« How to Scold Professionals Effectively | Home | Geotagging + Kubrick Mashup = The Future »

How to Reach Out to Your Stakeholders

By crooky | August 23, 2008

A lot of people don’t know this about me but before I became a consultant, I was a marketing/communications/public relations guy. Working with stakeholder groups was a big part of what I did for a living and when I did grad school at SFU, I even wrote my thesis on stakeholder engagement [READ]. Sometimes, for the sake of convenience, we try to reach out to stakeholders using their easiest means possible - electronic communications. I’ve been pushed in recent years to leverage electronic communications for stakeholder engagement and I’m learning that this is not an effective way to reach out to folks.

Electronic panels, e-mail campaigns and web forums are not community engagement. They’re substitutes for community engagement. I firmly believe that people want to hear a friendly voice on the phone or shake your hand and see your smile. When I was with Dow Chemicals, we would go out into the community and spend face time with our neighbours. When I was with ICBC, we spent a lot of time on the road talking with our stakeholders about drinking and driving as well as new safety programs we were introducing.

Just yesterday, I sent out a mass e-mail to a stakeholder group that I represent through my involvement with the SFU Alumni Association Board of Directors. One of the responses really caught my eye:

“I also agree about social media use through things like LinkedIn. What I think you should focus on in strategic planning is how to make the [SFU] alumni association a place of emotional connection for younger graduates. This emotional connection does not happen when someone like you, whom I’ve never met, connects with me. It happens, rather, when someone I went to school with reaches out to me.”

That’s an important point that a lot of folks miss when they try to leverage Facebook or LinkedIn for their organization - relationships are key. You can’t, as I tried to do, show up out of the blue and interject into someone’s social network. You need to establish the connections in real life (in person or over the phone) and then work your way into social media networks.

In my grad school thesis, I laid out four best-practice methodologies for effectively engage your stakeholders:

1. Appropriate timing
2. A fair participation process
3. Meaningful input from all stakeholders
4. Adequate provision of technical information

Translated into more general principles, here’s what you need to consider:

1. Make sure that you provide enough time for everyone to give their input. Take into consideration if it’s a time people are normally on vacation or not. Also know that you need to give most people 4-8 weeks to respond. Everyone’s busy.

2. Make sure that you’re not favouring input from one group of stakeholders over another. Don’t avoid input from people that you know are going to say controversial things. Their input counts too.

3. Make sure that everyone gets a chance to be heard and that you’re not just putting something to a vote. Dissent and disagreement needs to be recorded as well as agreement. Also make sure that you get your stakeholders involved at the planning stages of a project, not just at the decision points. The earlier you can get people involved, the better.

4. Make sure you give as much information to your stakeholders as possible. No, you don’t need to give them hardcopies of everything. In this day and age, I think electronic repositories of documentation are the norm. However, you need to let people know where this information is and/or provide them copies of the information on portable media like a CD or USB key.

Share/Save/Bookmark

Topics: Policy, social issues |

One Response to “How to Reach Out to Your Stakeholders”

  1. shanti Says:
    August 24th, 2008 at 7:24 pm

    I agree. The use of social media is best to supplement your face-to-face meetings, never to replace. Social media is great to maintain the relationship. In some cases, it can be a facilitator to the face-to-face like meetup.com.

Comments