Across 310,000 hectares of Queensland, from the New South Wales border to Cairns, HQPlantations (HQP) quietly does something most Australians benefit from without realising it. They sustainably manage the plantation forests that supply the timber for around 25,000 new house frames every year as well as other important timber products including flooring, appearance grade plywood, beams, products for the housing and construction industry while other parts of the tree are processed into products such as woodchips for paper and packaging, particleboard, and engineered wood products.

Around 190,000 hectares of that estate is commercial softwood plantation, mostly southern pine, with smaller areas dedicated to the beautiful endemic hoop pine (Araucaria cunninghamii). The remaining land is riparian, buffer, and native forest that HQP manages and protects.  The business maintains certification under international recognised sustainable forest management standards, which provides independent verification that the land, the waterways, and the communities that sit alongside the plantations are looked after properly.

Alongside HQP’s core work of managing productive, healthy plantations forests for long term success, HQP manages a large interface with plantation neighbours, the surrounding communities, permittees and visitors. The majority of HQP’s estate is located on State Forest tenure under a Plantation Licence Agreement managed by the Queensland State Government. Under this Licence, the plantations and surrounding buffer areas remain conditionally accessible the public. This significantly widens the engagement scope and complexity.

The stakeholder map

Sharon Beattie is HQP’s Community Engagement Manager, and the list of people she and her team engage with is long. Over 10 local government authorities, multiple state government departments, twenty First Nations groups, environmental and land care groups, graziers and apiarists and thousands of neighbouring landholders. Plus, more than a million recreational users a year including four-wheel drivers, horse riders, motorbike riders, and mountain bikers.

“We aim to build positive relationships, mutual understanding, and respect with industry, government, and our neighbours.”

Sharon Beattie, Community Engagement Manager

The old way was holding them back

For years, HQP used a bespoke internal system that had served the business well but did have some limitations.  Ongoing maintenance and updates to the system were limited as , it was not web-based and it was difficult to produce reports.

The real cost was not technical. It was that HQP could not track engagement and trends easily. Often, interactions went unrecorded because data entry as was fiddly. Trends went unnoticed due to reduced reporting functions.

“There was no quantification, and therefore no way to quantify and improve. It was just reactive.”

Sharon Beattie

Finding Simply Stakeholders

The introduction came the way good tools often do, through someone who had used it before and recommended it. HQP evaluated it alongside several other platforms and chose Simply Stakeholders.

Sharon advises that they chose Simply Stakeholders based on:

• a clean, simple and intuitive user interface
• strong IT security focus and governance
• great support from the Darzin team
• developing AI capability enabling more streamlined recording, categorising of interaction details
• capacity to manage and link complexity across stakeholder relationships (individuals within and across organisations)
• Spatial and web form capability
• An app version with offline capability.

Implementation took around six weeks to get reporting and task management up and running. As with any platform change, adoption was mixed at first. The people familiar with the previous system needed time to let go of it. The newer team members, Sharon included, found Simply Stakeholders noticeably easier to pick up.

What’s different now

Reports in minutes, not days. An executive or board overview of engagement activity took time to collate. Now it takes minutes. For a small team managing stakeholders across a state-sized estate, that time comes back in ways that matter.

“If the Board or the CEO wants an overview of stakeholder engagement it is now available within minutes. Previously, this task was very time consuming due to our geographic range and multiple interactions.

Sharon Beattie

Smarter complaint management. HQP has always responded to complaints quickly. What has changed is what happens next. The team can now look across complaint data, see clusters by issue or location, look for trends and then to fix the underlying cause rather than just the symptom.

A team that is still growing into it. Sharon is honest that the journey is not finished. Because engagement is not a daily activity for most users, habit is building slowly, and HQP is still refining tags, reports, and workflows to fit the reality of a continuous operation rather than a discrete project. That work is ongoing, and Simply Stakeholders is in it with them.

The bigger picture

The change Simply Stakeholders has supported at HQP is not really about software. It is about visibility. A business that manages a public-facing estate, works with government, industry and community partners, supports local economies through timber supply, and hosts a million recreational visitors a year needs to be able to see, understand, and learn from its engagement.

For Sharon and her team, that work now has a home.

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Project highlights

“Simply Stakeholders makes it easier for the team to see what needs actioning. And there’s real power in the analysis and reporting side of it. This combination gives each team member the confidence to dive in — they can see all the stakeholders connected to a particular site. As a result, they can focus more on what they need to do once they’re out there.”

Vanessa Rodgehiero, Community and stakeholder engagement manager at The Perth Mint

Company Background

Gold Corporation, trading as The Perth Mint, refines and manufactures gold, silver, and platinum bullion, coins and bars for domestic Australian organizations and international traders. Alongside this, they manufacture collector coins. 

Vanessa Rodeghiero is the Community and Stakeholder Engagement Manager — a role that involves her overseeing stakeholder engagement in relation to a project that aims to transform historical gold processing sites into beneficial projects for Western Australia.

She says, “As part of this work, it’s my role to keep all of the stakeholders informed about how the transformation will work and what’s happening. The projects my team and I work on need to deliver the best outcomes for the town or region.”  

The Challenge: Managing and Mapping Stakeholder Volume

The number of stakeholders involved in, or affected by the varied works that need to happen on the sites is considerable. So Vanessa and her team knew they’d be dealing with a high-volume of stakeholders and associated data. 

Just one site can involve a variety of stakeholder groups, such as local community members and councils, regulators, government departments, and internal stakeholders. Sometimes all of them. And, as Vanessa points out, “In Western Australia a lot of the sites involve native title rights, so I’m working with the traditional owners in all of those relevant areas as well. And there’s commercial interest, too,” says Vanessa. 

Keeping track of each stakeholder group, their relationship with the organization, and their requirements was a difficult task. Made harder as there was no centralized database. 

“The original process relied on a number of different people, liaising with different stakeholder groups,” says Vanessa. The result was a bunch of spreadsheets used by different internal stakeholders as each individual tracked their own work with external stakeholder groups. Sharing essential regulatory and approval information was time-consuming, proving that the spreadsheet system couldn’t support the volume of data. 

But that wasn’t the only difficulty with the existing system. 

“We had records of historical conversations happening with different stakeholders. Some went as far back as the 1980s and were stored in boxes of files and paperwork,” says Vanessa. 

Vanessa explains that it “made getting a grip of mapping those stakeholders difficult.” And this was a major issue and challenge for the project. “We want to be leading our project with the community at the heart of it — stakeholder engagement is central to the outcomes, so getting the mapping right was really important.”    

An Additional Obstacle

As well as needing a better way to map stakeholder relationships, Vanessa was mindful that some of her team weren’t from a stakeholder management background.

“I work alongside people with a mining engineering background, a geophysicist, and environmental specialists. For me it was important to create a framework and build a stakeholder management system for the team. One that they’d find accessible and actually use.”

An historic state battery. Credit: The Perth Mint.

The Solution: One Place to Centralise Community and Engagement Data

Thanks to her decades of experience in stakeholder management, Vanessa knew during the project’s early stages that stakeholder management software would be imperative. 

“There was no way we were going to be able to manage the number and the volume of stakeholders without proper organisational stakeholder mapping and software,” says Vanessa. 

When looking for a solution, Vanessa knew the right option would:

• Offer a fast and effective way to centralise the community and engagement data 
• Help all team members collect and create important report data in a time-effective manner  
• Allow the team to work offline in remote settings where data isn’t always available 
• Track stakeholder sentiment.  

Simply Stakeholders ticked all those boxes. 

Outcomes: Centralized Data Increases Efficiency, Is Convenient, and Instils Confidence

The Perth Mint has been using Simply Stakeholders since mid-2024. Their initial setup was swift, but it took around six months for it to really settle in. (“It took that long for us to reach a point where it really came into its own. But given the volume and different backgrounds of the team, we accounted for this.”)

Now it’s in regular, daily use by the team, bringing increased fluidity, cohesion, and ease to their work. 

“Part of choosing Simply Stakeholders has been the training, and training our team how to use the platform so they can understand the power and importance of tracking everything. In doing so, it supports them in all of their engagements,” says Vanessa. 

But it’s also helped with:

• Internal reporting: “It’s given us the ability for reporting that’s really critical, and made it simple.”
• Greater work flexibility: “The availability of an app helps during those times when our team members are working remotely.”
• Supporting live reporting: “Creating a live report (with the stakeholder’s permission) is helpful in terms of efficiency as I don’t have to wait to write things up when I’m back at my computer. The voice-to-text is a time-saver.” 

Currently, The Perth Mint is using the platform for:

• Stakeholder mapping to identify key/influential/impacted stakeholders in the project
• Task management to assign action items to the right person, and make sure it gets done
• Reporting to keep the executive up to date on key risks, opportunities and engagement metrics
• Customised dashboard for reporting for more flexibility and creating granular dashboards
• Data management to maintain shared records and build institutional knowledge of the history with key stakeholders
• Sentiment and issues analysis to proactively manage key elements of stakeholder relationships.

The Added Bonus: Discovering the Power of Tasks

As well as Simply Stakeholders meeting all of their initial software requirements, it’s also turned up a surprise. “An added bonus, which we didn’t really know about at the very start but is really helping us, is the tasks,” says Vanessa. “It helps us keep on top of everything. And that’s key to stakeholder management.” 

After an interaction, an action is needed. The task function allows users to assign the task to the relevant person. “The tasks really made it easier for the team; for them to see what needs actioning,” she said.  

The result is greater confidence. “With tasks clearly assigned, the team can dive in and see all of the stakeholders connected to a particular site. On a daily organisational level, this cuts down the amount of preparation time needed before visiting a site. So once they’re out there they can better focus on what they actually need to do.”

The Wrap Up

For The Perth Mint, Simply Stakeholders assists with stakeholder satisfaction. Particularly when navigating sensitive engagements, such as traditional owner engagement. 

So, if another company were to ask Vanessa about using Simply Stakeholders, what would she say to them?

“Simply Stakeholders gives everyone an easier way to manage a large amount of data. Even if they don’t come from a strictly stakeholder management background. Or, like me, they don’t consider themselves a technical person. Using this software, you’ll find that everyone in your team is able to produce the reports and evidence they need, with confidence.” 

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One of the world’s largest furniture brands was looking for ways to promote cross- team effective collaboration. Frustrated by the limitations of spreadsheets and org charts, they chose Simply Stakeholders to map their internal relationships.

Challenge

Strategic projects often require close teamwork between members of different teams. But in this organization, with more than 200,000 employees spread across three independent business units and hundreds of teams, it was extremely challenging for individuals to assess who they should be working with.

Our contact at this company soon realized that a simple org chart wasn’t going to be enough. They needed:

• To show more than just job titles and a 2D representation of hierarchy
• The ability to search for people with specific skills, specialties, and preferences
• To see past roles and real-world, interpersonal relationships
• Access to a history of all interactions from previous collaborations
• To easily update the information, with people constantly changing roles, moving departments, completing training, developing new relationships, and participating in new projects

They had tried using spreadsheets, but quickly discovered that to capture the minimum required data, they’d need scores of columns, a long list of difficult-to-use filters, and an array of ad-hoc comments. And this solution would have no easy way to search or display data. In addition to this, editing spreadsheets is tedious and prone to errors, so individuals would avoid doing it, leaving the document static and out of date.

Our contact had also tried using a CRM. But this didn’t work because CRMs are built for tracking customers and deals, not internal relationships. They could really only associate a single person with a single role in a single team within a single business unit. There was no way to track organic relationships, past roles, skills, experience, and so on.

Solution

After hearing about Simply Stakeholders’ relationship management capabilities, the organization booked a demo and undertook an initial trial of the platform. They were keen to see if it would tick all the boxes for managing internal relationships to increase collaboration.

Some of the features and capabilities they were keen to implement included:

• Contact Records – Storing contact information for internal stakeholders, including role, location, and email address
• Multiple Organizations – Being able to see the entire organization or see each business unit separately
• 3D Network Map – Visualizing the relationships between stakeholders on a 3D map that shows how each individual is connected (including connections outside of their official role)
• Relationship Health – Generating a Relationship Health Score to analyze the health of relationships based on interaction history
• Linked Stakeholders – Linking individuals to multiple roles, teams, business units, and other individuals
• Tagging – Tagging individuals with relevant info, such as skills and preferences
• Full History – Recording a full history of paid interactions and collaborations
• Searchability – The ability to search all data records and interactions
• Easy Updates – The ability to easily add new contact records and interactions via email plugins and integrations

Outcome

Since implementing Simply Stakeholders, users within this company can easily identify opportunities for collaboration between team members — even members who work in separate departments or who have never met before.

With the 3D Network Map, users can see who each person knows and how they’re connected (beyond their official role and org structure). They can easily discover more detail by clicking on any person in the network to see a complete audit trail or all interactions and past collaborations, along with Relationship Health. Linking and tagging capabilities make it easy to see key information at a glance.

Best of all, because the data delivers real value and the system is easy to use (no matter how much data is added), the company has a live database of information that users will continue to update and maintain.

Simply Stakeholders looks forward to continuing to support this client with tools to manage their internal stakeholders and relationships!