Celebrating 20 Years of Simply Stakeholders

The team at Simply Stakeholders is thrilled to announce that this April 2024, our company is celebrating its 20th birthday! 🎂🎈🥳

We’re taking a moment to reflect on our story — where we’ve come from and how we’ve evolved, and to share about an exciting new resource for engagement professionals, along with our 20th anniversary celebrating plans later this month (and you’re invited!).

Reflections on the Last 20 Years

Since we were founded in 2004, our company has grown to become one of the world’s trusted names in stakeholder software, creating two popular platforms, Simply Stakeholders and Darzin. 

Originally based in Sydney, our team of engagement professionals, customer success specialists, engineers, developers, and business analysts are now almost as global as our client base, with offices in Australia, the United States, and the UK.

We’ve come a long way since our founder, Allison Hendricks, set out to build a modern stakeholder platform that would replace the tools of her day (spreadsheets and basic databases!) as an engagement professional.

Over the last 20 years, we’ve proudly pioneered many of the tools, features, and best practices in the space of stakeholder engagement and stakeholder relationship management. 

And there’s so much more to come, as we continue to evolve our products, incorporate new technologies, and rise to meet new challenges as the engagement environment changes around us — and around our customers. 

In the coming months, our customers will see new features, improvements, updated branding, and more of the content they love.

But first, we’ve already rolled out an exciting new resource for our customers and the broader engagement community…

New! Engagement Professionals Community

Earlier this month, we announced our brand new online community for engagement professionals all over the world

Sign up here. 

Our Engagement Professionals community is just getting started, but inside we already have:

• Member listings – A great place for networking and discovering new connections!
• Discussion room – To vent/chat about any issues facing you at work
• Share your thing! – A place to promote your event, resources, or wins
• Resources – Helpful online resources or frameworks
• Jobs board – A place to look for opportunities or advertise your openings
• Curly questions and conundrums – A place to ask tricky questions and work through challenges with your peers
• Feedback – A link to fill out a feedback form to help shape our community as we grow

Check out the community here and click the ‘Sign Up’ button to join us! 

You’re welcome to join us, share it with your colleagues, and start interacting in the spaces. It’s 100% free and open to all engagement professionals — you don’t have to be a Simply Stakeholders customer. We look forward to seeing you inside!

Global Festival of Ideas: April 30, 2024

To wrap up our 20th anniversary month, we’re hosting a FREE Global Festival of Ideas event for engagement professionals on April 30 🎉

Click RSVP to join the event here! 

This Festival is part of our bigger vision to help grow an online global community of people working in stakeholder relationship management. The event includes:

• A line up of industry experts from all over the world (Brazil, Canada, USA, South Africa, UK, Europe, NZ & Australia)
• 12 hours of non-stop learning, ideas, and innovation
• Back-to-back with 15 minute presentations
• Breakout rooms and spaces to continue the discussions, debates, and peer-to-peer learning

A huge thank you to all of the speakers who have generously agreed to share their knowledge and expertise with the community. 

We hope you’ll join us to hear from some of the leading professionals in stakeholder engagement and relationship management. And we hope you’ll stick around for the community so we can continue the discussions and knowledge sharing even after the event ends. 

Who’s Speaking?

Looking for more event details? Check out this amazing lineup of speakers for the Festival of Ideas event!

Lucy Cole-Edelstein Engagement and strategy advisor Lucy will be presenting a session, “3 wise monkeys in reverse – the top 3 tips for actually engaging (as opposed to busyness and box ticking)”.	Max Hardy Founder & Director at Max Hardy Consulting Max will be sharing his expertise and experience in the stakeholder engagement and management space.	Colby Taylor Engagement Director Colby will be talking all things communication and engagement!
Julie Castle Co-Founder & Director at Struber Julie will discuss “The engagement precedent predicament”, “Resourcing engagement for the future”, and “Engagement interfaces and integration”.	Doug Horne Head of Marketing & Communications Doug will be sharing his knowledge about communication in business.	Anne Pattillo Founder & Director Anne will be sharing about all things strategy and engagement.
Nicholas Davis Partnerships & Advocacy Manager Nick will be discussing the future of sustainability in business.	Hugo Bonilla Director, Corporate Social Performance Hugo will be discussing “The value of data driven stakeholder engagement for corporate teams to drive the sustainability agenda” and “Sustainability reporting overload”.	Iain Walker Executive Director of The newDemocracy Foundation Join Iain as he discusses “How will democracy in Australia change over the next five years?”.
Kyle Redman Director of Research & Design Kyle brings a unique perspective on democracy due to his years of research and experience at newDemocracy Foundation.	Hugo Diogo Communities & Social Performance Manager Join Hugo as he talks about all things energy and renewables.	Jolie Wills CEO & Co-Founder at Hummingly Join Jolie as she combines science and storytelling with practical solutions for the complex challenges leaders and teams face in our new world of work.
Jill Hannaford Executive General Manager Join Jill and her unmatched experience in the stakeholder engagement world to learn how you can utilize stakeholder engagement in business.	Joel Levin Consultant & Managing Director Join Joel as he discusses “Intelligence both Artificial and Real”.	Margaret Harvie Founder Join Margaret as she discusses “Perspectives from an engagement practitioner on the recent Community Engagement Review – Renewable Energy”.
Amanda Newberry Founder & MD Join Amanda as she talks about ‘tough projects’ in her 10 years of experience.	Amanda Wild Group Account Director Join Amanda as she talks about all things stakeholder engagement.	Rachel Fox Engagement & Social Impact Join Rachel as she discusses all things stakeholder engagement.
Vivien Twyford Director at Twyfords Join Vivien as she discusses 3 short stories of significant failures in community engagement consultancy life.	Paul Kooperman Director at TEDxMaldon Join Paul as he presents on “community engagement – we’re doing it wrong”.	Katie Kinder  Customer Success Account Executive at Simply Stakeholders You’ll see Katie throughout the festival as she is one of our event facilitators!

To read the full speaker profiles go here. 

How to Join

Go to the event page in our online community and click “RSVP”. This will get you on the list! We’ll send you a confirmation email and reminder emails leading up to the event.

Note that if you’re not already a member of our free community for engagement professionals, you’ll be redirected to a page to log in or sign up (this should only take a minute!). 

We cannot wait to see you on the day!

Thank You for Being Part of Our Journey!

Finally, we just wanted to say a HUGE thank you for being part of Simply Stakeholders — no matter what role you’ve played over the last 20 years. 

Whether you follow along with our content because you care about best practice stakeholder engagement, whether you’re one of our valued team members, or whether you’re one of our incredible customers making a real impact by building better stakeholder relationships…

…we’re so glad you’re here and look forward to continuing on this journey together!