Example of Engagement Strategy with Stakeholders for Effective Communication

When running a project, it is important to know the interests of each stakeholder involved. This of course covers the interests of internal and external stakeholders. The roles of both are important to be able to maintain an effective project continuity.

Communicating with stakeholders needs attention in order to convey messages and build good communication. With a good strategy, it will be easier to achieve the goals of a project that is being worked on.

Effective Stakeholder Engagement Strategy

The success of the goals of a project is strongly influenced by stakeholders. Therefore, it is important to create attachments when communicating with them. Following are some strategies that can be applied as a pattern of interaction with stakeholders.

1. Survey your Stakeholders

From a company perspective, each employee has a formal advocacy and decision-making relationship. However, it is important to keep in mind the relationships that are owned by fellow employees. This allows you to learn about networking so that it can be used to solve problems.

While identifying your relationships, conduct surveys to identify new things. Know the issues that are an important focus for each employee as a stakeholder, then identify their interest in getting involved.

2. Prioritizing Stakeholders from Their Interests and Influence

If there are many stakeholders in your organization or company, prioritizing them based on their importance and influence is important. This is also related to what kind of influence will occur when certain issues occur.

This can help segment your engagement if stakeholders are less interested in getting involved. You may also want to limit how often you communicate with them. If certain stakeholders have a lot of influence, you might try a personal approach so they are more eager to work together.

3. Stakeholder Mapping to Measure ROI from Stakeholder Engagement

There is no one-size-fits-all strategy for stakeholder mapping. However, it is important to have a strategy in place to measure the return on investment of your stakeholder engagement efforts.

Stakeholder mapping is the process of organizing stakeholders based on internal organizational systems, such as levels of involvement, problem areas, or job roles. Mapping can be categorized from the things that make sense for the organization. The first mapping step for stakeholders is to identify who the stakeholders are and separate them into each category.

Mapping them will help evaluate your relationship with them. That way, you can fine-tune your communication strategy and engagement efforts depending on a person's position. It will also help to understand the character of the stakeholders and their influence and importance to a campaign.

4. Regularly Communicating Company Activities

Involving stakeholders can also be done through consistent communication of company activities. Through the launch of the Super Bowl advertisement, Coca Cola has delivered a message called "News from The Coca-Cola Company" which contains promotions about community initiatives or other releases.

With digital tools used to communicate with stakeholders, Coca Cola can track people who open and are interested in emails so they can be contacted further. The main key to do is to target stakeholders with clear content and create internal policies as a guide.

5. Making Documentation for Institutional Interests

Has a team member ever left your company and taken all their networking and institutional knowledge with them? This of course will complicate the process that is already happening within the organization.

So that there are no difficulties when there are stakeholders who are no longer part of your company or business, use a system to document them. This serves to maintain the availability of information in an organized way, not just in one's head.

Institutional knowledge is not the only benefit of documenting meetings. If several team members meet with the same person, refer to notes from previous meetings to avoid misunderstandings and confusion.

Include notes on how well the meeting went and update the stakeholder mapping based on the quality of the particular meeting. While taking the time to record meetings can be an extra step in your work, you can also use tools to make it easier.

Of the various engagement strategies that can be applied in companies, the aim is to position stakeholders at the right level of involvement. It is very important to pay attention to and maintain good relations with stakeholders in an effective way.