Four Valuable Lessons from Eight Years of Stakeholder Engagement
For the last eight years, I have had the opportunity to oversee various stakeholder communities, specifically volunteers, in the non-profit space. I've managed hundreds of association chapter leaders and mentors of high school students, as well as small groups of volunteer committee members for an arts organization. Engaging a stakeholder community can be exciting if you have a wealth of ideas and strategies to activate them. However, it can also be challenging if you don't know where to start. Here are a few lessons I've learned along the way to keep communities engaged.
The key to building a thriving stakeholder community is making your stakeholders (i.e., partners, volunteers, members) feel valuable. You can achieve this through consistent communication, offering impactful services/programs, acknowledging their efforts, and creating community among them.
1) Sharing Relevant and Consistent Communication
Determining how and when to communicate with your key stakeholders is essential. Stakeholder members must feel like they are kept abreast of what's happening within the organization and the activities that pertain to them. They should be aware of the various programs, events, and campaigns designed for their benefit, as well as relevant organizational news, changes, and challenges. You don't want them to feel ill-prepared or out-of-the loop on information they need to be aware of.
There are multiple communication methods to help keep communities up to date. I have used monthly newsletters, mass texting platforms, slack, internal community forums, social media, and more to engage my stakeholder communities with timely and consistent information. I've also learned that communication is a two-way street. I always strive to provide opportunities for community members to share their ideas, concerns, and questions with me.
2) Offering Impactful Services and Programs
More than likely, stakeholders are a part of communities to gain something personally or professionally. They could be interested in funding, connections, professional development, resources, opportunities to give back, and more. Regardless of their reasons, ensuring you are offering quality services and programs that meet their needs is crucial. Depending on your community's size, understanding their needs can be done via one-on-one conversations, focus groups, surveys, polls, or simple observations. After reviewing the gathered information, you will need to assess whether or not your current services/programs are effective and determine if you need to pivot and create new services/programs.
In one of my previous roles, I led a volunteer experience research project where I held multiple one-on-one virtual interviews with a wide range of mentors to understand their challenges, likes, and dislikes of the program and general experience since becoming a volunteer. After synthesizing the information, I shared common themes and recommendations to department leads to change how the organization recruits, onboards, equips, and engages volunteers. Instead of asking, "What can you build for stakeholders?, we must ask, "What can we build with our stakeholders?" Incorporating their feedback in the decision-making process increases engagement and clarifies how to create and enhance your service or program.
3) Acknowledging Their Efforts
Stakeholders want to feel seen! Acknowledging their work in helping you achieve company goals or highlighting their accomplishments due to utilizing your service/program is vital. The cost of recognizing stakeholders can vary, but the impact will be invaluable. Budget-friendly ways to showcase members of your community can be featuring them in newsletters, websites, social media, and community meetings. You can even do something simple like writing a thank you or congratulatory card. If you have more cash to spend, throw an appreciation party or an awards ceremony to thank them for their time and contributions, or send them a generous gift card to step it up a notch! To recognize former stakeholder communities I've managed, I have sent holiday cards, interviewed and highlighted volunteer success stories in newsletters, planned several appreciation socials, and implemented "coffee on us" campaigns during Thanksgiving and National Volunteer Week.
4) Creating Community Connections
Lastly, while your main priority should be activating your stakeholders to engage with you, you should also create opportunities for your stakeholders to engage with each other. A true community supports one another and has spaces to discuss and spend time with like-minded people who share similar interests and goals. These spaces can be virtual or in-person and can take place one-on-one or within a group. As a stakeholder engagement manager, I must also consider myself a relationship engineer. I'm always asking myself - how, when, and where can I get individuals to form organic relationships with others? To increase stakeholder-to-stakeholder connections, I have planned social events with fun ice-breakers, organized intimate roundtable workshops and dinners for volunteers to exchange best practices, and coordinated mystery coffee chats where I randomly matched volunteers to connect over coffee. While it is hard to quantify, creating these spaces has led to additional friendships, mentors, and thought partners and opened doors to new opportunities and connections for community members.
The needs of stakeholders may evolve over time but these four simple strategies will always remain instrumental in creating a best-in-class stakeholder experience. If you're a fellow stakeholder engagement manager, let's connect! I would love to know what you've learned while building strong communities.
