Whether you are a government department, corporate organisation, not-for-profit or a small business, it is essential that you comprehensively identify all of your stakeholders or customers.
Too many organisations and businesses fail to develop a stakeholder engagement plan.
This failure means that they often miss important sectors, as well as individual stakeholders, which can impact heavily on project success or their business’ bottom line. By failing to identify all their stakeholders, there is a huge risk that their client or customer engagement will miss the mark and fail dismally, which may result in a negative outcome.
Here are four reasons why it is important to identify your stakeholders:
- It enables effective targeted messaging: each stakeholder group will have different interests or issues, and your messaging should be targeted for each group. It is important that all stakeholders feel they are appropriately informed, and that their feedback is both valued, considered and responded to in a timely way.
- It creates an understanding of key communication timeframes: what is an important date to a corporate stakeholder engaged in a project may be irrelevant to a community stakeholder and vice versa. This allows you to establish key timeframes and ensure messaging is executed in an appropriate and timely manner.
- It enables identification of risks and issues: by identifying your stakeholders and engaging them in meaningful two-way communication, you will increase your chance of understanding any potential risks or issues before they arise and being able to put in place appropriate mitigations.
- It assists in identifying appropriate communication channels and tools: by researching your clients or customers, you will understand how they like to receive information – letter, brochure, report or online, via social media or emails, through a town hall meeting, an expo or other forums etc. You can identify if the information should be presented in English, transcribed into other languages or even graphically depicted.
If you spend the time to find out as possible about your stakeholders, you will increase your chances of successfully engaging with them.