Stakeholder Feedback: An Essential Element in Effective Project Management
For project managers and stakeholder engagement professionals, stakeholder feedback is about so much more than just ticking the box.
Tapping into stakeholder perspectives can shape your decision-making, mitigate risk, avoid costly problems, build trust, and drive more sustainable outcomes. It can help you more effectively manage your projects, strengthen your relationships, and give your organization a competitive advantage.
In this guide, we look at what stakeholder feedback is and why it’s so important, along with some practical methods to gather feedback, understand it, and apply your insights.
What Is Stakeholder Feedback?
Stakeholder feedback is defined as the evaluative information, reactions, and responses you receive from your stakeholders. That is, the feedback of the people, groups, and organizations that are impacted by, have an influence on, or an interest in your project or work. These stakeholders might be internal (inside your organization) or external (outside your organization).
Learn more: What Does Stakeholder Mean?
This feedback may come from a variety of sources and may be:
- Intentional – Such as how stakeholders answer a survey or interview question designed to evaluate the project, process, or consultation
- Incidental – Such as whether stakeholders open an email or attend an event, or how they indirectly express their thoughts, concerns, ideas, and feelings through their communications and actions
Effectively capturing, analyzing, and taking action on this feedback is essential for successful stakeholder consultation — and these processes must be accounted for in your stakeholder engagement plan.
Why Stakeholder Feedback Matters
If you can optimize just one aspect of your project consultation and engagement process, let it be feedback! Requesting and capturing your stakeholder feedback can make a significant impact on how you work together with your team, the decisions you make, and even the overall direction of your project and organization. You’ll find that stakeholder feedback can help you:
Enhance Strategic Planning
Stakeholder feedback is data — and the more data you have, the better-informed your plans and decisions can be. By gathering feedback from multiple stakeholder groups and diverse perspectives, you’ll remove potential blind spots in your strategy and ensure your plan is developed for real stakeholder expectations and requirements.
Boost Collaboration
With a clear system for encouraging, capturing, and sharing stakeholder feedback, you can facilitate better stakeholder collaboration. You can quickly spot opportunities to bring stakeholders together based on shared interests and capabilities, and you can identify potential conflicts that might impact stakeholders before they become a barrier to collaboration.
Plus, you can boost internal collaboration on the consultation or engagement itself if your whole team has access to your engagement data, including feedback from stakeholders.
Identify and Address Issues Early
Stakeholder feedback allows you to keep your finger on the pulse of your project or consultation. It can act like an early warning system for possible challenges and risks before they escalate and become more expensive to fix. For instance, you might notice a steady decline in satisfaction ratings, or an increase in issues reported for a particular product. Or you might analyze your stakeholder communications and find sentiments are trending towards negative, or focused on a particular issue. In most cases, the sooner you spot these trends, the easier it will be to address them, while keeping your stakeholders happy.
Drive Innovation and Efficiency
Is your organization working towards continuous improvement and innovation? One of the best ways to drive this innovation is by harnessing stakeholder feedback, as this can be a source of ideas, insights, and inspiration. For example, a stakeholder may suggest a new feature or a new product to bring to market, or identify ways to make your processes more efficient.
Increase Engagement and Build Trust
The act of requesting stakeholder feedback itself can have a positive impact on engaging your stakeholders, whether they’re internal team members, external contractors, partner organizations, users, customers, or community members. It’s part of facilitating two-way communication between your organization and your stakeholders — an important stakeholder engagement best practice. After all, when you listen to your stakeholders, acknowledge their concerns, and act on their feedback, it can help you build trust and build stronger stakeholder relationships.
Identifying Key Stakeholders for Feedback
Before we get into how you can gather stakeholder feedback, it’s important to establish who you need to gather that feedback from.
You can gather feedback from any stakeholder, but most of the time, you’ll want to focus your efforts on key stakeholders.
Feedback from key stakeholders will carry more weight due to their roles, interests, influence, and other characteristics. Capturing their feedback and responding to their concerns in a timely manner is more likely to contribute to the success of your project. Learn more about key stakeholder identification and how to identify your key stakeholders.
It’s also worth tailoring your feedback gathering process to different stakeholder groups. One of the most obvious ways to do this is by segmenting your lists into internal stakeholders (inside your organization) or external stakeholders (outside your organization).
Internal stakeholders are often best positioned to provide formal or informal feedback on internal processes, collaboration opportunities, and efficiencies. On the other hand, external stakeholders typically provide feedback through formal mechanisms like surveys or interviews, with insights into expectations, satisfaction, experiences, and product/service demand.
Effective Methods for Collecting Stakeholder Feedback
Any comment, action, or reaction from your stakeholders could be considered feedback. However, the most common methods used by stakeholder professionals and project managers to gather stakeholder feedback include surveys, questionnaires, interviews, focus groups, and extracting data from digital platforms.
Surveys and Questionnaires
Perhaps the most popular method of gathering stakeholder feedback is via surveys and questionnaires. In fact, some engagement and consultation platforms (like Simply Stakeholders) include this capability inside their software, or integrate with external survey software, such as SurveyMonkey, Google Forms, or TypeForm. However, some organizations and projects may also utilize paper-based surveys and questionnaires — and this format may be preferred by some stakeholder groups.
| Best suited for: |
|
| Success tips: |
|
Interviews and Focus Groups
Both interviews and focus groups are useful methods for gathering stakeholder feedback, allowing you to go beyond surface level questions and develop a deeper understanding of stakeholder ideas, perspectives, and concerns. One-on-one interviews tend to be more conversational and are ideal for capturing feedback from key stakeholders. Meanwhile, focus groups may include representatives from multiple stakeholder groups participating in a structured discussion of your project, product, or issue. Each of these methods have traditionally occurred face-to-face, but increasingly, organizations are using digital platforms like Zoom or Teams to conduct interviews and focus groups online — especially if stakeholders are geographically distributed.
| Best suited for: |
|
| Success tips: |
|
Digital Platforms and Tools
We’ve already touched on some of the digital platforms and tools used for surveys, questionnaires, and online discussion. However, many other tools, channels, and software used by organizations and project managers can also become a useful source of stakeholder feedback — even if this is not their original or intended purpose. For example, your website analytics, social media analytics, CRM, and email marketing tools can provide insights into engagement, sentiment, behavior, and other forms of feedback.
| Best suited for: |
|
| Success tips: |
|
Crafting Effective Stakeholder Feedback Questions
So, you’ve determined you need to gather stakeholder feedback. The next step is to come up with a list of questions that will result in useful feedback — and that your stakeholders will respond to. The following tips mainly apply to surveys and questionnaires, but may also prove useful for planning interviews or focus groups.
Choosing the Right Question Type
Different types of questions have different benefits and applications — and you’ll probably get the best results from including a variety of question formats.
Consider using closed questions (e.g. tick-the-box, likert scales, multiple choice, or yes/no) are ideal for quantitative data, benchmarking, and responses to straightforward questions. They’re quick to answer, so a higher number of stakeholders may be willing to answer them.
Open-ended questions (e.g. “What do you think about X?” or “How does this project impact you?”) are best suited to gathering detailed data, context, explanations, emotional responses, and examples. The qualitative data you gather might be trickier to analyze and benchmark, but can provide valuable insights into stakeholder perspectives, concerns, and ideas. It’s a good idea to make these questions optional, as not every stakeholder will want to provide detailed responses.
Writing Questions Well
Well-written questions are designed to align with both stakeholder expectations and the goals of your organization. Stakeholders will be motivated to respond to questions that give them opportunities to:
- Address specific pain points
- Share their experiences
- Influence project outcomes
- Improve your products, services, or processes
At the same time, questions should add value to your organization or project. Make sure each question results in meaningful feedback that aligns with your objectives, serves a purpose, and has the potential to influence your decisions.
Pros and Cons of Anonymous Surveys
Some surveys are anonymous, while others require respondents to enter their name, email address, or other identifying data. Anonymous feedback is ideal for discussing sensitive topics, gathering potentially negative feedback, and reporting issues or concerns that don’t require follow up. The primary benefit of identifiable feedback is the ability to follow up with respondents — but it can also be used to track individual progress, encourage accountability, and offer incentives for participating.
Example Stakeholder Feedback Questions
To help speed up the process of designing your feedback survey, questionnaire, or interview, here’s a list of common stakeholder feedback questions that you might like to use in your consultation:
- How would you rate the effectiveness of our communication channels? Please explain your rating.
- What are your preferred methods for receiving updates or providing feedback on the project?
- On a scale of 1-5, how well do our current initiatives align with your long-term needs and expectations?
- Can you share any potential risks or challenges we should be aware of?
- Would you say that you trust our organization more, less, or similar to other organizations like ours?
- What are some barriers that you encounter when working with our organization?
- How can we improve the value we deliver to you as a stakeholder?
Make sure you adjust these examples to fit your organization, project, and stakeholders!
Analyzing and Implementing Feedback
Before you begin gathering stakeholder feedback, it’s important to plan for how you’ll make sense of it so that you can incorporate it into your ongoing projects, reporting processes, and strategic plans. Depending on the type of feedback you receive, you could use several different methods to categorize and analyze it.
Quantitative data, such as scale ratings, yes/no responses, and user activities (such as website visits or event attendance) can be represented as percentages or plotted on graphs.
Qualitative data, such as open-ended responses, stakeholder communication, emails, conversations, and online comments are trickier to analyze. However, the right software capabilities can allow you to make sense of large volumes of text very efficiently.
Simply Stakeholders includes AI-assisted automated issues tagging and sentiment analysis, and the ability to annotate comments so you can bring quotes into your reports. This means that any qualitative feedback, survey responses, and stakeholder comments added to the software are automatically analyzed. This process also enables efficiencies, such as automated workflows triggered for key issues (like risk categories and negative sentiments), or interactions with specific issues could be routed to the relevant team member for action.
Also, consider how you can segment your feedback based on your different stakeholder groups — as this will provide clearer insights into how you can tailor your engagement and communications to address their concerns and meet their expectations. If your stakeholder feedback is linked to individuals in your stakeholder register (like Simply Stakeholders), you can use filters to generate reports for all your stakeholders, or specific segments. Learn more about what’s possible in our blog on 5 Simple Steps To Getting Started With Stakeholder Data Management.
Once you’ve analyzed your feedback, be sure to apply your findings via:
- Reports – Some organizations include stakeholder feedback in the reports they share with stakeholders, and by showing how feedback has been used and actioned, they can help to build trust and demonstrate transparency.
- Strategies – If you’re reviewing your strategy and updating your strategic plans, recent stakeholder feedback can play a role in shaping your strategy and justifying any proposed changes to your products, services, and processes.
- Decisions – By considering feedback from stakeholders ahead of each major decision in your project and organization, you benefit from a broader range of perspectives that may help to reduce risk and improve outcomes.
Overcoming Challenges in Stakeholder Feedback
Even if you follow all the steps we’ve shared so far, gathering and using stakeholder feedback can still be challenging at times. So, let’s take a look at some common issues, why they occur, and how to tackle them.
Low quality responses can occur for a number of reasons. Tailoring your feedback approach and questions to different stakeholder groups can help to increase response quality and completion rates. But it’s also a good idea to start your survey with an introduction that asks for honest, critical feedback and sets stakeholder expectations for how the feedback will be used and how long the survey will take (so that they don’t rush through it). Messaging like the above screenshot that says “Your feedback matters and is seen by decision-makers at Clutch!” can go a long way in encouraging better quality responses.
Managing conflicting feedback is another common challenge. How do you decide what feedback to take action on, or how to create a compromise? However, the right analysis methods will help you understand what the majority of stakeholders think and feel — or you may choose to place more weight on your key stakeholders’ feedback over others. It may also be a good idea to follow up your survey findings with a focus group so that you can discuss the issues in more detail and work towards a consensus.
You may find that engagement levels drop over time, which makes it difficult to gather survey data over time and track how your stakeholders feel throughout the life of your project. Maintaining and improving stakeholder engagement requires ongoing effort to stay relevant, but one of the most important actions is to show people how their feedback is being incorporated into your project and decision-making process. If they can see they’re having an impact, they’ll be more likely to keep showing up.
Maximize Your Stakeholder Feedback for Project Success
It’s clear that stakeholder feedback is essential for stakeholder satisfaction, but it can have so many other benefits for your organization and project.
Looking for a way to enhance your feedback management and stakeholder engagement? Discover the Simply Stakeholders platform, with features like our powerful stakeholder register, stakeholder analysis, reporting, communication (including forms and surveys), and so much more. Reach out to our team if you’d like to learn more or book a demo.
