Stakeholder engagement
Transparent, respectful and timely engagement with stakeholders is crucial to successful communication. Whether your stakeholders are in industry, government or the community, our best practice, evidence-based framework enables us to implement comprehensive strategic communication and stakeholder engagement plans that will help you achieve your business objectives.
Our approach
Our stakeholder engagement projects follow a proven process:
- Listen and learn – Listening is a fundamental part of our stakeholder engagement approach. The contentgroup team is dedicated to reviewing your documents and speaking with you and your team to kick off the project and develop an appropriate research methodology.
- Research – The next step is to perform the relevant research to ensure our work is as detailed as possible. We craft questions and engage in stakeholder consultations, following the defined research methodology.
- Plan – This phase includes stakeholder mapping, grouping stakeholders by influence, interest and information needs. We will also identify key opportunities for engagement and develop the project output – typically a stakeholder engagement strategy. The strategy includes risks and benefits, accountabilities, key messaging, priorities, budget and reporting requirements.
- Implement – A range of engagement and messaging will be deployed to your audiences via the most appropriate channels. This communication is tailored to build on existing stakeholder relationships and establish new ones as appropriate.
- Evaluate – As part of the stakeholder engagement strategy, we recommend ways to measure the impact that the program has had. This includes secondary interviews with key stakeholder groups within an appropriate timeframe to ensure that the strategy has delivered against its objectives.
Principles of stakeholder engagement
- Purposeful – We begin with the end in mind. Before we start, we understand what we are trying to achieve and why we want to achieve it.
- Inclusive – We think about who can add value to the discussion in each engagement activity and identify the relevant stakeholders. We consider the engagement activity from the participants’ perspectives and assess their needs, wants and barriers to making a meaningful contribution.
- Timely – We engage the right stakeholders at the right time to gain the right insights for each of the work packages. We are reliable and professional in our stakeholder engagement planning and implementation.
- Clear – We are open and transparent in our dealings with stakeholders. We are clear about our expectations from the engagement and we communicate the limits of participants’ ability to influence and contribute to the ultimate outcome. We define, then actively manage their expectations.
- Open – We encourage all engagement participants to actively contribute and listen carefully to their contributions. Stakeholder engagement is a two-way activity.
