This service will appeal to service organisations that help organisations facilitate their stakeholder relationships. While typically this means external stakeholders, this pack works equally well for internal stakeholder engagement activities. You will likely to have already developed your own methods for facilitating stakeholder engagement. What our techniques offer is the potential to extend your scope to even larger groups of stakeholders using our scalable network analysis techniques.
By using organisational network analysis survey techniques, our approach can identify who individuals identify as their stakeholders. In exercises we have conducted management are often puzzled by who staff think are stakeholders for them. Right or wrong, this intelligence is a useful starting point for undertaking a stakeholder engagement review.
Case Study - Major UK Council
Context Major UK council which administers over 300 towns and 1.5 mill people
The Problem In developing its programs the council had few ways of assessing its level of engagement with its external stakeholders. They had invested heavily in a number of programs and were looking for a way of analysing their level of stakeholder engagement with their target community.
Solution Without undertaking expensive community surveys, the Council felt it could source the information from their internal staff in terms of who talks to who, who are the more influential stakeholders etc.. An organisational networking survey was conducted to help visualise how roles within the council were connected with key external stakeholders, enabling them to analyse the effectiveness of their stakeholder engagement strategy and address gaps that the mapping highlighted to them.
Benefits The ability to visually analyse their stakeholder network provided a number of unexpected benefits. One of the insights was the need to focus on building community amongst the external stakeholders rather than to have them continually rely on council staff. This was important as programs only have a limited tenure, so without leaving behind a stakeholder community, all the good effort would dissipate once the program was completed.
Case Study - Federal Social Services Agency
Context Major federal social services agency with over 1,000 delivery points and close to 7 million clients
The Problem This major agency conducts many of its delivery services through a complex web of NGO providers. This web of providers is virtually invisible to them, with many of them having touch points into the agency at many locations and levels. In order to effectively manage these partnerships they had to first 'see' the network.
Solution An organisational networking survey was conducted across one of the larger regions to help visualise the NGO stakeholder network. Using the results a number of 'sensemaking' sessions were held to assess what the nature of the stakeholder engagement currently was and whether the agency staff were allocating their time and attention effectively in terms of influence and advocacy.
Benefits The mapping exercise provided them with, for the first time, a view of what the stakeholder network really was. Based on this they were able to identify the handful of critical stakeholders that they needed to concentrate on. It also showed them those stakeholders that they were paying too much attention to.
Stakeholder Engagement Toolkit
Optimice has developed a unique approach to stakeholder engagement which goes well beyond traditional approaches. Using elements of organisational and value network analysis, the approach considers the full stakeholder engagement influence network. It makes use of the value network approach to assist with agreeing value exchanges. Through our Partnership Scorecard you can monitor and sustain effective stakeholder engagements.
The approach is described succinctly in this 12 minute presentation:
Deliverables
Our methodology for conducting stakeholder engagement is well documented in our white paper on Stakeholder Engagement. The pack includes access to Optimice’s ONA Survey tools with a pre-defined template of key stakeholder engagement questions provided. Partners are able to add additional questions as they see fit, but as a minimum, the template questions are required. The Stakeholder Prioritisation map generated from the survey results and Partnership Scorecard facilitation kit.
Example tools and outputs are shown here:
The stakeholder prioritization chart is derived from the stakeholder survey. It identifies which stakeholders you should be paying attention to, as well as those that you could pay less attention to!
The Partnership ScorecardTM facilitation toolkit provides cards and guidelines for facilitating a role-to-role value exchange. The value exchange negotiation as a key tool for achieving sustainable stakeholder engagement. Value exchanges are defined explicitly and can be maintained in a scorecard repository.
The kit also provides a facility for storing stakeholder commitments along with a regular assessment facility is required.
