How to Identify and Engage Community Stakeholders
Engaging community stakeholders is rewarding and challenging work. A lot of the time, you’re interacting with the people, groups, and businesses most impacted by your project — and getting this right can make a real difference, both for the community and your project outcomes.
Like other forms of stakeholder engagement, the community engagement process involves identification, analysis, communication, relationship building, participation, and feedback. But because community stakeholders are located in a specific region, identifying and connecting with these stakeholders can look a little different.
So, let’s take a closer look at who community stakeholders are, how you can find them, and a step-by-step process to involve them in your projects.
Who Are Community Stakeholders?
Community stakeholders are the individuals, groups, or organizations that make up a local community and are impacted by, have an influence on, or an interest in your project, organization, or work. Common examples of community stakeholders include:
- Local residents and workers
- Local businesses
- Schools
- Government agencies
- Non-profits
- Indigenous groups
- Faith organizations
Communities are important because they actively contribute to a region’s growth and wellbeing. Stakeholders living and working within communities often bring unique perspectives and interests, and engaging them can help increase your local knowledge, make your project better, and reduce your risk.
You can start identifying key community stakeholders for your project by interacting with existing community groups (both online and offline), seeking out local leaders, visiting project sites, checking maps or directors, attending local events or meetings, and connecting with influential individuals that are engaged in similar projects.
Why Identifying Stakeholders Matters for Successful Projects
A project is generally considered successful if it delivers its stated objectives — on time and within budget. Of course, we’d argue there’s more to it than that, like sustainable outcomes, meeting stakeholder expectations, meeting compliance requirements, maintaining positive relationships, and delivering value to a community.
But for most projects to meet even the most basic definitions of success, some level of stakeholder engagement will be required so that you can:
- Understand stakeholder needs and shape your objectives
- Make better-informed decisions from diverse perspectives
- Minimise the risk of delays, cancellations, and cost-overruns
- Build trust for your organization and acceptance for your project
Community engagement matters, but before you can engage your community stakeholders, you’ll first need to identify who they are. The challenge here is that stakeholders within communities are often trickier to identify when compared with other types of stakeholders. You won’t find them all listed on LinkedIn, Google Maps, or online databases — and their demographics, concerns, and goals are often varied.
On top of this, failing to identify and get participation from the right people in a community can leave you open to financial and reputational risks, compliance issues, a lack of support, poor transparency, limited local knowledge, inefficiencies, and additional barriers to getting your project finished on time. In fact, the Australian National University’s Next Generation Engagement Program one program estimates that over the last decade, more than $30 billion in infrastructure projects across Australia were delayed, cancelled, or suspended due to insufficient community engagement.
Participation from community stakeholders is critical to project success — and it all starts with identification.
How to Identify and Engage Community Stakeholders
So, how do you get started with engaging community stakeholders? We’ve uncovered seven key steps, from identifying the right stakeholders to managing your ongoing relationships and commitments.
1. Define Your Project’s Scope and Objectives
Before you can identify or engage community stakeholders, you first need the right foundations in place. Start by defining your project’s purpose, goals, and boundaries — where the scope of your project starts and finishes. From there, you can conduct a stakeholder analysis to identify who might be impacted by, have an influence on, or an interest in your project.
For example, if you were planning an affordable housing development stakeholder project, your initial community engagement planning notes might look like this:
2. Engage with Local Networks
Local networks are a practical pathway for connecting with specific individuals or community groups you should partner with or consult with directly.
Start this process early on and don’t rush. You need time to build relationships, identify key players, establish trust, and set appropriate expectations. And make a plan for how to engage community stakeholders — especially those that may be less visible or harder to reach. For instance, you might collaborate with another organization or a local leader to increase your organization’s credibility, tap into resources, or amplify your message.
The following organizations offer real life examples of how you might use local networks to reach your community stakeholders:
- The Nature Conservancy: Global environmental nonprofit, The Nature Conservancy, were eager to get more community members involved in their conservation efforts. They used Simply Stakeholders to help scale up their stakeholder engagement efforts by better tracking their stakeholder lists and contact groups, including community groups, other conservation groups, and faith organizations.
- Sydney North Health Network (SNHN): Like other public health networks, SNHN strategically engages stakeholders through various channels, such as health service providers, nonprofits, and volunteers so that they can deliver health services within a community. Their stakeholder engagement framework states that their methods of community engagement include reaching communities via Health Professionals and the Community Council.
- Napier Community Network: Many local governments leverage local community networks like New Zealand’s Napier Community Network to deliver service information to community members and encourage active participation in projects and planning.
3. Map Your Stakeholders
At this point in the process, you’ve likely realised that your list of potential community stakeholders is substantial. It’s probably not realistic to engage with each person individually. That’s why you need to do stakeholder mapping — the process of placing stakeholder attributes onto a chart to visualize the data, identify trends, and organize stakeholders into groups so that you can tailor and prioritize your engagement.
Our preferred mapping method is multi-dimensional stakeholder mapping because it allows you to analyze and categorize stakeholders based on a combination of six criteria: influence, interest, impact, criticality, effort, and position. This method is baked into Simply Stakeholders software.
Relationship mapping is another tactic increasingly used in community engagement planning. It involves visualizing the relationships and connections between different community members, community groups, and your organization. This can help you understand how different actors relate to one another, so that you can see who influences who, prioritize specific relationships, and strategically build new connections.
4. Foster Stakeholder Relationships
We saw many organizations struggle to get their messages out to the community during COVID because they lacked strong connections with local leaders and other community networks.
It’s clear that stakeholder relationships matter in community engagement. Once someone has established a relationship with your organization, they’re more likely to trust you, support you, share information and resources, and work with you through conflict. At the same time, by building stronger community networks and connections within communities, you can help to:
- Encourage healthier, happier communities (although governments are primarily responsible for this, private and non-government organizations can play a role, too)
- Ensure that communities are better positioned to navigate a crisis
- Support communities and organizations to minimise risk
To encourage strong stakeholder relationships you will first need to prioritize stakeholder needs — and this will motivate community members to engage with you and consider your needs, too.
Another important factor is ensuring that your organization is worthy of trust. You can earn stakeholder trust by communicating transparently, taking responsibility for your role and actions, implementing CSR measures, and following through on your promises.
5. Ask for Feedback
Stakeholder feedback plays an important role in engaging community stakeholders. It can allow you to:
- Find out what the community needs or expects from your organization
- Tap into innovative ideas and spot opportunities for your organization and project
- Identify risks before they become a problem
- Understand how to effectively allocate and prioritize resources
- Discover how people would like to be engaged (how often, what issues they want to be involved in, and via what channels)
- Strengthen relationships by using stakeholder input to shape your decisions
- Evaluate and improve your engagement processes
So, don’t hesitate to ask your stakeholders for feedback throughout your project via surveys, questionnaires, focus groups, feedback forms, town halls, and public meetings.
6. Respond to Stakeholder Concerns
Listening to your stakeholders, responding quickly, and following up are all important best practices in stakeholder engagement. When a community stakeholder expresses concern about a potential project impact or issue, it’s important to address those concerns to the best of your abilities. You might not have the power to fix every problem that’s brought to your attention, but you can always:
- Acknowledge a concern and thank stakeholders for their input
- Take the time to look into issues properly
- Close the loop by letting people know what actions were taken and how their feedback was incorporated into your process (you could do this individually or on a larger scale with a consultation report)
The right response will show stakeholders that you’re listening to them and taking them seriously, which will help to strengthen your relationships and build trust.
7. Keep Your Stakeholder Lists Up-to-Date
Finally, when identifying and engaging community stakeholders, it’s important to keep your stakeholder information current. An up-to-date stakeholder information system will help you:
- Keep track of a large number of stakeholders and groups
- Analyze, map, and categorize your stakeholders
- Work as a team with one place for all your data and actions
- Track stakeholder concerns, grievances, and follow-up
- Make decisions quickly with accurate insights and information on hand
- Quickly generate consultation reports to inform your colleagues and your stakeholders
So, encourage your team to get in the habit of adding new stakeholder data to your system everyday so you always have accurate information and insights.
Of course, with a system like Simply Stakeholders, it’s much easier to stay up-to-date, with features like contact record importing, plugins to instantly save meetings and emails from your Outlook or Gmail inbox, forms to capture stakeholder feedback, and API/Zapier integrations for easy data sharing.
Build Stronger Communities Through Stakeholder Engagement
We’ve covered some practical steps to help you start identifying and engaging community stakeholders. But don’t stop there! Community engagement isn’t a box you can check and move on — it’s an ongoing process that will require consistent effort, evaluation, and adaptation.
Fortunately, you’ll find that genuine engagement can be extremely rewarding.
When you identify and engage stakeholders, you can get meaningful outcomes like better project design, greater sustainability, reduced risk, and more trust and legitimacy surrounding the project. And you play a role in building stronger communities with increased local capacity, stronger social networks, and better places to live and work long-term, as more people feel empowered to address local issues and participate in future engagements.
Hopefully in future, we’ll see more organizations embrace community engagement as an opportunity, both for their projects and for the communities they operate in!
