Stakeholder engagement uses a variety of methods to communicate with people who are important to the ongoing success of your organisation or business.

Stakeholders can be internal, like kaimahi, or people external to your organisation such as customers or nearby residents. It’s an important way to include people in decisions that will impact them. This could include a significant change in your business, developing a new public policy, or consulting with them about important issues.

Stakeholder engagement is also used to help you understand your audience or community so you can best meet their needs. Engaging with your stakeholders is a great way to build trust. It also helps them feel informed about what is happening, empowers them to get involved, and provides valuable insights or data which you can use to support your work.

Looking to grow your stakeholder engagement? Contact the Priority Communications team.

Your stakeholders are unique to your business. They differ from company to company and across industries. They can include your customers, clients, investors, industry partners, suppliers, government bodies and/or regulators.

The important part is identifying who your stakeholders are and understanding your relationship with each of them.

Hearing what your stakeholders have to say is incredibly important for your organisation. Their opinions, experiences and suggestions provide a treasure-trove of insight into how your business may need to adapt, behave or respond.

But stakeholder feedback isn’t just a nice-to-have; failing to listen to their feedback can be costly. They can stop trusting you, desert you, and influence how others perceive you. Hearing what your stakeholders have to say during the engagement process helps give you a social license to operate, and without that, how would your business be successful?

Many organisations are increasingly adopting policies and ways of doing business that support environmental sustainability and socially-minded initiatives. For those that do this well, it is informed by, and includes, their stakeholders.

Customers, consumers and other stakeholders have often influenced the way organisations operate, because if they don’t like what is being done, they can go elsewhere. If your stakeholders are increasingly concerned about certain issues, it may pay to listen to what they have to say. That’s where stakeholder engagement can help you identify these shifts and learn more about what your organisation may need to do to make meaningful change.

Relationships are everything, and that’s never been more true for businesses wanting to mitigate risk or navigate a crisis. Maintaining, building or enhancing your relationships with stakeholders is done through your engagement with them, and when it is done well, your stakeholders can help you prevent a crisis or weather a storm.

If your engagement with them is poor, they may not be inclined to share information with you or cooperate. When a crisis happens, they may be distrustful of your actions or simply not know you well enough to hear important information you need to share with them.

Getting your stakeholder engagement right and maintaining good relationships with the people who make your business possible, often pays dividends when something goes wrong. It puts you in a stronger position to form an effective response.

Any form of communication you have with the people and groups who are important to your organisation’s success is called stakeholder engagement. Community consultation is a particular type of engagement.

Not all of your engagements need to be a consultation (which is where you present an issue to your stakeholders and seek out their feedback to help inform the final decision), but all of your community consultations involve engaging with your stakeholders.

If you need help understanding the engagement you need with your stakeholders, talk to the Priority Communications team. We are a member of the International Association for Public Participation (IAP2) Australasia, which is the leading body for the community and stakeholder engagement sector.