Building and maintaining good stakeholder relationships is essential for your organization's success, but managing them can be challenging. Keeping stakeholders engaged and informed, while staying on top of all the associated information and data, can be overwhelming. The good news is that there are ways you can improve stakeholder relationship management.
What is stakeholder relationship management?
Stakeholder relationship management is the process of building and maintaining positive relationships with individuals and groups that can impact or be impacted by your organization's work.
The goal is to create trust, foster collaboration, and ensure mutual understanding. Effective stakeholder relationship management helps align stakeholders with your vision and goals. Ultimately, it supports long-term success by turning stakeholders into partners and advocates.
Why is stakeholder relationship management important?
Stakeholder relationship management is crucial because it fosters trust and credibility with the individuals and groups that significantly impact your success. It also reduces risk by identifying and addressing potential issues early.
When stakeholders are aligned with your vision, they are more likely to support your initiatives. Strong relationships create long-term value through loyalty, collaboration, and advocacy.
How to improve stakeholder relationship management
This blog post provides five tips for improving stakeholder relationship management. Following these tips can help you build stronger connections with your stakeholders.
1. Be proactive with stakeholder engagement planning
Planning to reach out to your stakeholders as early as possible is key to successful stakeholder relationship management. A proactive approach to stakeholder engagement is essential for fostering trust and loyalty among your stakeholders.
Start by identifying your stakeholders and their needs and interests. Once you have a clear understanding of your stakeholders, you can create a stakeholder engagement plan that outlines your engagement goals, communication channels, and the frequency of communication.
If you need help mapping your stakeholders, use our free stakeholder mapping template →
2. Communicate with stakeholders regularly
Ensure that your stakeholder engagement plan includes establishing a regular communication cadence.
This can involve setting up regular check-ins, sending newsletters or updates, or even holding planned events or webinars. You should also plan to communicate regularly with stakeholders about any new developments, changes in policies or procedures, or other vital information (before they hear it from another source).
Ensuring your messaging is clear, concise, and relevant to your stakeholders' interests and needs is essential. Messaging should also be consistent from all employees across your organization.
By communicating regularly, you can build trust and credibility with your stakeholders, demonstrate your commitment to developing a relationship with them, and achieve your goal of keeping them engaged and informed.
If you need help emailing your stakeholders, check out our free templates →
3. Track all your stakeholder information
You need a comprehensive record of all interactions between your stakeholders and your organization. It's important to track everything from your engagement history with them to their communication preferences. You can use this information to personalize communication, engage with them more effectively, and build trusting stakeholder relationships. You can better understand each stakeholder by tracking everything, including their needs, interests, and behaviour patterns.
Tracking all your stakeholders' information will help you later when fulfilling promises or commitments, or reporting on project progress to decision makers or regulatory bodies.
Whatever tool you choose for tracking your stakeholder information, ensure it's easy to use and can be integrated with your other engagement efforts. Some organizations prefer to use spreadsheets, such as Google Sheets or Excel, but these tools have several limitations. Many stakeholder engagement professionals are switching to software like Jambo, which is made specifically for managing stakeholder engagement and consultation.
4. Communicate and collaborate with your team
Stakeholder relationship management is a team effort, and it's crucial to communicate and collaborate with your team proficiently.
Collaborating with your team also means ensuring everyone involved in stakeholder engagement and maintaining stakeholder relationships is working towards the same goal. This requires clear and consistent communication of goals and objectives, as well as regular team check-ins to monitor progress and adjust strategies.
To facilitate better communication and collaboration, consider using various tools, such as specialized stakeholder engagement software, instant messaging platforms, and regular meetings. These tools can help you stay organized, share information quickly and easily, and ensure everyone is on the same page.
5. Continuously learn and adapt
Effective stakeholder relationship management requires ongoing learning and adaptation to ensure ongoing success. It's important to remember that not all stakeholder groups and communities will be the same or react similarly to your engagement plan. Review your data to show what is working and what isn't, and use it to refine your engagement strategy if needed.
In addition, it's essential to be open to feedback and suggestions from your stakeholders. This may involve conducting surveys, focus groups, or other types of research to gain a deeper understanding of their needs and preferences. You should also use this feedback to adjust your engagement strategy if needed.
Remember, changing your strategies is acceptable if they're not yielding the desired results. It's more important to demonstrate to your stakeholders that you value their input and are receptive to their feedback than to persist in communicating or engaging with them in a manner that isn't resonating well.
If you're looking for new ways to refresh your stakeholder engagement strategy, check out our blog, where we share tips on making it more meaningful →
Now that we understand the importance of stakeholder relationship management for your organization, we can proceed. By being proactive, communicating regularly with stakeholders, tracking all relevant stakeholder information, collaborating with your team, and continuously learning, you can enhance your entire stakeholder relationship management process, making it easier and more effective.
Remember, investing time and effort in building strong relationships with your stakeholders will ultimately pay dividends. For additional tips on stakeholder relationship management, check out our free guide.
