Government teams work with a wide range of stakeholders, including residents and community groups, Indigenous communities, industry partners, and other levels of government. Every meeting, phone call, and email adds to a growing record of engagement that your team needs to track, understand, and report on.
That's a lot to manage, and government departments face pressures that make it even harder. Staff turnover can mean institutional knowledge walks out the door. Freedom of Information (FOI) requests and data requests from senior officials demand fast, accurate responses. And when information lives in scattered spreadsheets and inboxes, even simple questions about a stakeholder's history become time-consuming to answer.
We built our stakeholder relationship management (SRM) software, Jambo, to help government teams meet these challenges. In this blog, we'll walk through four of the most common stakeholder management challenges our government customers face and show how Jambo helps solve each one:
The following are some stakeholder management challenges government departments experience when engaging with stakeholders, and how Jambo solves them:
When it comes to stakeholder issues and commitments (or promises), your team needs to be able to have access to updated information like:
To meet your stakeholders' expectations, keep your projects on schedule and keep your organization protected, you and your team need access to all your data.
When data is scattered in different spreadsheets, saved on personal desktops, or scribbled on notepads, it's impossible to answer these questions quickly and easily, which is a significant problem, as we know commitments and issues can be time-sensitive.
But even if they can't be resolved for years to come, forgetting about them is a real risk, so you need to stay updated and keep issues and commitments at the forefront of your mind in a centralized software system.
Organized issues and commitments: With Jambo, you can easily answer the questions above. Our software gives you and your team an organized space to check for issues and commitments associated with a single project, across all your projects, or with specific stakeholders. Additionally, Jambo empowers you to dive into each issue and commitment and understand the full story associated with each one.
Colour-coded materiality matrix: Our colour-coded materiality matrix helps you organize your issues by impact and priority. This way, you and your team can prioritize your riskiest issues without forgetting about the others.
Issues timeline: Our issues timeline allows you and your team to quickly and easily gain a deeper visual understanding of a specific issue.
With all your information organized in Jambo, you and your team know exactly where to find the latest updates.
Learn more about how an SRM can help you manage stakeholder issues→
Stakeholders are essential to your project's success, so you need to keep your contact cards organized, accessible, and complete. When your organization's contact management is a mess, this is a significant problem, as it impairs your team's ability to understand the history of your stakeholder information. You also risk missing important updates that could help you build stronger stakeholder relationships.
Organized contact information: With Jambo's contact profiles, you and your team can quickly see basic contact details, along with more detailed information such as engagement history, notes logged by your team for that stakeholder, and any issues and commitments (including their statuses). This information is organized and easy to find within the software.
When different team members meet with the same stakeholders, they must represent your organization consistently and respectfully. To do this, your team needs to understand information like:
Whether your team is planning a significant stakeholder meeting later this year or has been asked to jump into a last-minute meeting with a stakeholder they've never engaged with before, you all need your stakeholder information to be accessible and understandable.
Without access to all this information, you risk showing up to meetings unprepared, which can undermine the trusting relationships your team has worked so hard to build.
Interconnected engagement data: Beyond the basic contact information, Jambo's contact profiles offer everyone on your team quick insights into all the logged stakeholder information, including:
With easy access to this information, you and your team are empowered to engage consistently and respectfully, allowing you to pick up where your team left off.
A big part of working with a team is understanding what everyone is working on, being regularly updated on progress, and working together to reach goals. When things get confusing and disorganized, with no easy way to bring everyone together, teamwork starts to fall by the wayside. When this happens, your stakeholders will notice the inconsistencies, which will erode their trust in your organization.
Team collaboration and continuity: As we mentioned above, understanding who on your team has engaged with a stakeholder is important. With this information, you can reference what's been shared with your team in previous meetings (even if you weren't part of these meetings) for consistency and familiarity, which builds trust. This information also lets you know whom to reach out to on your team if you have any questions about this stakeholder or any of the engagements they were part of, so everyone is always accountable for their work and can collaborate more efficiently.
Team task management: With Jambo's task management feature, you and your team can assign tasks to each other and easily see once they've been completed. It's so helpful to have the entire team aware of these tasks, which keeps everyone accountable for their progress. It fosters greater understanding among your team and ensures your engagement and consultation efforts are more consistent and focused.
Jambo helps keep everyone on the same page, so your stakeholders always know what to expect from you and your organization, building stronger relationships and better data for more positive outcomes in your projects.
Learn more about how an SRM can help you build stronger stakeholder trust and relationships→
We know that without a high-quality SRM, adding communication records can be a headache, especially for teams that manage many important tasks and stakeholder data. Beyond losing valuable time on vital resources, without an easy, quick way to log communication records, your organization is open to risks associated with poorly organized data, especially data gaps.
The Jambo development team has streamlined the process to ensure that adding information into the system is fast and easy, so you can use your time much more efficiently.
Integrating emails: One of the ways we've ensured that getting your vital data into Jambo is as easy as possible is through our email integration. With this feature, you can automatically log communications you and your teams have had with stakeholders by emailing the record to your Jambo project.
Our system logic translates these emails into readable communication records and includes any attachments from those emails in the system.
Another great time-saving feature is Jambo's automatic PDF conversion for emails. Often, government agencies require a copy of an email to be kept as part of the official record, which means staff must manually print/save each email to PDF and store it, wasting their valuable time. Jambo streamlines this process with automation, making it easier than ever!
Emails submitted to the system are automatically converted to PDF and added as an attachment to the communication record in Jambo. It makes your records more complete and ready to share.
Learn more about the Jambo user experience→
Many organizations try to make do with spreadsheets. But as we've seen time and time again, stakeholder management in spreadsheets is a confusing, disorganized and frustrating process.
Common problems with spreadsheets for stakeholder management include:
Read the complete list of reasons to break up with spreadsheets→
Centralized stakeholder engagement data: Jambo operates as your team's single source of truth. With all your information in Jambo, you always know where to find the information you need, quickly and efficiently, so you can understand your project's progress and complete all your stakeholder management tasks.
Freedom of Information (FOI) requests are common in government, but compiling the information in a readily shareable, comprehensive way can be a challenge. If a request is made for relevant records pertaining to a specific stakeholder or topic, you and your team need to be confident that you know how to access all their stakeholder information and can share it quickly.
Faster responses to information requests: With all your stakeholder information centralized in Jambo, you can easily respond to Freedom of Information requests. With our configurable reporting options, you can easily create a report that meets the specific engagement information request and share a detailed report.
Beyond FOI requests, it's also common for managers or senior government officials to request access to your stakeholder data, and building organized, comprehensive reports can be time-consuming.
Quick reporting: Whether the request is for a specific history of engagement with a stakeholder or a report on everything related to them across all projects/programs, Jambo can meet these requests. These reports are organized and easy to understand.
With these reports, you can ensure you're able to respond to requests for information, address expectations and keep everyone updated in the easiest and most transparent way possible.
Key takeaways
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To see how Jambo can meet your organization's needs, visit our Government page or book a 15-minute call with a Jambo expert!