Engaging Stakeholders Early – Why and How
If you are like me then sometimes you can feel like you are being engaged and consulted on every topic and issue that you could possibly imagine. If you are also like me, sometimes you are really interested in providing your input when it is something that is important to you or impacts you directly.
Increasingly, it is becoming more commonplace for organizations and governments to regularly engage and consult with the people they serve and work with. There are a number of reasons to do this: evidence-based decision making, the community may have a good solution to a complex or persistent policy issue, or it is a regulatory requirement to do so. Regardless of the reason, well-planned engagement is key to project success. One issue that projects may face is that stakeholder engagement does not begin until late in the process, sometimes after critical decisions have been made.
Outlined below are some compelling reasons to engage your stakeholders and the public early on your projects.
Saves you time later by getting to know your audience
While it is not advised to engage stakeholders for the sole reason of gauging perspectives or acceptance of a particular issue, engaging early in the project lifespan gives you the opportunity to understand concerns from the outset. You may discover that your assumptions about what will be a challenge are not top of mind for stakeholders or that something completely different will be a challenge. It gives you an opportunity as a project manager or engagement coordinator to meet your stakeholders where they are at, and to adjust your engagement plan to focus on issues that are specific to stakeholder groups that may have a greater influence over the project outcome.
What happens if you do not engage early and do not know how your stakeholders feel? You may risk the success of the project. Early engagements can give you indications of past issues that may have never been resolved. You may face a situation where you can not make progress on your project without addressing those past touch points.
Engaging early gives you time to adjust your project’s timeline if there are unexpected events or even to change the scope of the project, if required.
Figure out how you can best engage with your audience
Selecting appropriate and compatible engagement techniques and communication methods for your target audience is best practice in stakeholder engagement. Thinking about and being familiar with who your audience is may give you some indication of how those people would like to be engaged or is most effective, but if it is a project exploring new subject areas or groups of people, it is a good practice to ask those groups of people how to be best engaged.
You may learn that online surveys are the most convenient way to reach your stakeholders, or that having a focused in-person workshop makes more sense. It is important to be open to the needs of your stakeholders. Your audience may require specific accommodations for them to be able to participate such as childcare or advanced notice to be able to take off work. Really, you are providing a courtesy to your stakeholders by acknowledging their unique needs and asking them upfront how to make it work for them.
Gives you time to report on your engagement
You may notice that your municipality or organization publishes something along the lines of a “What We Heard” report. These are becoming more commonplace as a demonstration that engagement efforts and data are aggregated and transparent. It also allows stakeholders to review the information they have provided for accuracy and representativeness. These documents are helpful for organizations and stakeholders to better understand the whole picture when it comes to the project or issue at hand. These reports may demonstrate that there are many diverging perspectives or that diverse stakeholders feel more similarly than different. In addition to increasing accountability, reporting on engagement may also help you learn to improve your engagement efforts for the next time.
Gives you time to implement lessons learned from your engagement
Stakeholder engagement is a relatively new component of doing business across sectors. It is becoming more widespread for governments and organizations to have dedicated stakeholder engagement staff. Because this practice and way of doing things is relatively new for some, there is space for practitioners and organizations to be creative, and to learn and improve on their efforts. Engaging your stakeholders early lends time to being able to adjust practices along the way or to take a step back throughout the project to review whether the approach is giving you the results you had intended.
This process compliments another cornerstone process of evaluation. Evaluation is a critical practice in project management and more commonly known to take place in the public health sector, that allows for the systematic reflection of processes and objectives. Regardless if your organization has a formal evaluation process, it is good practice to take time to ask yourself and your team questions about how the process went and how it could be improved for future projects.
Relationships are better and it increases transparency and trust
Ultimately, engaging your stakeholders early and appropriately, reporting on your engagements, and adjusting your approach to engagement will help to build positive relationships. When there is more trust and transparency, people are more likely to take part in your programs and be engaged – the dream!
One thing to keep in mind is that you don’t have to have it all figured out. Every time you engage with people, it will be different and that is ok. What makes a good stakeholder engagement practitioner is someone who is flexible, creative, and at ease with knowing that they may not have it all right. As the engagement practice grows and evolves, we can learn from each other to do the best we can with what we have learned.