-mouth and online recommendations, social media content, and ability to apply political and regulatory pressure.

Engaging with this stakeholder group is where you’ll see some crossover between stakeholder relations and public relations, although your consultation process will focus on managing the expectations, needs, and interests of key members of the public. When you get it right with members of the general public, you can gain or maintain your social license to operate.

Guide: Social License In this guide, learn what a social license is, why it matters, and how to gain (and maintain) one for your organization. Read the Guide

How to Identify Secondary Stakeholders

We’ve defined what secondary stakeholders are and looked at some common examples. But how do you identify who your secondary stakeholders are? 

Identifying secondary stakeholders is a natural outcome of the stakeholder analysis process, which encompasses:

• Identification: Undertake key stakeholder identification to create your initial stakeholder lists based on internal brainstorming, a review of similar projects, and any people, groups, and organizations you expect to be impacted by, have an influence on, or an interest in your work.
• Assessment: Conduct a stakeholder assessment, which may involve examining each stakeholders’ interest, concerns, potential influence, degree of impact, and networks.
• Mapping: Use stakeholder mapping to understand who your primary stakeholders, key decision makers, and influential stakeholders are, and who your secondary stakeholders are.
• Reviewing & Adapting: Remember that stakeholders change over time, so be sure to regularly revisit your initial stakeholder lists and keep them up-to-date.

Best Practices for Engaging and Managing Secondary Stakeholders

We’ve included some of our favorite tips and best practices below to help you better engage and manage your secondary stakeholders.

Develop a Clear Communication and Engagement Plan

Many organizations can benefit from creating a communications plan specifically for their secondary stakeholders. This is because primary stakeholders are more likely to require a hands-on approach, whereas most of your secondary stakeholders may only need occasional updates via your online channels. 

Stakeholder engagement best practice suggests tailoring your communications plan to specific stakeholder groups — not just primary vs secondary stakeholders. So, consider the messages, channels, and frequency of communication best suited to different secondary stakeholders, whether it’s media groups, government representatives, community members, or interest groups.

You should also create a stakeholder management plan that includes your primary and secondary stakeholders — and the engagement activities you plan to undertake.

Free Webinar: How to Create a Stakeholder Management Plan Want to dive deeper into more topics like this? Watch our free webinar replay. Watch the Webinar

Build Trust Through Transparent Relationships

Trust is critical to the success of your stakeholder relationships. But secondary stakeholders may face more barriers to trusting your organization because they have less visibility over your activities than primary stakeholders — and they’re also less able to influence those activities. 

With these barriers in mind, you might need to put extra effort towards building trust through:

• Transparent communications: This study found that transparency is essential to rebuild trust and maintain healthy community stakeholder relationships following a crisis.
• Community participation: By playing a role in community initiatives and supporting civic engagement in your community, you’ll demonstrate a genuine interest in the good of others.
• Corporate social responsibility: By doubling down on CSR efforts, you can enhance trust with local communities, activities, and other interest groups.
• Encouraging engagement: Invite your secondary stakeholders to participate in your consultation opportunities, keep them updated on your project, and show how their input has influenced your decisions.

Monitor Feedback and Address Issues Quickly

Even if you have regularly scheduled stakeholder feedback mechanisms, like surveys and interviews, you should be aware that stakeholders may provide feedback via other channels at any time. Monitor for feedback across social media, news media, and community groups so that you can address potential concerns proactively and prevent reputational damage. A basic process for feedback monitoring could involve:

• Identifying channels stakeholders are likely to use
• Setting up brand monitoring tools and social listening tools (such as Google Alerts and Brandwatch)
• Setting up alerts for keywords relating to your brand name or project across those key channels
• Assigning feedback to the relevant stakeholder (if known) in your stakeholder management system
• Analyzing feedback to understand topics, themes, sentiments, and how urgently you need to respond
• Responding to the stakeholder publicly or privately to address their concerns
• Including any brand mentions (and actions taken) in your regular stakeholder reporting

Actionable Reporting & Insights With Simply Stakeholders Turn your data into smart insights, strategic direction, and actionable reports. Build custom reporting dashboards and save, export, and schedule reports that include the precise insights you need. Learn More

Use Technology to Enhance Engagement

The most effective way to engage and manage your secondary stakeholders is with digital tools — especially purpose-built stakeholder management platforms. 

Our favorite tips for getting started with stakeholder software include:

• Starting with the basic features and getting these right before implementing complex capabilities
• Identifying champions within your organization who may become superusers, and letting them try the software first (so they can help bring the rest of your team onboard)
• Getting clear on your rules and processes for recordkeeping when you structure your account
• Making the most of any training, onboarding, and support provided

Systems like Simply Stakeholders offer a full suite of advanced features for stakeholder engagement, all in one place. But if you don’t need advanced features, you can also enhance your engagement and get started with a mixture of digital tools, from email and spreadsheets, to simple project management software and file sharing technology.

Harnessing the Power of Secondary Stakeholders

There’s so many reasons to harness the power of secondary stakeholders through engagement and go beyond tapping into their influence on your project or organization. Effectively engaging these stakeholder groups can also help you mitigate risk, increase legitimacy, gain strategic insights, improve decision-making, strengthen your networks, comply with regulations, and operate responsibly and ethically. 

Looking for a way to better identify, prioritize, manage, and engage all your stakeholders? Discover the Simply Stakeholders platform and our tools for stakeholder mapping, reporting, analysis, communication, and so much more. 

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

Tapping into stakeholder perspectives can shape your decision-making, mitigate risk, avoid costly problems, build trust, and drive more sustainable outcomes. It can help you more effectively manage your projects, strengthen your relationships, and give your organization a competitive advantage.

In this guide, we look at what stakeholder feedback is and why it’s so important, along with some practical methods to gather feedback, understand it, and apply your insights.

What Is Stakeholder Feedback?

Stakeholder feedback is defined as the evaluative information, reactions, and responses you receive from your stakeholders. That is, the feedback of the people, groups, and organizations that are impacted by, have an influence on, or an interest in your project or work. These stakeholders might be internal (inside your organization) or external (outside your organization).

Learn more: What Does Stakeholder Mean?

This feedback may come from a variety of sources and may be:

• Intentional – Such as how stakeholders answer a survey or interview question designed to evaluate the project, process, or consultation
• Incidental – Such as whether stakeholders open an email or attend an event, or how they indirectly express their thoughts, concerns, ideas, and feelings through their communications and actions

Effectively capturing, analyzing, and taking action on this feedback is essential for successful stakeholder consultation — and these processes must be accounted for in your stakeholder engagement plan.

Why Stakeholder Feedback Matters

If you can optimize just one aspect of your project consultation and engagement process, let it be feedback! Requesting and capturing your stakeholder feedback can make a significant impact on how you work together with your team, the decisions you make, and even the overall direction of your project and organization. You’ll find that stakeholder feedback can help you:

Enhance Strategic Planning 

Stakeholder feedback is data — and the more data you have, the better-informed your plans and decisions can be. By gathering feedback from multiple stakeholder groups and diverse perspectives, you’ll remove potential blind spots in your strategy and ensure your plan is developed for real stakeholder expectations and requirements.

Boost Collaboration

With a clear system for encouraging, capturing, and sharing stakeholder feedback, you can facilitate better stakeholder collaboration. You can quickly spot opportunities to bring stakeholders together based on shared interests and capabilities, and you can identify potential conflicts that might impact stakeholders before they become a barrier to collaboration.

Plus, you can boost internal collaboration on the consultation or engagement itself if your whole team has access to your engagement data, including feedback from stakeholders.

Identify and Address Issues Early 

Stakeholder feedback allows you to keep your finger on the pulse of your project or consultation. It can act like an early warning system for possible challenges and risks before they escalate and become more expensive to fix. For instance, you might notice a steady decline in satisfaction ratings, or an increase in issues reported for a particular product. Or you might analyze your stakeholder communications and find sentiments are trending towards negative, or focused on a particular issue. In most cases, the sooner you spot these trends, the easier it will be to address them, while keeping your stakeholders happy.

Drive Innovation and Efficiency

Is your organization working towards continuous improvement and innovation? One of the best ways to drive this innovation is by harnessing stakeholder feedback, as this can be a source of ideas, insights, and inspiration. For example, a stakeholder may suggest a new feature or a new product to bring to market, or identify ways to make your processes more efficient.

Increase Engagement and Build Trust

The act of requesting stakeholder feedback itself can have a positive impact on engaging your stakeholders, whether they’re internal team members, external contractors, partner organizations, users, customers, or community members. It’s part of facilitating two-way communication between your organization and your stakeholders — an important stakeholder engagement best practice. After all, when you listen to your stakeholders, acknowledge their concerns, and act on their feedback, it can help you build trust and build stronger stakeholder relationships.

Identifying Key Stakeholders for Feedback

Before we get into how you can gather stakeholder feedback, it’s important to establish who you need to gather that feedback from. 

You can gather feedback from any stakeholder, but most of the time, you’ll want to focus your efforts on key stakeholders. 

Feedback from key stakeholders will carry more weight due to their roles, interests, influence, and other characteristics. Capturing their feedback and responding to their concerns in a timely manner is more likely to contribute to the success of your project. Learn more about key stakeholder identification and how to identify your key stakeholders.

It’s also worth tailoring your feedback gathering process to different stakeholder groups. One of the most obvious ways to do this is by segmenting your lists into internal stakeholders (inside your organization) or external stakeholders (outside your organization). 

Internal stakeholders are often best positioned to provide formal or informal feedback on internal processes, collaboration opportunities, and efficiencies. On the other hand, external stakeholders typically provide feedback through formal mechanisms like surveys or interviews, with insights into expectations, satisfaction, experiences, and product/service demand.

Effective Methods for Collecting Stakeholder Feedback

Any comment, action, or reaction from your stakeholders could be considered feedback. However, the most common methods used by stakeholder professionals and project managers to gather stakeholder feedback include surveys, questionnaires, interviews, focus groups, and extracting data from digital platforms.

Surveys and Questionnaires

Perhaps the most popular method of gathering stakeholder feedback is via surveys and questionnaires. In fact, some engagement and consultation platforms (like Simply Stakeholders) include this capability inside their software, or integrate with external survey software, such as SurveyMonkey, Google Forms, or TypeForm. However, some organizations and projects may also utilize paper-based surveys and questionnaires — and this format may be preferred by some stakeholder groups.

Discover Surveys, Forms & Outreach with Simply Stakeholders Manage stakeholder communications with built-in tools for surveys, email outreach, SMS messaging, and email data capture. Publish embeddable forms to collect feedback, complaints, or registrations. And get instant insights with every interaction and form response automatically analyzed for issues and sentiments. Learn More

Interviews and Focus Groups

Both interviews and focus groups are useful methods for gathering stakeholder feedback, allowing you to go beyond surface level questions and develop a deeper understanding of stakeholder ideas, perspectives, and concerns. One-on-one interviews tend to be more conversational and are ideal for capturing feedback from key stakeholders. Meanwhile, focus groups may include representatives from multiple stakeholder groups participating in a structured discussion of your project, product, or issue. Each of these methods have traditionally occurred face-to-face, but increasingly, organizations are using digital platforms like Zoom or Teams to conduct interviews and focus groups online — especially if stakeholders are geographically distributed. 

Digital Platforms and Tools

We’ve already touched on some of the digital platforms and tools used for surveys, questionnaires, and online discussion. However, many other tools, channels, and software used by organizations and project managers can also become a useful source of stakeholder feedback — even if this is not their original or intended purpose. For example, your website analytics, social media analytics, CRM, and email marketing tools can provide insights into engagement, sentiment, behavior, and other forms of feedback.

Crafting Effective Stakeholder Feedback Questions

So, you’ve determined you need to gather stakeholder feedback. The next step is to come up with a list of questions that will result in useful feedback — and that your stakeholders will respond to. The following tips mainly apply to surveys and questionnaires, but may also prove useful for planning interviews or focus groups.

Choosing the Right Question Type

Different types of questions have different benefits and applications — and you’ll probably get the best results from including a variety of question formats.

Consider using closed questions (e.g. tick-the-box, likert scales, multiple choice, or yes/no) are ideal for quantitative data, benchmarking, and responses to straightforward questions. They’re quick to answer, so a higher number of stakeholders may be willing to answer them.

Open-ended questions (e.g. “What do you think about X?” or “How does this project impact you?”) are best suited to gathering detailed data, context, explanations, emotional responses, and examples. The qualitative data you gather might be trickier to analyze and benchmark, but can provide valuable insights into stakeholder perspectives, concerns, and ideas. It’s a good idea to make these questions optional, as not every stakeholder will want to provide detailed responses.

Writing Questions Well

Well-written questions are designed to align with both stakeholder expectations and the goals of your organization. Stakeholders will be motivated to respond to questions that give them opportunities to:

• Address specific pain points
• Share their experiences
• Influence project outcomes
• Improve your products, services, or processes

At the same time, questions should add value to your organization or project. Make sure each question results in meaningful feedback that aligns with your objectives, serves a purpose, and has the potential to influence your decisions. 

Pros and Cons of Anonymous Surveys

Some surveys are anonymous, while others require respondents to enter their name, email address, or other identifying data. Anonymous feedback is ideal for discussing sensitive topics, gathering potentially negative feedback, and reporting issues or concerns that don’t require follow up. The primary benefit of identifiable feedback is the ability to follow up with respondents — but it can also be used to track individual progress, encourage accountability, and offer incentives for participating. 

Example Stakeholder Feedback Questions

To help speed up the process of designing your feedback survey, questionnaire, or interview, here’s a list of common stakeholder feedback questions that you might like to use in your consultation:

• How would you rate the effectiveness of our communication channels? Please explain your rating.
• What are your preferred methods for receiving updates or providing feedback on the project?
• On a scale of 1-5, how well do our current initiatives align with your long-term needs and expectations?
• Can you share any potential risks or challenges we should be aware of?
• Would you say that you trust our organization more, less, or similar to other organizations like ours?
• What are some barriers that you encounter when working with our organization?
• How can we improve the value we deliver to you as a stakeholder?

Make sure you adjust these examples to fit your organization, project, and stakeholders!

Analyzing and Implementing Feedback

Before you begin gathering stakeholder feedback, it’s important to plan for how you’ll make sense of it so that you can incorporate it into your ongoing projects, reporting processes, and strategic plans. Depending on the type of feedback you receive, you could use several different methods to categorize and analyze it.

Quantitative data, such as scale ratings, yes/no responses, and user activities (such as website visits or event attendance) can be represented as percentages or plotted on graphs. 

Qualitative data, such as open-ended responses, stakeholder communication, emails, conversations, and online comments are trickier to analyze. However, the right software capabilities can allow you to make sense of large volumes of text very efficiently. 

Simply Stakeholders includes AI-assisted automated issues tagging and sentiment analysis, and the ability to annotate comments so you can bring quotes into your reports. This means that any qualitative feedback, survey responses, and stakeholder comments added to the software are automatically analyzed. This process also enables efficiencies, such as automated workflows triggered for key issues (like risk categories and negative sentiments), or interactions with specific issues could be routed to the relevant team member for action.

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Also, consider how you can segment your feedback based on your different stakeholder groups — as this will provide clearer insights into how you can tailor your engagement and communications to address their concerns and meet their expectations. If your stakeholder feedback is linked to individuals in your stakeholder register (like Simply Stakeholders), you can use filters to generate reports for all your stakeholders, or specific segments. Learn more about what’s possible in our blog on 5 Simple Steps To Getting Started With Stakeholder Data Management.

Once you’ve analyzed your feedback, be sure to apply your findings via:

• Reports – Some organizations include stakeholder feedback in the reports they share with stakeholders, and by showing how feedback has been used and actioned, they can help to build trust and demonstrate transparency.
• Strategies – If you’re reviewing your strategy and updating your strategic plans, recent stakeholder feedback can play a role in shaping your strategy and justifying any proposed changes to your products, services, and processes.
• Decisions – By considering feedback from stakeholders ahead of each major decision in your project and organization, you benefit from a broader range of perspectives that may help to reduce risk and improve outcomes.

Overcoming Challenges in Stakeholder Feedback

Even if you follow all the steps we’ve shared so far, gathering and using stakeholder feedback can still be challenging at times. So, let’s take a look at some common issues, why they occur, and how to tackle them.

Low quality responses can occur for a number of reasons. Tailoring your feedback approach and questions to different stakeholder groups can help to increase response quality and completion rates. But it’s also a good idea to start your survey with an introduction that asks for honest, critical feedback and sets stakeholder expectations for how the feedback will be used and how long the survey will take (so that they don’t rush through it). Messaging like the above screenshot that says “Your feedback matters and is seen by decision-makers at Clutch!” can go a long way in encouraging better quality responses.

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Managing conflicting feedback is another common challenge. How do you decide what feedback to take action on, or how to create a compromise? However, the right analysis methods will help you understand what the majority of stakeholders think and feel — or you may choose to place more weight on your key stakeholders’ feedback over others. It may also be a good idea to follow up your survey findings with a focus group so that you can discuss the issues in more detail and work towards a consensus. 

You may find that engagement levels drop over time, which makes it difficult to gather survey data over time and track how your stakeholders feel throughout the life of your project. Maintaining and improving stakeholder engagement requires ongoing effort to stay relevant, but one of the most important actions is to show people how their feedback is being incorporated into your project and decision-making process. If they can see they’re having an impact, they’ll be more likely to keep showing up.

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Maximize Your Stakeholder Feedback for Project Success

It’s clear that stakeholder feedback is essential for stakeholder satisfaction, but it can have so many other benefits for your organization and project. 

Looking for a way to enhance your feedback management and stakeholder engagement? Discover the Simply Stakeholders platform, with features like our powerful stakeholder register, stakeholder analysis, reporting, communication (including forms and surveys), and so much more. Reach out to our team if you’d like to learn more or book a demo.