Every global organisation has stakeholders: people and organisations that have a stake in your success and can impact your ability to achieve your goals. This makes stakeholder engagement — meaning the process of identifying, monitoring, communicating, and interacting with stakeholders in a thoughtful way — a crucial component of any public affairs programme.
Discover our five-step method for a successful stakeholder engagement strategy across geographies.
Define Your Objective
Identify Your Stakeholders
Prioritise Your Stakeholders
Assemble Your Toolkit
Outline Your Game Plan
1. Define Your Objective
Outline the objectives of stakeholder engagement in each market. This may include outcomes such as:
Having your stakeholders advocate on your behalf in a certain jurisdiction;
Gaining insights from stakeholders who faced similar challenges in different regions to inform your own policy or approach;
Enlisting their support to enact a specific change in policy;
Building relationships to help mitigate potential business risk.
In short: define how and where your stakeholders can help you move the needle on your issue, and outline the actions you need them to take.
2. Identify Your Stakeholders
Next, map the players that hold influence over the issues your organisation cares about — these are the key stakeholders who impact your organisation’s ability to achieve its goals. Remember that your stakeholders can be internal or external, and may be found in several areas: public policy, the corporate world, wider industry, community players, locally, or internationally.
Move faster on identifying your stakeholders with Quorum International. Easily find the people who can move the needle on your issues with up-to-date contact information for international officials and comprehensive social media monitoring.
3. Prioritise Your Stakeholders
With your stakeholders identified, shift your focus to how to prioritise them. This helps you to develop a tailored approach towards stakeholder groups — accounting for variations in business culture and communication styles across regions — which makes your engagement strategy more impactful and intentional.
There are a number of ways to categorise and organise your stakeholders, including grouping them by issue topic, with an interest-influence matrix, or by your team’s relationship with them. For a deep dive, see our five techniques for prioritising your stakeholders.
4. Assemble Your Toolkit
Set yourself up for success with a toolkit that covers each stage of your engagement efforts:
Monitor stakeholders: create an early warning system to alert you of anything that could impact your organisation, no matter where the conversation is happening.
Communicate at the right time: use integrated tools to reach out to the most relevant stakeholders when it matters. With Quorum Outbox, you can send a personalised email to multiple stakeholders at once, making your communications even more strategic and targeted.
Measure your impact: track your activity and report on your return on investment with a tool such as Quorum Dashboards. Dashboards are completely customisable, auto-updating, and downloadable so you can have an executive-level report on stakeholder engagement ready in seconds.
5. Outline Your Game Plan
Finally, bring all your insights together into a thoughtful plan for monitoring, communicating, and engaging with each of your stakeholder groups. Be mindful that stakeholders may increase or decrease in priority as the policy landscape shifts over time.
Best Practice: Consider an integrated tool like Quorum to curate and centralise valuable insights on your stakeholder engagement efforts across markets — helping you to map, track, change, and report on your activities, all in one place.
Learn more about Quorum
Learn why public affairs professionals use Quorum software to work smarter and move faster on stakeholder engagement