Maintaining accurate contact details and engagement history is critical and central to excellent stakeholder management. But many organisations don’t put in place sufficient resources or measures to ensure stakeholder databases or CRMs are always accurate and reliable.
Some executives think that if they buy a software solution, this “magic tool” will immediately solve their organisation’s stakeholder data quality issues. But this is optimistic to say the least and you should never expect any system to be a silver bullet!
You should always put in place robust procedures and a dedicated resource to manage your database. However, a good stakeholder management system will make life easier and significantly improve your engagement performance.
With reliable stakeholder intelligence, accurate contact details and well organised stakeholder groups, the benefits will flow with a carefully executed engagement plan. Enquiries and complaints will drop significantly and the time you save reacting to problems can be used to engage proactively with stakeholders. Overall, there will be less stress, relationships will be enhanced and better business outcomes will be achieved.
What you can expect from an accurate and well-designed database:
- Always be ready to respond to urgent enquiries, announce important initiatives and send out invitations to events.
- Use your engagement history in each community to gauge relationship levels to inform your communications strategy for new projects and initiatives.
- Enhance your reputation with stakeholders by sending them accurate, relevant and timely information – in line with what they have asked for.
- Achieve excellent attendance at community and stakeholder events.
- Get faster responses to surveys and feedback with the right people participating.
- Reach the right audiences for communication campaigns through targeted marketing.
- Improve the accuracy of your contact details and minimise effort following up on bounced emails.
Common pitfalls
In stark contrast, without accurate data, you could experience many pitfalls and your relationship levels could decline.
- Your important stakeholders may not receive the right information or invitations to attend events or provide feedback on proposals.
- Staff may not know about the latest contacts and issues, which will harm your reputation.
- Key information or important stakeholders may be missed when developing strategies.
Organisations also often seek feedback without carefully planning how they will receive, analyse and report on large volumes of information. Where this occurs, the extra workload on your team will be enormous – something that could have been avoided.
Learning from the experts and our clients
Since the first Consultation Manager platform was developed in collaboration with industry experts, we have continually consulted with our users and added tools to make stakeholder engagement more productive. This also includes many new features to help manage the database and large flows of information.
In my next article, I cover off top tips to help you maintain an accurate stakeholder database. Make sure you’ve signed up for blog updates so that you don’t miss it.
RELATED READING
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10 Reasons why a Stakeholder Management System is Your Next Competitive Advantage
