For today’s blog, we’re going to share how we’ve developed our Stakeholder Relationship Management (SRM) software, Jambo, to help our government clients meet the unique challenges they face.
In this blog, we’ll cover:
- Challenge #1: Keeping stakeholder and community information accessible and organized
- Keeping track of issues and commitments
- Avoiding messy contact management
- Challenge #2: Ensuring your organization is being represented consistently by your team
- Preparing for stakeholder meetings
- Keeping everyone accountable and working as a team
- Challenge #3: Saving time to ensure your team can focus on other vital tasks
- Avoiding time loss due to data input processes
- Saying goodbye to time-consuming spreadsheet management
- Challenge #4: Ensuring your information is easily shareable and transparent
- Handling Freedom of Information (FOI) requests
- Addressing data requests from senior government officials and management teams
Challenge #1: Keeping stakeholder and community information accessible and organized
Keeping track of issues and commitments
When it comes to stakeholder issues and commitments (aka promises), your team needs to be able to have access to updated information like:
- How many issues and commitments are currently open?
- How long have they been open?
- When are they supposed to be fulfilled? Do they have a due date?
- What communications are connected to the issues and commitments?
- What team members are connected to each issue and commitment?
- What level of risk is associated with them? (especially regarding issues)
To meet your stakeholder’s expectations, keep your projects on schedule and keep your organization protected, you and your team need access to all your data. When data is scattered in different spreadsheets, saved on personal desktops, or scribbled on notepads, it’s impossible to answer these questions quickly and easily, which is a significant problem as we know commitments and issues can be time-sensitive. But, even if they can’t be resolved for years into the future, forgetting about them is a real risk, so you need to be updated and keep issues and commitments front of mind in organized software.
How Jambo helps
With Jambo, you can easily answer the questions above. Our software gives you and your team an organized space to check for issues and commitments associated with one of your projects, across all your projects, or with specific stakeholders. Additionally, Jambo empowers you to dive into each issue and commitment and understand the full story associated with each one.
Colour-coded materiality matrix and issues timeline
Our colour-coded materiality matrix helps you to organize your issues according to their level of impact and priority. This way, you and your team can prioritize your riskiest issues without forgetting about the others. Additionally, our issues timeline allows you and your team to gain a deeper visual understanding of a specific issue quickly and easily.
With all your information organized in Jambo, you and your team know exactly where to go to gain important updates.
To learn more about how an SRM can help you manage stakeholder issues, check out our blog!
Avoid messy contact management
Stakeholders are essential to your project’s success, so you need to keep organized, accessible and complete contact cards. When your organization’s contact management is a mess, this is a significant problem, as it impairs your team’s ability to understand the history of your stakeholder information. You also risk missing important updates that could help you build stronger stakeholder relationships.
How Jambo helps
With Jambo’s contact profiles, you and your team can quickly see basic contact details and more detailed information like the engagement history, notes logged from your team on that stakeholder, and any issues and commitments (including their statuses). This information is presented in an organized manner and is easy to find within the software.
Challenge #2: Ensuring your organization is being represented consistently by your team
Preparing for stakeholder meetings
When different team members meet with the same stakeholders, they must represent your organization consistently and respectfully. To do this, your team needs to understand information like:
- Who from your team has already spoken with this stakeholder?
- What comments, issues, and concerns has this stakeholder shared with your team?
- Does this stakeholder have any preferences they’ve shared with your team? (e.g., meeting locations)
Whether your team is planning a significant stakeholder meeting later this year or has been asked to jump into a last-minute meeting with a stakeholder they’ve never engaged before, you all need your stakeholder information to be accessible and understandable. Without access to all this information, you risk showing up to meetings unprepared, which can negatively affect these trusting relationships that your team has worked so hard to build.
How Jambo helps
Beyond the basic contact information, Jambo’s contact profiles offer everyone on your team quick insights into all the logged stakeholder information, including:
- What’s the stakeholder’s contact information?
- Which organizations are they associated with?
- What roles do they hold with each organization?
- What’s their entire engagement history with your team?
- Who was the last person on your team to speak with this person? What was shared?
- Are there any issues raised or commitments made to this stakeholder?
- Have they shared any preferences with your organization?
With easy access to this information, you and your team are empowered to engage in consistent and respectful ways, allowing you to pick up wherever your team has left off.
Keeping everyone accountable and working as a team
A big part of working with a team is understanding what everyone is working on, being regularly updated on progress, and working together to reach goals. When things get confusing and disorganized with no easy way to bring everyone together, teamwork starts falling to the side. When this happens, your stakeholders will notice the inconsistencies, impacting their trust in your organization.
How Jambo helps
Who was the last to contact a stakeholder?
As we mentioned above, understanding who on your team has engaged with a stakeholder is important. With this information, you can reference what’s been shared with your team in previous meetings (even if you weren’t part of these meetings) for consistency and familiarity, which builds trust. This information also lets you know who to reach out to on your team if you have any questions about this stakeholder or any of the engagements they were part of, so everyone is always accountable for their work and can collaborate more efficiently.
Team task management
With Jambo’s task management feature, you and your team can assign tasks to each other and easily see once they’ve been completed. It’s so helpful to have the entire team aware of these tasks and helps to keep everyone accountable for their progress. It creates more understanding amongst your team and will ensure that your engagement and consultation efforts are more consistent and focused.
Jambo helps keep everyone on the same page, so your stakeholders always know what to expect from you and your organization, building stronger relationships for better data and more positive outcomes for your projects.
Interested in learning more about how an SRM can help you build stronger stakeholder trust and relationships, check out our blog!
Challenge #3: Saving time to ensure your team can focus on other vital tasks
Avoiding time loss due to data input processes
We know that without a quality SRM, adding communication records can be a headache, especially for teams who manage a lot of important tasks and a lot of stakeholder data. Beyond losing vital resource time, without an easy and quick way to log communication records, your organization is open to risks associated with poorly organized data, especially data gaps.
How Jambo helps
The Jambo development team has streamlined the process to ensure that adding information into the system is fast and easy, so you can use your time much more efficiently.
Email Integration
One of the ways we’ve ensured that getting your vital data into Jambo is as easy as possible is through our email integration. With this feature, you can automatically log communications you and your teams have had with stakeholders by emailing the record to your Jambo project. Our system logic translates these emails into readable communication records while also including any attachments from those emails in the system.
Another great time-saving feature is Jambo’s automatic PDF conversion for emails. Often government agencies require a copy of an email to be kept as part of the official record, which means staff must manually print/save each email to PDF and store it wasting their valuable time. Jambo streamlines this process with automation and makes it so easy! Emails submitted to the system are automatically converted to PDF and added as an attachment to the communication record in Jambo. It makes your records more complete and ready to share.
To learn more about the Jambo user experience, check out our blog!
Saying goodbye to time-consuming spreadsheet management
Many organizations try to make do with spreadsheets. But as we’ve seen time and time again, stakeholder management in spreadsheets is a confusing, disorganized and frustrating process.
Common problems with spreadsheets for stakeholder management include:
- Multiple spreadsheets are messy and complicated to manage
- Inconsistent inputting methods are common with spreadsheets
- Spreadsheet reporting is confusing and time-consuming
- Spreadsheet management wastes time
For the complete list of reasons to break up with spreadsheets, check out our blog!
How Jambo helps
Jambo operates as your team’s single source of truth. With all your information in Jambo, you always know where to get the information you need quickly and efficiently, allowing you to quickly understand your project’s progress and complete all your stakeholder management tasks more efficiently.
Challenge #4: Ensuring your information is easily sharable and transparent
Handling FOI requests
Freedom of Information (FOI) requests can be common in government, but putting together the information in a readily sharable and comprehensive way can be a challenge. If a request is made for relevant records pertaining to a specific stakeholder or topic, you and your team need to be confident that you know how to access all their stakeholder information and can share it quickly.
How Jambo helps
With all your stakeholder information centralized in Jambo, you can easily respond to Freedom of Information requests. With our configurable reporting options, you can easily create a report that meets the specific engagement information request and get a detailed report to share.
Addressing data requests from senior government officials and management teams
Beyond FOI requests, it’s also common for managers or senior government officials to request access to your stakeholder data but building organized and comprehensive reports can be time-consuming.
How Jambo helps
Whether the request is for a specific history of engagement with a stakeholder, or a report on everything related to them across all projects/programs, with Jambo, you can meet these requests. These reports are and are organized and easy to understand.
With these reports, you can ensure you’re able to respond to requests for information, address expectations and keep everyone updated in the easiest and most transparent way possible.
Next Steps: Jambo for government
To see how Jambo can meet your organization’s needs, visit our Government page or book a 15-minute call with a Jambo expert!
