Stakeholder engagement plays a crucial role in the success of any project or organization. How you communicate, collaborate, and build relationships with people impacted by your work can shape outcomes and influence long-term support. But what does stakeholder engagement look like in practice, and why is it so important? In this article, we'll define stakeholder engagement, explain how to identify stakeholders, discuss its importance, and offer tips to strengthen your approach.
Table of Contents
What is stakeholder engagement?
Stakeholder engagement is the process of identifying, informing, and collaborating with individuals or groups who are interested in or can influence a project, decision, or organization. Its core purpose is to involve these stakeholders to gather their input, feedback, and insights, resulting in better decision-making, stronger support for initiatives, and improved outcomes for everyone involved.
In short, stakeholder engagement matters because your stakeholders matter: their knowledge, participation, and support can make the difference between success and failure. Engaging with stakeholders offers a range of benefits, including building trust through clear communication, promoting transparency, and boosting accountability. It also helps uncover crucial information, supports better, more sustainable decision-making, and empowers all stakeholders to have a meaningful voice in your project's success.
Definition of a stakeholder
A stakeholder is any individual, group, or organization that has a vested interest in the success or failure of a project or organization. The stakeholder definition includes not only those who are directly involved in company activities, such as employees, managers, or investors, but also external groups like customers, suppliers, regulators, and communities who can be affected by or exert influence on business decisions and outcomes.
Types of stakeholders include:
- Internal stakeholders
Internal stakeholder engagement is about keeping the people inside your organization, your team, managers, and leadership, in the loop and actively involved. It means creating open, honest communication channels so everyone knows what's happening, feels heard, and is motivated to work towards the same goals. - External stakeholders
External stakeholder engagement is the process of interacting and communicating with individuals or groups outside an organization who are affected by or have an interest in its activities. External stakeholders include customers, suppliers, investors, community members, regulators, partners, and the general public.
Learn more about stakeholders, including the types and their importance to your project's success →
Why is stakeholder engagement important?
By engaging with customers, partners, regulators, and communities, you can better understand stakeholder needs, manage risks, and align your projects with broader expectations.
This approach not only enhances your reputation but also drives long-term success.
- Building trust and transparency: Open communication fosters trust, which is essential for any organization's reputation. When stakeholders feel heard and informed, they're more likely to support your initiatives and remain loyal.
- Reducing risks: Understanding stakeholder concerns early on helps identify potential risks, whether regulatory, environmental, or social, that could impact a project or your business at large. Addressing these risks early can save time, money, and headaches.
- Enhancing decision-making: External stakeholders often bring unique perspectives and expertise. Their feedback can improve project design, operational decisions, and strategic planning by highlighting opportunities or challenges your internal team might have missed.
- Meeting regulatory and social expectations: Many industries face strict regulations. Engaging with regulators and community groups ensures you stay compliant and support social license to operate, reducing conflicts and delays.
- Driving innovation and collaboration: Active stakeholder engagement can open doors to partnerships, shared knowledge, and collaborative projects that benefit everyone involved.
What are the steps in the stakeholder engagement process?
Successful stakeholder engagement requires a strategic and structured approach. Here are the essential steps to guide you through the process:
Identify and analyze your stakeholders
Start by mapping all individuals and groups affected by or capable of influencing your project. This includes internal teams, customers, community groups, regulators, and more. Conduct a stakeholder analysis to assess each group's level of influence, interest, needs, and potential impact. Segment stakeholders based on these factors to tailor your engagement approach.
Understand stakeholder interests
Research and assess stakeholder goals, concerns, and motivations. Consider their expectations, the potential benefits and risks of your project to them, and any potential conflicts of interest. This understanding allows you to address their needs effectively and anticipate potential issues.
Develop a stakeholder engagement plan
Create a plan outlining your objectives, key messages, communication channels, timelines, feedback methods, and documentation practices. Decide the appropriate level of engagement for each stakeholder group (e.g., Inform, Consult, Involve, Collaborate, Empower, as per the IAP2 Spectrum). A well-defined plan sets the foundation for clear, consistent, and targeted engagement.
Engage with stakeholders
Implement your plan by actively reaching out to stakeholders using appropriate methods, such as meetings, workshops, surveys, emails, or events. Communicate your key messages clearly, listen to feedback, and address questions or concerns. Build trust by being transparent, responsive, and inclusive throughout the process.
Track and document engagement
Record all interactions, feedback received, commitments made, and any issues that arise. Using tools like stakeholder registers and stakeholder engagement software helps you stay organized, ensure accountability, and identify patterns, risks, and key themes in stakeholder responses.
Monitor, evaluate, and adapt
Continuously assess the effectiveness of your engagement through participation rates, feedback quality, stakeholder sentiment, and progress towards objectives. Be flexible. Adjust your strategies in response to changing circumstances or new insights. Reporting back to stakeholders demonstrates transparency and shows how their input has influenced decisions.
What are the different levels of stakeholder engagement?
The Spectrum of Public Participation, developed by the International Association for Public Participation (IAP2), is an excellent tool for identifying the best level of engagement (or participation) for your stakeholder categories.
The IAP2 Spectrum identifies five different levels of participation:
- Inform
- Consult
- Involve
- Collaborate
- Empower
For example, a low-power/low-interest stakeholder is unlikely to influence or be concerned with your project and may only need to be informed (often through one-way communication). Your "key player" stakeholders (high power/ high interest) have a much greater potential to impact your project and, based on the IAP2 levels of engagement, may need to be consulted, involved, collaborated with, and/or empowered, depending on the circumstance or your organization's vision for engagement.
Once you decide on your level of engagement, you're ready to choose your specific engagement tactics. Your tactics are the methods you choose for engagement. For example, emailing stakeholders can be an excellent two-way communication method.
How to build an effective stakeholder engagement strategy
Developing an engagement strategy for stakeholders starts with internal alignment and a shared understanding of your organization's engagement goals. With these foundations in place, you can focus your efforts where stakeholder engagement will have the greatest impact on your strategy and operations. Here's how to build an effective engagement strategy:
Assess past engagements
Begin by examining your company's history with stakeholder engagement. Review previous activities and reflect on their effectiveness:
- Were your objectives met?
- What performance indicators support your assessment?
- Which approaches worked, and which did not?
- What challenges or mistakes were encountered?
- Did you miss any key opportunities or stakeholders?
Learning from past experiences helps you set realistic ambitions, avoid repeating mistakes, and clarify current objectives.
Streamline engagement processes
Design your processes to be cost-effective and efficient. Evaluate whether past formats and channels were appropriate, and determine whether similar objectives could be achieved more effectively with the same resources.
- Understand and manage stakeholder expectations
- Draw on what you've learned about stakeholder expectations:
- Did your previous engagement address stakeholder concerns?
- Were you proactive in collecting and providing feedback?
- Was the feedback delivered in a format that stakeholders valued?
- Which internal team members need to be more closely involved to improve results?
Involving the right internal and external stakeholders ensures that engagement activities are more meaningful and productive.
Clarify objectives and measure value
Be explicit about what you want to achieve through engagement. Set clear performance indicators to measure the value and outcomes of your investment in engagement activities. Regularly review and update your objectives as your strategy evolves.
Focus for maximum impact
Prioritize stakeholder engagement efforts where they will impact your key strategic goals and operations. Use data and feedback from previous engagements to refine your approach and concentrate resources for optimal results
How to ensure effective stakeholder engagement
Your engagement must be meaningful to ensure you build strong relationships with your stakeholders. The foundation of successful relationships is trust, and to build confidence, stakeholders need to feel that their issues and concerns are valued and heard.
For stakeholders to feel valued and heard, you need to remember what has been said and what has been promised for the future. Keeping a record of your stakeholder interactions, issues, and commitments can help ensure this is possible and, in turn, allow stakeholders to build trust in your organization. However, trusting relationships cannot be maintained without a way to ensure everyone is on the same page. Trust is essential for managing stakeholder engagement.
Building stakeholder relationships is necessary to invest in your organization's long-term success, whether in a long-term or short-term project. Stakeholder relationships are not "one and done." You could quickly encounter the same stakeholders again, so building a good relationship with them early on can help ensure the success of your current and future projects.
Check out these tips to enhance stakeholder engagement →
Stakeholder engagement checklist
Use this checklist to help ensure your stakeholder engagement activities are well-planned, inclusive, and effective. Adapt as needed to suit your project or organization.
- Sought appropriate expert advice
- Agreed on a dedicated budget for communications and engagement
- Defined who will make decisions and established the decision-making process for each stage
- Identified sufficient staff and resources for engagement activities
- Appointed a communications and engagement lead
- Completed equality impact screening and, if needed, equality impact assessment
- Established clear principles and protocols for working with stakeholders (e.g. drafting, approvals)
- Appointed a senior lead to represent project requirements and communicate with the authority
- Informed senior leadership, board, or governing body
- Engaged with relevant local officials, oversight bodies, or community representatives
- Involved key stakeholder groups (e.g. advisory panels, community representatives, industry experts, advocacy groups, or customers)
- Developed and clearly articulated project key messages and facts
- Drafted a communications and engagement strategy appropriate to the project's scale
- Defined how stakeholder feedback will be used to influence decisions
- Set up effective processes for monitoring and addressing misinformation or concerns
- Planned a range of creative and inclusive methods for stakeholder involvement
- Established systems for capturing, analyzing, and tracking feedback
- Created clear routes to provide feedback to stakeholders, showing how their input made a difference
Stakeholder engagement examples
Mercer Peace River Pulp Ltd.
Mercer Peace River Pulp Ltd., a leading pulp mill in Alberta, Canada, demonstrates how effective stakeholder engagement can serve as a foundation for sustainable, successful business operations. Since 1990, Mercer has recognized that strong partnerships, especially with Indigenous communities, are essential for both environmental stewardship and economic growth.
Mercer actively engages and consults with 16 Indigenous communities in its operating region, recognizing their critical role in sustainable forestry. The company approaches engagement as an ongoing, long-term commitment, prioritizing trust, open dialogue, and collaboration. This means not only fulfilling regulatory consultation requirements but also building genuine relationships that support mutual prosperity and respect for traditional land and interests.
Key elements of Mercer's stakeholder engagement include:
- Consistent communication: Maintaining regular, open lines of communication ensures stakeholders' voices are heard, and their feedback is considered in decision-making.
- Respect and accountability: Keeping accurate records of commitments and following through on promises builds trust and credibility.
- Long-term collaboration: Viewing engagement as an ongoing partnership, not a one-time activity, helps create sustainable benefits for both the business and the communities involved.
Mercer's focus on stakeholder engagement demonstrates how proactive consultation, respect, and partnership can yield positive outcomes for both the company and the broader community, setting a strong example of responsible resource management.
Learn how Jambo helped Mercer Peace River streamline its stakeholder engagement→
UK Department for levelling up, housing and communities
The UK Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities provides another example of stakeholder engagement at a policy level. When developing the Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill, the department sought feedback from a wide range of stakeholders through consultations. This approach aimed to ensure that new national planning policies supported broader objectives and reflected the interests and insights of diverse groups, including local authorities, community representatives, industry experts, and the public.
Why use stakeholder engagement software?
Using cloud-based stakeholder engagement software to manage stakeholder engagement throughout the project's lifetime keeps all information in one easy-to-find place, which helps you maintain trust and build long-term, meaningful relationships with your stakeholders. While using spreadsheets or a CRM to manage your stakeholder engagement information might seem practical, these options aren't sustainable if you want to build future-focused, long-term relationships with stakeholders. Developing a repeatable, scalable process for stakeholder engagement management is essential to building strong stakeholder relationships.
This process needs to include a collaborative database of stakeholder contact details and your interactions with these stakeholders. Choosing to create this database with a stakeholder engagement software is an easy and effective way to compile and store vital information like:
- Contact details
- Communications
- Commitments
- Issues
Stakeholder engagement software lets you report on this information quickly. It enables you to share it with your internal or external stakeholders, which is a time-saver and a business best practice.
Learn how stakeholder engagement software can improve your engagement strategy →
FAQ: stakeholder engagement
What is stakeholder engagement?
Stakeholder engagement is the process of involving people or groups affected by or able to influence your project by sharing information, gathering feedback, and working together.
Why is stakeholder engagement important?
It builds trust, improves decision-making, reduces risks, and helps gain support for your project.
What are the main steps in stakeholder engagement?
Identify stakeholders, segment them, plan your approach, communicate and collect feedback, and report on progress.
How do you know if stakeholder engagement is effective?
Look for active participation, helpful feedback, positive stakeholder attitudes, and evidence that their input shapes decisions
What tools are used for stakeholder engagement?
Common tools include stakeholder registers, mapping templates, communication logs, and feedback forms. Specialized platforms like Jambo streamline these activities in one place.
Why is it important to use tools for stakeholder engagement?
Using the right tools helps you organize information, track interactions, collect feedback efficiently, and ensure all stakeholders are adequately involved throughout the project.
What are the levels of stakeholder engagement?
According to the IAP2 Spectrum, the five levels are: Inform, Consult, Involve, Collaborate, and Empower. Each level reflects the extent of stakeholders' influence and participation in your project.
Jambo allows users to:
- Track and manage communications with every stakeholder
- Identify and log each unique stakeholder role
- Track and manage stakeholder issues
- View issues with an easy-to-understand timeline
- Track all project commitments right through to fulfillment
- Save time by compiling detailed reports quickly
- Stay on track by assigning tasks to team members and monitoring task progress
- Collaborate by securely working with different departments or external contractors on the same project
