The Jambo Blog

6 Ways Jambo Can Help You Improve Your Stakeholder Meetings

Written by Britney Blomquist | March 23, 2021

How Our Stakeholder Relationship Management (SRM) Software Can Help You to Improve Your Meetings for Better Project Outcomes

What is Jambo?

Jambo is the fastest and easiest Stakeholder Relationship Management software (SRM). It simplifies how organizations manage their stakeholder engagement and consultation projects by helping teams collaborate in real-time to track, report and stay on top of their stakeholder information.

Why Is Improving Your Stakeholder Meetings So Important?

Stakeholder meetings are vital opportunities for you to connect with your stakeholders. By putting a little extra effort into planning and preparation for your meetings, you'll show your stakeholders that you take their time and perspectives seriously, building long-term, positive stakeholder relationships for better project outcomes.

To learn why stakeholder relationships are so vital, read the blog!

6 Ways Jambo Can Help You Improve Your Stakeholder Meetings

With your stakeholder information centralized in Jambo, you and your teams know exactly where to find all your stakeholder information. Beyond centralized access, Jambo keeps your data organized, simplifying the stakeholder management process and helps you to gain quick stakeholder and project updates. These updates and insights allow you and your team to engage more clearly, consistently and effectively.

Below we'll highlight six specific ways Jambo can help you improve your stakeholder meetings.

1. Helps You Book the Right Kind of Meeting

Not everyone enjoys communicating in the same ways, so you want to keep track of your stakeholder's meeting preferences. As you'll be managing several stakeholder relationships, you need to track your stakeholder preferences in a logical space where you can quickly look before booking a meeting to ensure you're proposing the best kind of meeting for that stakeholder.

Internal Notes Feature

By using Jambo's internal notes feature, you can add stakeholder preferences that include information like:

  • Location preferences for meetings (e.g., do they like to meet near their work?)
  • The form the meeting takes (e.g., do they prefer an in-person meeting or a virtual web meeting?)
  • Accessibility considerations for meeting locations (e.g., do they require accessible parking? Or elevator access?)

By remembering your stakeholder’s meeting preferences, you’ll not only increase the likelihood that they’ll be willing to meet with you, but it also shows your stakeholders that you listen to them, which will help build trust in your organization.

For more on accessible locations and other ways to make engagement more inclusive, visit our blog!

2. Ensures Your Messaging is Tailored for Each Stakeholder Meeting

What you choose to say to your stakeholders in your meetings can significantly impact how they view your project and your organization, so you want to make sure you select your messaging carefully and tailor it to meet your stakeholders' needs.

Stakeholder Profiles

With Jambo's stakeholder profiles, you can dive into a profile before your meeting to quickly learn what your stakeholder has communicated to you and your team in previous engagements. With this history, you can gain insights into what matters most to them. Using these insights, you can prepare your messaging beforehand to address their concerns and perspectives in a meaningful way while ensuring that you don't ask repeat questions that have already been covered in other meetings.

For example, in their stakeholder profile, you may notice they have raised an issue surrounding a particular location where your project is operating. To prepare for your meeting, you can use Jambo to quickly familiarize yourself with every engagement around that issue and view all logged information connected to that stakeholder. The ability to understand all the information connected to that stakeholder and that issue they raised helps you understand the big picture, ensuring you're fully updated and are communicating about the information that matters to them.

3. Allows you to Bring Organized and Understandable Updates to the Meeting

Being respectful of people's time is essential to running a successful stakeholder meeting, so you want to be prepared. To manage time effectively in a stakeholder meeting, you want to share project updates clearly and understandably (no one wants to slowly sift through data in endless spreadsheets or try to piece together scribbled notes).  

Reports

With Jambo's reporting options, you can bring organized and simplified reports to show stakeholders updates on the topics they need to hear about without overwhelming them with irrelevant or redundant information. Our robust reporting options allow you to build reports around the most critical topics to your stakeholders.

Integrated Map

Using the location example from above, with Jambo, you can also log the area of concern in our integrated map viewer, then export and bring a geospatial PDF of this map to your stakeholder meeting. Maps help create a visual understanding of your project in relation to the identified area and can help to facilitate a more effective conversation around this topic.

4. Ensures You're Updated on all Issues and Commitments Connected to The Stakeholder You're Meeting With

Commitments

With Jambo, you can easily view commitments (or promises) associated with one or all your projects to help you build a full understanding of all your current or past commitments with a stakeholder before you meet with them.

By clicking into a commitment record, you can see which team member made the commitment, the associated communication record with the stakeholder, and its change history.

Issues

Like our commitments records, Jambo has an issues profile for each stakeholder and organization that allows you to dive into your current and past issues (across one or all projects), so you're easily updated on who’s associated with the issue and any updates surrounding it.

Colour-coded Materiality Matrix

As issues can increase project risks, we've added a few additional features to ensure you’re protecting your projects and your organization while meeting your stakeholder's expectations. One of these features is our colour-coded materiality matrix that helps you organize your issues based on their level of impact and their priority. With this feature, you and your team can prioritize the highest risk issues without losing sight of the rest.

Issues Timeline

The second issues-related feature that Jambo includes is our issues timeline that helps users to gain a deeper understanding of the full history for a specific issue with just a glance.

Being updated on any commitment or issues related to the stakeholder you're meeting with will help build trust and show you're listening. Even if the meeting isn't about commitments or issues, being updated on them will save you from being unprepared if they come up during the conversation and help you prepare any relevant updates, which your stakeholders will appreciate.

5. Allows You to Input Your Stakeholder Information During (or Right After) Your Meeting

To ensure you're inputting accurate updates into Jambo, it's useful to be able to add updates on the go. Jambo is accessible anywhere with an internet connection, so you can log into your account during (or right after) meetings to input your important notes right away. This immediacy helps ensure you don't miss anything, keeping your records accurate with useful information, so you’re always fully prepared for your next meeting.

If your mobile device has a microphone, you can use voice-to-text features to make the input process even faster and easier!

6. Ensures You're Prepared When Meeting with Stakeholders Who Were Part of a Different Project

Stakeholders don't care if you weren't involved with a previous project or engagement; often, they expect you to be updated on the full engagement history as you're representing your organization during these meetings. To meet this expectation, you must be updated on everything previously discussed, even if you weren't part of those previous engagements.

If you or your team communicated with a stakeholder during a different project, with Jambo's global view, you can view all inputted information across all your organization's projects as long as you’ve been granted access. You can easily view the last logged conversation with that stakeholder and see what was discussed before your meeting, allowing you to pick back up where things left off or reference any related concerns or perspectives that the stakeholder previously shared, even if this is the first time you’re engaging with them.

Next Steps

To learn all the ways Jambo can simplify and organize your stakeholder management efforts and improve your stakeholder meetings, book a 15-minute discovery call with a Jambo expert!