Are you proactively engaging with your stakeholders and community?
You’ve heard the adage – if you don’t measure it, you cannot manage it! The same applies to community and stakeholder engagement.
Having a stakeholder management system in place enables organisations to track stakeholder issues, evaluate relationships and measure performance. And if you can move from being reactive to proactive, you will be amazed at the improved results.
Ongoing research shows that the majority of customers, communities and stakeholders want to be engaged proactively and that this approach has the potential to reap significant benefits for all affected parties.
At a corporate level, excellent engagement performance provides opportunities to further align business practices with societal needs and expectations, helping to drive long-term sustainability and shareholder value.
And for professional practitioners, being proactive will make engagement more efficient, effective and enjoyable. You will build better relationships with your stakeholders and business decisions will more likely be supported. If done well, you will find that you get more quality time with stakeholders and the number of ongoing transactional issues will drop significantly.
Most government organisations now have in place stakeholder and community engagement policies, dedicated resources and are striving to be more proactive. Gone are the days when you could introduce a change or build new infrastructure without genuine engagement. In today’s society, affected stakeholders and interested parties will lobby government and the media and planned works can be delayed or scrapped, costing millions of dollars.
What are the benefits of proactive stakeholder engagement?
The Victorian Department of Environment, Land, Water and Planning’s website highlights many benefits of successful engagement for government, stakeholders, and communities.
But here are two tangible examples from my personal experience prior to joining the Consultation Manager team.
These case studies highlight the benefits of proactive vs reactive engagement. Be sure to subscribe to the blog to receive the full posts direct to your inbox.
Proactive engagement in action:
- Proactive engagement with Members of Parliament: 90% reduction in Ministerial letters
Anyone who has worked in government knows how much effort is required to respond to community or stakeholder issues raised with Members of Parliament or Ministers. Prior to implementing a proactive relationship management program with MPs and their electoral staff, my branch received more than 400 written ministerial enquiries a year in the Perth metropolitan area.
How did a proactive approach to engagement help reduce the 400 ministerial letters to 28, leading to better business outcomes, improved customer service and a saving of thousands of dollars for Water Corporation? Read the full case study.
- Proactive engagement on a contentious project: Securing community and stakeholder support
The WA Groundwater replenishment scheme is an innovative concept where treated wastewater is further treated to drinking water standards and recharged into groundwater supplies. How did a proactive approach to engagement with regulators, stakeholders and the community help build support and ensure approval of the project? Stay tuned for the full case study.
Need stakeholder engagement support?
If are introducing strategic stakeholder engagement systems into your organisation for the first and don’t know where to start, or would like tips on how to manage your stakeholder information efficiently, feel free to email me your questions john@consultationmanager.com.
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Learn how other organisations manage small and large scale engagement projects. Download the free information sheet for your industry.
RELATED READING
Make Your Community Engagement Meaningful Using These 3 Tactics
How Proactive Stakeholder Engagement Reduced Ministerials by 90%
Case Study: Novo Rail – Winner of the COI Award for Community Engagement
10 Reasons why a Stakeholder Management System is Your Next Competitive Advantage
