Key Principles of Effective Stakeholder Management

When you begin a project, you have a motive of making it a success and what contributes towards it, is the right kind of stakeholder engagement. While the engagement done rightly can work in your favour, the vice-versa is also true. In other words, one should adapt a good stakeholder engagement plan and for doing so, there are a few principles of stakeholder engagement which should be followed. 

5 Steps for Effective Consultation

Engagement Hub is a powerful cloud-based SaaS to enable robust online discussions with Employee, Stakeholders and complies with government, security and accessibility requirements. https://engagementhub.com.au/ 

Key Elements of Successful Online Communities

A successful organization requires flourishing engagement of all the internal and external stakeholders. Engagement Hub is all-inclusive community engagement software that offers a free trial and complete technical support to all the subscribing organizations.To find out how this software benefits organisations, you can contact us at https://engagementhub.com.au/.

Tips For Managing Stakeholder Expectations

Make your stakeholder management and engagement process easier, cost-effective, secure and more satisfying with the Engagement Hub solution. It is powerful community engagement software that drives effective conversations, participation, and collaborations.

Key elements for an enchanced stackholder engagement experience

We introduce Stakeholder Relationship Management (SRM) Tool & software for better online and offline activities, user profiles, and keep your community & Stakeholder updated with newsletters.

Top 5 Online Engagement Tools

Having sticky notes posted on your desk used to enough to help manage your projects and ensure efficient engagement used to be enough in the times of traditional business practices. However, with everything going online now, it is being recommended that every business should use a mixture of offline and online methods to help reach out to all kinds of stakeholders.

We’ve compiled a list of some of the best online consultation mapping tools available and the benefits that they will have for your business engagement.

1. Engagement Hub

Engagement Hub is like no other software as it is the only integrated stakeholder management and community engagement tool. It offers the ease of use, cost effectiveness and security while helping the organizations to achieve a high engagement and participation rate with the stakeholders while reporting processes and streamlining administration.

It is your enterprise level SaaS adopting the latest technologies in cybersecurity, while regularly adding value in service through its customer support.

2. Social Pinpoint

Social Pinpoint combines digital mapping with online engagement to enable your stakeholders to provide feedback more interactively. This tool is very helpful for the plans and projects that are dependent on the geographical demographics and thus can be presented on a map. Also, the administrators have direct access to live reporting and moderating comments.

Many businesses use this tool to engage their communities to leave a positive or negative feedback as per their geographical locations.

3. Consultation Manager

Consolidation manager is very useful in consolidating your entire online as well as offline data in the cloud, into a centralized knowledge base. It not just stores the entire history of all your interactions with your entire community and all your stakeholders, but also tracks and reports it while allowing features like integration of emails and SMS.

This tool is used to track all the engagements with stakeholders on different projects and then create a report about what actually concerns the people so they can be engaged effectively.

4. Engagement HQ

Engagement tool provides you multiple tools like surveys, Q&A sections, forums and guest books to engage with your stakeholders so that you can know what they expect of you. It also provides an analytical report to help you understand how you are performing while engaging with your stakeholders so that you can improve your communication.

You will find a digital map and ideation board in this software that would let you present all your project related information to the stakeholders effectively.

5. Harvest Digital Planning

Harvest Digital Planning helps you in engaging with your stakeholders and communities in a more interactive and enjoyable manner by taking their feedback on your project from time to time in the form of surveys. They offer a simple approach to communicate strategies and plans through meaningful content.

You can create a website using this tool to allow your stakeholders to directly provide their inpur and feedback in the functioning of your projects and business concerning them.

Summing It Up

All of these tools are designed to help you promote and manage your projects effectively and some of them even provide you customization options also. You can research about all this online consultation mapping tools that suit your business requirements the most and use it to up your level of stakeholders’ engagement. 

5 Key Benefits of Using Online Engagement Software

Across the globe, organisations recognise the tangible benefits of online engagement to reach more stakeholders, drive higher participation while reducing cost, minimizing administration burden and  meeting regulatory requirements.

Online Engagement Software, Engagement Hub is the most effective end-to-end solution for consulting and managing online engagement and stakeholder management:

1.  Facilitates Transparency and builds trust

Online engagement software bridges the divide between organisations, their decision makers and stakeholders enabling organisations to deliver better shared outcomes. align their goals with their community’s needs. Undertaking a comprehensive approach with a well designed communications and engagement strategy facilitates transparency, drives higher rates of participation and builds ongoing trust.

2. Reducing the cost of consultation

100% offline / face-to-face consultation can be extremely expensive and time consuming resulting in reduced project delivery budget. Online engagement software enables organisations to effectively communicate project information and receive quantitative and qualitative feedback from their stakeholders via cost-effective subscription licence fees. Combining online engagement with your offline engagement activities dramatically reduces consultation cost and administration burden achieving  better outcomes.

2. Increase interaction with your audience

No matter what level of engagement organisations determine for individual consultations, the key to success is reaching and engaging with as many of your relevant stakeholders as possible. Online engagement software facilitates this by:

· Delivering a channel which is easy to drive more people to and easy to promote

· Availability 24/7 on any device – enabling your stakeholders to engage at a time which suits them

· Providing a range of flexible tools to drive high participation

· Maintaining and building a stakeholder database to continue the conversation with

· Reporting on who is participating enabling you to quickly identify how reflective the participants are of your target audience. This provides organisations the opportunity to quickly review how they are reaching their stakeholders and the messaging they are using

· Embedding accessibility within the software - Best in class online engagement platforms like Engagement Hub are built to WCAG 2.0 Level AA web accessibility with language translators, enabling all community members to readily access the information and participate.

4. Measure and analysis the success of your consultations

Engagement Hub, best in class Online Engagement Software delivers an array of features for understanding your stakeholders and analyzing your consultations:

· Stakeholder relationship management 9SRM) tool streamlining processes, providing stakeholder profiles and segmentation whilst capturing all your online and offline engagement data in one place

· Snapshot time-based consultation activity reports

· Deep Insight Reporting

· And more: the engagement level over time, current issues and trends across all projects, the most engaged and influential stakeholders and the demographics of your stakeholders.

5. A Safe Place to Engage

A dedicated online engagement platform creates a safe and secure environment for both the community participants and the organization, as feedback is monitored and the conversation is in a controlled environment, unlike social media. Engagement Hub is the complete digital platform available globally.

To find a trusted Online Engagement Software, visit our website engagementhub.com.au or you can call us at +612 8007 4277.

Why digital approach for Stakeholder Engagement?

In today’s digital world, when most of the important work could be carried out online without meeting in person, will it make sense if you spend hours in briefings and meeting stakeholders for every minor step of the project. With emerging technologies such as in the field of digital stakeholder engagement, the solutions we get are viable and meet the expectations of the target audience (stakeholders, in this case). In short, stakeholder engagement going online, brings in a lot of benefits, some of which are mentioned below:

1. Cost benefit

Digital approach is not as expensive as the traditional one. How, you ask? Well, while the traditional methods account for expenses like production costs, labour-intensive activities, travel expenses, etc. the digital approach doesn’t include any such cost. Furthermore, the time saved leads to better utilization of the time and hence more productivity.

2. Personal Touch

Another advantage of digital approach over traditional one is the ability to manage the primary stakeholder groups at the individual level. When you manage the stakeholders on a one-to-one basis, you are in a better position to understand their expectations and  hence fulfil them to the fullest. Moreover, since you are talking to them in a virtual environment, you don’t have to bear the cost of commuting, which you can invest elsewhere in the business and thus add more value to it.

3. Benefits of timely stakeholder engagement

You can communicate from anywhere and at anytime with your stakeholders via these digital platforms, keeping them engaged and their interest alive. This further lets you build a mature and trusting relationship with your stakeholder.

4. Transparent stakeholder engagement

Being one of the most essential parts of the project, stakeholders would want to know everything about the project; they would like to know about all the recent developments in the project and digital stakeholder engagement platform offers transparency; stakeholders are constantly updated about all the progress. Such practices further ignite a sense in stakeholders to participate and give their best for the project.

5. The modern stakeholder

While it’s your personal choice to opt or not to opt for the digital platform, in today’s world when everybody has a smart phone/device, most of the stakeholders would prefer a platform that can be accessed from remote location.

If you want to avail all these benefits, or rather, we would say much more benefits than the ones mentioned, then come to us at Engagement Hub. We, Engagement Hub are a highly sophisticated and intuitive engagement and consultation toolbox. We offer more than 20 informative and engaging tools to engage your stakeholders like never before. Ours is a flexible and customizable tool that can be customized as per your needs. And in case you need suggestions and help, you can always feel free to contact our team of specialists who will address your issues, understand your requirements and guide you accordingly. Want to know more about us? Check us out at – https://engagementhub.com.au/stakeholder-relationship-management or give us a call at -  (02) 8007 4277.

Stakeholder Management – Key to a Successful Project

Who are stakeholders? Why are they so important for the success of a project and organizational goals? Why does the top management need to invest so much in the management of stakeholders? We understand each question that comes to your mind whenever somebody mentions about ensuring effective stakeholder management and we will help you get all the answers.

Who are stakeholders?

Anybody who either performs or is affected by the actions taken in an organization to achieve project goals is termed as its ‘stakeholder’. These are the human resources without whom an organization or project will not even be in existence.

Now, it is imperative for the growth and success of any business that your stakeholders are effectively managed and community relationship management software can really help you in engaging the stakeholders who are present outside your organization.

Stakeholders can be categorized into two major heads:

· Internal Stakeholders

Internal or primary stakeholders are the people who directly affect the transactions and activities of a project. This category includes employees, investors, customers, suppliers and creditors.

· External Stakeholders

Though not engaged directly in the activities of a project, external stakeholders are impacted by the outcomes and can affect the actions of the company too. This category includes media, communities, business support groups, activist groups and government.

Why manage stakeholders?

Each and every stakeholder in an organization is really critical to its success as they affect the operations of the company directly and as a project manager, one of the key responsibilities includes engaging and managing all the stakeholders. Here are first three steps that you can adapt to help you get started so that you can ensure that all of your stakeholders are satisfied with the engagement and are happily contributing in the success of a project:

1. Identify your stakeholders and acknowledge them

Before you begin to manage your stakeholders, you need to know who all they are and what role they play in the project or organization. Whether internal or external, you should map out all of your stakeholders at the beginning of a project. Subsequently, prioritize all the stakeholders according to the interest they will have in the information related to every step of the project process and the amount of power they have to affect the major organizational decisions.

2. Pick the right communication tool

Now that you know who your key stakeholders are and how much information about the project and organization you need to share with each of the categories in order to keep them contented and invested in your interest, it is important that you choose the right communication medium for their engagement. For instance, you can get a community relationship management software for all the primary stakeholders who are not present inside the premises of the organization to ensure that they are timely informed about the proceedings of the project.

3. Create an action plan and monitor it

Once you have identified all your stakeholders and the communication channel you will use to keep them informed and get their feedback, it is important that you create a proper plan so that each stakeholder is passed on the information important to them within the required time. This would not just make them feel happy, hence increasing their involvement and productivity but would also help you maintain a long term business relationship.

It is convenient to manage the communication with stakeholders present inside your organization, but when it comes to engaging the stakeholders that might be present in some other part of the country or continent, it gets a bit tricky to maintain the communication with them on regular basis. The community relationship management software by Engagement Hub provides you with the tools to ensure that your stakeholders are connected with you even if they are in a different time zone.

Effective Business Communication – An Imperative Tool for Success

Accounting makes you spawn bouts? Having to think about the creative marketing ideas make your hair stand at the end? Well, you probably have an accountant and an experienced team of marketers in place to take care of those jobs for you. As a project manager or small business owner, you are absolutely smart enough to surround yourself with the talented bunch of people who can fill up all the proficiency and knowledge gaps for you and all you have to do is manage them effectively.

However, communication with everybody within your organization and with the stakeholders outside is something that you will have to do yourself. This is one task that you can never completely delegate even if you wish to. Luckily, it is also that one aspect at which you can get better with practice and by getting an online community engagement software in place for your organization.

Once you will comprehend the role that effective business communication and engagement plays in the growth of your organization, you are going to realize the incentives that an organized communication channel brings with it and hence you will be motivated to invest in an online community engagement software that would make your job easier and put things in motion for you.

Communication Fosters Sharing of Ideas

At its best, communication enables effective sharing of information and ideas across the organization. It influences, motivates and even comforts your stakeholders and employees alike. You will observe that when the communication system in your organization is effectual, everybody will feel more involved and hence the productivity level will increase.

Communication Shapes Outlook

Your employees, as well as the stakeholders, need to know what you are planning, what your goals are and what your action plan is to achieve them so that they can work and invest in alignment with that. With timely communication and feedback from the concerned personnel, you can improve your strategies and hence increase the probability of your growth and success.

Communication Creates Engagement

When your stakeholders and the people in your organization will be continuously informed about the progress and risks involved, they will feel more engaged and hence will get inspired to offer their ideas to ensure the success of the project. When your personnel will feel comfortable around you, they will be able to contribute more.   

Burnish Your Communication System

You might already be having a proper chain of communication in place for your organization and could be working on improving your methodologies more with each project. However, being a good communicator is a continuous job and it does not stop with a single conversation.

Now chances are that you already have too much to take care of regarding the business as a manager, which create loopholes in your communication system and that subsequently affects your relationship with your stakeholders. Engagement Hub offers an online community engagement software that will be tailored to your business requirements and would ensure that you are able to communicate with your stakeholders even when they are unavailable. This tool is available 24/7 to you and your stakeholders, thus ensuring that there is a constructive exchange of communication from both the ends regardless of your location and time differences.

What is stakeholder engagement and what are its benefits

For the success of your business, you may want to pursue stakeholder engagement in the right way possible, but before you understand the correct way of engaging stakeholders,  let’s talk about what is actually a stakeholder engagement and how it benefits the business.

What is a stakeholder engagement?

It is the process of involving those people whose decisions matter or make a difference in the implementation of any organizational plan and on the organisation as a whole. In other words, it is not just knowing the opinions of members, but also letting them have an active part, throughout the project in a way that they analyse every step and give views based on deep understanding of everything.

What are the benefits of stakeholder engagement?

Learning

Stakeholder engagement enables you to learn a lot from others and hence take a decision which is the outcome of the amalgamation of everyone’s best perspective.

When there’s an involvement of different field experts in various stages of projects, opinions of all the members may vary and in such a situation, it is important that everybody’s point of view is well taken care of to reach a common solution. In doing all such things, one gets to know everybody’s perspective which is a great learning experience in itself as it lets you  see things from a different mindset than yours.

Better decision making

You may or may not know what is more profitable for the betterment of the organisation, but when you engage your stakeholders and know their take on a specific topic, you are in a better position to take the right decision.

Trust

Stakeholder engagement is like laying the foundation for credibility and trust.

Risk management

With every aspect of the plan/project laid bare in front of the stakeholders, you can collectively work towards risk that have arisen or may arise.

Accountability

The more transparent you are with your stakeholders, the more closer you are to the success; it is important to improve accountability within your own organisation first before you reach out to the wider market.

Better policy making

It is vital to have a good policy in place for the comfortability of the employees. When you engage stakeholders, you understand the needs and views of all members which lets you create a better policy.

So, all in all you can say that effective stakeholder engagement will always win-out. If you have not thought about stakeholder engagement, do it now.

Digital Stakeholder Engagement to help you engage better

For the success of any business, stakeholders are required to communicate and execute various processes in a certain way, for which, each one of them prefers a different channel. For instance, if they want to fetch news, there are different tools for it; similarly, if they want to research about a topic, there are various sources of information, so depending on the choice of each person, the mediums are selected. But now, with the digitization reaching another level, there are several organizations that are using one single platform for stakeholder engagement. This all-in-one digital stakeholder engagement tool serves as a one stop destination for all stakeholder engagements. Work can be boring, but not when the stakeholders are using online engagement platform that removes monotony, repetitive communications and make tasks interesting. These tools help in automating processes that you lay out in your initial communication plan.

There are different levels of stakeholders and you need to address each one of them according to their importance and these tools let you do just that and much more. There are many benefits of these tools for each layer of stakeholders, some of which are mentioned below:

Updating stakeholders

These tools let you update the stakeholder as per their status. For instance, some stakeholders just need to be informed, others need to be consulted, while there are also those who should be collaborated with. New age digital stakeholder engagement tool allows you to choose what information you should provide to a specific group of people. For example, low-interest/low influence stakeholders are a group that only needs to be informed. You can use these digital platforms to post relevant information for them to digest.

Consulting stakeholders

High interest/low influence stakeholders, this is the group that should be connected to everything that has been done to low-interest/low influence group.

The tools have special discussion forums where these stakeholders can participate online and talk about various issues.

Furthermore, these come equipped with features like E-polls and online surveys for responses that must be analysed and catalogued for future reference.

Working with stakeholders

Last but definitely not the least, comes the high-influence/high-interest stakeholders; this group is of utmost importance. These must be kept on high priority for almost all tasks. Digital stakeholder engagement tool will have features that will assist this high priority group in doing the following:

· Keeping a record of every single change that is being made.

· Involving the members for co-authoring the relevant process documents.

· Providing them access to internal project management communication channels.

· Knowing the entire timeline of the project, when what happened and how the complete process is taking place.

· Providing access to gallery of images for information and insight.

If you are looking for such a software/platform for your organisation, come to us. We, Engagement Hub are a market-leading, all-in-one digital stakeholder engagement and management solution. Ours is a platform that enables you to bridge the gap between the project’s current status and stakeholders by helping the team members increase their participation in consultations while reducing the administration time. Engagement Hub is accessible in more than 100 languages and can be made available to stakeholders 24/7 on their device from any location. Engagement Hub is scalable for all sized organizations, so it doesn’t matter whether yours is a small institution or big. To know more about us, visit us at - https://engagementhub.com.au/  

Project Management Communication – Do’s and Don’ts

The keystone to a success project management lies in the effective communication and an online engagement consultation system can really aid you in that process. As a project manager, majority of your tasks would be communicative. You responsibilities include ensuring a clear communication about the scope, goals, responsibilities and accountabilities, division of work, performance and feedback, deadlines, along with providing project updates to the stakeholders.

You perhaps might already be aware of all this but it’s also really easy to forget just how significant it is while you are juggling between multiple tasks throughout the day. In such cases, having a communication plan in order can really save your day and the online engagement consultation programs help you in achieving that.

We found some do’s and don’ts for you to heed in order to ensure an effective communication with all the stakeholders of the project present inside as well as outside the organization.

1. Listen More

This is one of the most important characteristics that we are taught to instil in our conduct right from the schooling age. And this is something that project managers wither do really well or not at all. You really want to maintain a nourishing relationship with your stakeholders as they could directly or indirectly impact the success of your project. So it vital to understand that no relationship can go on for long if you will just keep on talking and not listen to the other person’s view point.

2. Ask

Listening certainly does not mean that you just sit their silently and only grasp whatever your client, investors or employees are saying. You have to ask the questions so that you do not get stuck anywhere when you will actually go on to implement the tasks and you will know who to reach out if there will be any queries. Just ask – ‘What are their expectations?’, ‘Where and how can you communicate with them?’, ‘Would they prefer personal meetings or video conferencing will work for them?’ and the list could go on. Be prepared with your questions and just ask them away.

3. Pave Your Way

Remember that you have to establish a good working relationship with your stakeholders. Do not jump on to being informal in your communication right from the beginning. Get you know you clients, investors and even your employees by starting off formally and then work your way towards informal style of communication. Just follow the KISS rule – Keep it short and simple.

4. Language

You should treat every stakeholder located outside your organization as a layman. Do not use acronyms or too technical terms with them as they would not be able to understand that language and it could result in them either losing the interest or simply getting pissed off. However, if the client also belongs to your industry, then it is absolutely fine to use such articles.

Now as simple as these things might seem, it will be really tricky to maintain communication with your stakeholders on regular basis once the project begins. However, Engagement Hub provides you with an all-inclusive and supremely effective online engagement consultation platform to ensure that your communication with your stakeholders is facilitated with ease, regardless of their location and time constraints.

Features of online engagement platform that helps businesses succeed

The Engagement Hub are one such online engagement platforms and here are some of the many features  in the infographic we provide in our software.