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.