The Future of Stakeholder Relationship Success and Simply Stakeholders / Darzin
It’s an exciting month for the Darzin team as we celebrate the launch of a new version of our Stakeholder Relationship Management platform.
First, let me shed some light on “the new Simply Stakeholders” and why we shifted our product strategy towards bringing our two platforms Darzin and Simply Stakeholders closer together.
Four years ago, we created Simply Stakeholders for what we thought was the growing influx of companies and businesses that were very new to stakeholder engagement and stakeholder management tools. We wanted to give them a step up from spreadsheets and CRM systems that really aren’t designed for managing complex stakeholder relationships.
What surprised us was that governments and companies of all sizes were attracted to Simply Stakeholders because of its simplicity of design with built-in smarts and automation, and most importantly, how easy it was to adopt and roll out across their teams. Some of them had tried other stakeholder management platforms that were either too complex and never used, or too simplistic and didn’t give them any reporting or analytics.
Fast-forward four years and we decided that we should take our learnings from Simply Stakeholders and apply it to our other platform Darzin, as those customers could also benefit from more automation, a better user experience and some of the innovations we were building for Simply Stakeholders customers.
And in that design process, a new, combined platform emerged. Simply Stakeholders Version 2.
The new Simply Stakeholders is built around four key themes:
- Visibility
- Productivity
- Collaboration
- Flexibility
Initially, Stakeholder Management platforms attempted to resolve the challenge of Visibility. Stakeholder data was scattered across multiple tools including email, spreadsheets, websites, and more. Just getting a view of who the stakeholders were, and who was interacting with them was a time-consuming challenge. This was a challenge that Darzin, Simply Stakeholders, and other stakeholder management platforms have been tackling for many years and there are a range of solutions available.
In designing the new platform, we wanted to aim higher – to shift the narrative and emphasize the “so what” of this challenge. What do teams need to focus on now that they have an organized picture of their stakeholders?
Our pioneering work with Stakeholder Mapping in both our platforms showed us that projects and work was more successful when our customers utilized the strategic insights from the stakeholder analysis and mapping. So, we wanted to take that further – dive deeper into the who, when, and why of stakeholder engagement. Providing visibility on not only who was being engaged, but also who wasn’t being engaged, and measuring the success of those engagements against the health of the relationship.
While solving the Visibility issue, traditional Stakeholder Management platforms have only amplified productivity and collaboration problems. They have created large amounts of data, with little insight or knowledge that can be gained from them, as well as creating quite a data entry and maintenance burden on already busy teams.
Despite all the great things Stakeholder Management platforms have done to unify the stakeholder data, they fall short of enabling teams to do their best work.
In designing the new platform, we wanted to address this productivity and collaboration challenge through expanding our use of Artificial Intelligence, automation and workflows. We had successfully used some of those technologies in Simply Stakeholders, and wanted to see how we could provide the power of Darzin within that lens of simplicity and ease-of-use.
With this next evolution of Darzin/Simply Stakeholders, teams now get the best of both worlds – a clear picture of stakeholders, their sentiment and relationship health, along with a productivity toolset that makes teams more strategic and collaborative, within and across teams.
A stakeholder management system that has the ability to grow with you. The core features are always there – like issues tagging, sentiment analysis, stakeholder mapping and interaction tracking. But the more advanced features are all tucked neatly out of the way until they are needed. This flexibility that is embedded in the design of the new version gives teams the ability to quickly deploy the solution, provide a customized experience for individual teams, and scale their stakeholder engagement efforts. And the flexibility doesn’t stop there. Each user has the ability to tailor and craft their own user interface and experience, to boost adoption and have a system that your team will actually want to use.
The next chapter for Darzin and Simply Stakeholders
Over the coming months, our team will continue to expand on an already unparalleled Stakeholder Relationship Management platform – one we believe fundamentally alters the way organizations will manage their important stakeholder relationships. A single workspace that makes teams more productive, more impactful and brings them closer to their stakeholders than ever before.
If you’re interested in learning more about what we have planned next, book a meeting with one of our team members for a first-look demo at the future of Simply Stakeholders and Relationship management success.
- Book a personalised tour with our Australian team
- Book a personalized tour with our North American team
