External stakeholders include individuals or groups that are affected by your organization and have a vested interest in its success. This could consist of your clients, customers, investors, suppliers, community, and others who are affected by the work you do.
For your nonprofit to perform well, you must keep all stakeholders informed and engaged. This will keep them satisfied and ready to continue supporting you and your goals.
Creating an External Stakeholder Engagement Strategy
Your stakeholder engagement plan should include three major sections.
- Stakeholder identification: Identify every stakeholder your nonprofit needs to accommodate. Define their roles and responsibilities in your project and label them by name.
- Stakeholder interaction: Now that you’ve identified the stakeholders, you must determine how you will interact with each of them and meet their specific needs.
- Stakeholder engagement: You should also outline how your team will engage with stakeholders and manage their expectations. This could look like meetings or key reports.
The Purpose of Stakeholder Outreach
Stakeholder outreach is a crucial component of a business plan that requires formulating specific methods to identify, engage with, and communicate with your nonprofit’s stakeholders.
Because the stakeholders in your project authorize and allocate resources, you cannot achieve your desired outcome without their support. You should set clear expectations for your stakeholders upfront and then outline how you will maintain those expectations throughout the project’s life. Be aware that every stakeholder will be engaged to a different degree and with varying motivations.
Your nonprofit’s success depends on effective stakeholder outreach and should be an integral part of your process from the outset.
Ways to Engage Stakeholders
Engaging with your stakeholders takes various forms. The biggest takeaway is to be specific and strategic in how you go about engagement. Conduct thorough research and maintain consistency in your implementation.
- Identify your stakeholders early: As we mentioned before, it is essential to identify your stakeholders by name, but it is also crucial to do so as early in your project’s life as possible. You can also practice categorizing them to add more structure to your plan.
- Seek to understand: Understanding your stakeholders’ point of view before building your plan will make it easier to interact and engage with them throughout your project. Assess what they already know, what they need to know, what power they have, and how interested they are.
- Means of interaction: Plan how you will communicate with each individual. Determine and keep track of their communication preferences. Their level of engagement should also influence the means of interaction.
- Document: Ensure that you document the work you do throughout your stakeholder engagement plan, so you and your team are all on the same page and your stakeholders can verify any information.
Communicate Concisely and Clearly
Clear communication with your external stakeholders is essential. You can take specific steps to ensure that your stakeholders are aligned with you and your team.
Establish Communication Goals
Each external stakeholder you have identified will require different communication goals. Various stakeholders will need you to raise awareness of a situation, send a report, align attitudes, attract sales, support policies, or change misconceptions.
Whatever their needs, your communication as you seek to pursue them should be honest and transparent.
Sometimes, your goal of communication may need to be more than simply informing your stakeholders about developments within your nonprofit, such as a new policy, procedure, or focus. Understanding your stakeholders’ goals will enable you to communicate with them more effectively.
Choose the Right Medium
Again, if you understand the goals of your stakeholders, you will know which medium to use for communication, making them more likely to see it and follow up if necessary. With today’s technology, you have numerous communication options, including email, reports, memos, chat, video calls, text messages, and in-person meetings. It is helpful to have many options, but it is essential to carefully choose the one that you think is suitable for each stakeholder.
Choose the Right Language
Just as you wouldn’t write an email to your supervisor and your sister the same way, you should evaluate how you communicate with your various stakeholders. The medium, stakeholders’ goals, and their level of stake in your nonprofit will all determine the language you use when communicating with them. Choosing the appropriate language can be easy to overlook, but it is essential not to.
Methods and Technologies For External Stakeholder Engagement
You can choose from several methods and technologies when selecting digital and traditional engagement tools. Collaborating with stakeholders for your nonprofit organization is essential, but it shouldn’t have to be expensive. Combining tools into one can help you save money while still achieving exceptional stakeholder collaboration and engagement.
- Social media: Using social media can help you save money and ensure all your stakeholders are aware of significant changes or announcements. These days, it’s rare for someone not to have a social media presence, so if you market yours and your stakeholders are following you, it can be an excellent way to share information. However, it’s not as personal as other methods.
- Team collaboration: Various team collaboration tools are available, including shared documents, online databases, and discussion forums. These tools help get everyone on your team and theirs on the same page.
- Consultation tools: These tools can include polls or questionnaires and are helpful for stakeholders who need to be involved in the decision-making process before a change is made, rather than just being informed afterward.
- Secure workspaces: Utilize the internet to your advantage by establishing a safe workspace for your nonprofit. Secure spaces provide your stakeholders with easy access to ask you questions, thereby increasing their trust in you and enabling you to make announcements and other communications securely.
Having an external stakeholder engagement strategy that lays out the methods of communication you will use for various stakeholders will help this process move more quickly and smoothly. Every stakeholder you identify should have a method of communication attached to them in your plan from the beginning.
