6 Steps to Effectively Measure Stakeholder Engagement
Stakeholder engagement is important, but how do you know if it’s performing well?
Although the process may not be as clear cut as tracking marketing KPIs, financial outcomes, or other performance metrics across your organization, you can (and should!) measure the performance of your engagement.
As a stakeholder engagement professional, project manager, or executive entrusted with engaging stakeholders, you should be on top of your key engagement metrics and prepared to demonstrate how well your engagement is performing.
In this guide, we explore how to measure stakeholder engagement, why it matters, key metrics to monitor, and the six steps you should follow.
Why Should Organizations Measure Stakeholder Engagement?
First thing’s first — is it really worth investing time and energy into measuring stakeholder engagement?
The short answer is yes. If you’re a stakeholder engagement professional or working to achieve a particular outcome by engaging with stakeholders, measurement is an important part of the overall process. Here are just some of the reasons why:
- Risk Management – Measuring your engagement early and often can help you keep your finger on the pulse, identifying potential issues so you can proactively address stakeholder concerns, maintain stakeholder alignment, and manage risks to your project.
- Resource Optimization – Regular stakeholder assessments can help you quickly identify what channels and what types of engagement work best so you can focus your resources and efforts on more effective stakeholder engagement.
- Performance Improvement – If you want to do better with your current or future engagements, you need to measure your baseline and track your results so you know if you’re improving and the specific areas to focus on.
- Stakeholder Reporting – It’s often a good idea to report back to your stakeholders after the engagement so you can show them the impact of their feedback or input (this can help motivate them to participate in future engagement opportunities!).
- Proof of ROI – Measuring your stakeholder engagement activities and outcomes can help you demonstrate results and ROI to internal stakeholders, increasing support for ongoing engagement and further investment.
- Compliance – If stakeholder engagement is required for your project or organization, you’ll need to demonstrate proof of that engagement, including who you’ve engaged, what they said, and the impact this had on your project.
How to Measure Stakeholder Engagement
You’ll find there are many different ways to measure stakeholder engagement, but the best methods are ones that fit your engagement goals and activities, and are easy to maintain. The gold standard of measurement starts with launching the right stakeholder platform to support all your processes, from inputting data to reporting.
Launch an SRM
An SRM or Stakeholder Relationship Manager is a platform that is built to track and manage all your stakeholder relationships. These platforms typically come with a whole range of tools for data input, reporting, and analysis, so they’re ideal for measuring your engagement in a really efficient way.
If you don’t already have an SRM (it’s not the same as a CRM!), you’ll need to:
- Review the current top platforms on the market
- Demo/trial your top products to make sure they’re a fit
- Commit to a product for setup, onboarding, and training
- Start using your SRM in your stakeholder engagement processes
Learn more about how to choose stakeholder software here or reach out to our team if you’d like to demo Simply Stakeholders as your preferred SRM.
Set Engagement Targets
One of the most important steps in measuring stakeholder engagement is to start with clear targets. You need to know what you hope to achieve from your engagement, and (ideally) a way of measuring your progress towards your goals. Examples of engagement targets include:
- Number of people subscribing to your notifications and emails, or following your online channels
- Amount of web traffic to your website or project landing page
- Number of people viewing/interacting with engagement emails or social media posts
- Percentage of people responding to surveys or consultations
- Number of meeting/event attendees
- Percentage of attendees actively participating in discussions
- Number of complaints
- Resolution times and rates for issues/grievances
- Response times to comments or enquiries from stakeholders
- Frequency of interactions with stakeholders
- Feedback scores and satisfaction ratings
- Percentage of decisions influenced by stakeholder input
- Health of stakeholder relationships
- Reaching a specific target audience
- Reaching at least one stakeholder from all your key stakeholder groups
- Gaining participation from marginalized groups
Of course, there are many other metrics and leading indicators you could apply to your project or engagement. So, don’t be afraid to think outside the box about what data or results might indicate you’re successfully engaging with stakeholders.
Identify Key Stakeholders
Key stakeholder identification will likely be an important step in how to measure stakeholder engagement for your organization. After all, you won’t be engaging with all your stakeholders in the same way — and the success of your engagement with a handful of key people will likely have a much greater impact overall. To identify key stakeholders, follow these steps:
- Think big – Create a list of all your stakeholders
- Assign attributes – Note which of these stakeholders are critical to project success and/or present a higher risk to the project (considering interest, impact, and influence)
- Visualize data – Use stakeholder mapping to visualize stakeholder data and identify which stakeholders are key stakeholders
- Segment stakeholders – Group your key stakeholders together for easier tracking – especially as you’ll likely engage with them sooner and more often than your other stakeholders
Collect Stakeholder Input
A significant part of your stakeholder engagement will involve gathering stakeholder input. Any response (or lack of response) from a stakeholder could potentially form valuable data on the success of your engagement — as well as feedback towards your project or organization. Use your SRM as a source of truth for this data so that you can build a history of your interactions with each stakeholder, and see the big picture for your engagement.
Stakeholder input you’ll likely need to collect will include both explicit and implicit feedback, such as:
- Questionnaires and surveys that specifically ask about satisfaction and outcomes
- Focus groups and face-to-face interviews
- Formal responses
- Comment cards, feedback forms, and written submissions
- Official complaints, compliments, and grievances
- Comments or engagement on social media
- Ratings and reviews across online platforms
- Attendance (or non-attendance) at events or meetings
- Analytics on website and other online platforms
- Clicks, shares, likes, saves, and downloads
- Time spent engaging with materials or information
- Time to respond to questions or communications
- Resource utilization
- Participation in voluntary activities
- Behavioral changes or adoption rates
Analyze Stakeholder Data
Make sense of your stakeholder input and data by analyzing it in a way that delivers meaningful insights — and helps you to measure your stakeholder engagement’s success and impact. If you’re using an SRM like Simply Stakeholders, some of the analysis methods you could use include:
- Multidimensional Stakeholder Mapping (interest, influence, impact, criticality, effort, position)
- Relationship Health Scores
- Relationship mapping
- Sentiment analysis
- Feedback surveys and forms
Inside Simply Stakeholders, you can also use the filters to look at specific stakeholder segments to understand how your engagement is performing with different groups.
Report and Refine
Gather your insights into a report that you can use internally, or share externally with certain stakeholders. From this report, you should be able to see ways to further refine your engagement process to improve your metrics. For example, you might realize that you’re not reaching a key stakeholder group and need to adjust your activities to engage them. Or you might realize that you’ve exceeded several of your targets and can switch your focus to an area that needs more work.
You may also find that some of your original engagement targets are no longer relevant or realistic, so this is also an opportunity to refine your strategy and set some new goals.
Important Stakeholder Metrics to Monitor
We briefly touched upon some examples of engagement metrics you could track, but let’s take a closer look at some of the most important stakeholder metrics that nearly every project will need to monitor.
Monitor Engagement Levels
Stakeholder engagement levels are a popular metric for measuring engagement, and typically involve assigning each stakeholder with a level (Unaware, Resistant, Neutral, Supportive, or Leading) based on their current or desired level of engagement. These levels could be used to set and measure certain objectives, track specific improvements, plan tailored strategies, and set priorities.
However, it’s not enough to simply measure your level of engagement, or even to track basic statistics like how many people participated in your engagement. This is the bare minimum.
As an engagement professional or project manager looking to deliver best practice stakeholder engagement, you need to go much deeper into metrics that indicate the quality of participation. Consider how you could measure and report on things like:
- What people said
- How information was used
- How deliberative your discussions were
- Whether issues were discussed in depth
- Whether various viewpoint were considered
- Whether participants accurately represented the people impacted by the work or project
Track Satisfaction Scores
As a customer, hotel guest, or patient, you’ve probably come across surveys where you’ve been asked to provide a star rating, a 0-10 scale rating, or NPS (Net Promoter Score) on a scale. These are all examples of satisfaction scores that are typically used to measure the satisfaction of customers, patrons, or visitors.
Satisfaction scores can also be a great way to measure the satisfaction of your stakeholders. You might include a question in your feedback surveys or a link in your post-interaction email to stakeholders, such as:
- On a scale of 1-10, how satisfied are you with [organization’s] engagement process?
- Provide a star rating for our recent interaction!
- On a scale of 1-10 (where 1 is extremely dissatisfied and 10 is extremely satisfied), how would you rate your experiences with the project/service/product/organization?
- Please provide a rating for [specific aspect of the project/engagement]?
Satisfaction scores can be used to identify whether some groups are more satisfied than others, and to determine whether certain project milestones, engagement activities, or events are linked to an increase or decrease in overall satisfaction.
Analyze Stakeholder Influence Impact
The influence of certain stakeholders or stakeholder groups may impact your consultation, project, or organization more than others. Equally, your organization or project may have a greater influence on certain stakeholders over others. Measuring, analyzing, and tracking these metrics over time can be invaluable for shaping plans and strategies, anticipating challenges, and managing expectations.
Methods for analyzing stakeholder influence impact include:
- Stakeholder Impact Analysis – Assign an impact rating from Very Low to Very High to determine how you expect a stakeholder or group may be impacted by a project or decision
- Stakeholder Classification – Classify stakeholders as primary or secondary based on their likely level of impact, and mark higher influence stakeholders as key stakeholders
- Stakeholder Mapping – Choose the most appropriate stakeholder mapping methods to assign criteria to your stakeholders (with a special focus on influence and impact) and visualize this data on a diagram
Track Retention Rates
For many organizations, one of the clearest signs of a successful engagement is that your stakeholders are happy to remain in contact and provide input on future projects. This indicates that:
- You respected their time
- You provided value
- You showed evidence that they had an impact on the project
- Your engagement or project was relevant to your stakeholders
Methods of measuring retention include tracking email open rates, email clicks over time, survey completions, unsubscribes, event attendance, and how long someone has been in your system (and active). Although it is normal for individual stakeholder’s levels of engagement to fluctuate over time (often due to external factors), keeping an eye on retention metrics can help you refine your engagement and continue strengthening your stakeholder relationships — as these will often provide greater value over time.
Calculate Engagement ROI
One final (but important) piece of the puzzle in how to measure stakeholder engagement is ROI. Calculating the return on investment for your engagement is tricky, but not impossible — and it’s worth doing as it can help you justify further investment in stakeholder engagement. To calculate your ROI, you’ll need to know two things:
- Your costs – How much time and resources have you invested in engaging stakeholders?
- Your benefits – How is the engagement helping you to increase revenue, retain income, reduce costs, reduce/manage risk, save time or resources, uncover opportunities, avoid legal penalties, or fix costly problems?
You won’t be able to come up with an exact number (there’s too many other factors that can influence your outcomes), but you’ll likely be able to come up with a reasonable estimate that points to a solid ROI. And if not, it’s time to look at how you can more efficiently manage your costs, and what you can do to increase the benefits for your organization.
Learn more about ROI in our blog on the 7 hidden costs of not using stakeholder software.
Measure Engagement With a Stakeholder Reporting Tool
We’ve covered a range of stakeholder engagement metrics to track — and various methods of measuring stakeholder engagement. However, one of the best ways to simplify the process of tracking, measuring, and reporting on key stakeholder metrics is with a fully featured stakeholder management platform.
Simply Stakeholders includes custom dashboards, analysis capabilities, surveys, reporting tools, and stakeholder mapping tools — making it easier than ever to measure your engagement and report on your key metrics.
Keen to learn more? Check out the full list of features or book a live demo with our team.
