Understanding Secondary Stakeholders and Their Impact
Most organizations would agree that their primary stakeholders are important to their business operations, risk management processes, and the success of their projects. But what about secondary stakeholders?
The term “secondary” infers that these stakeholders are lesser-than, minor, inferior, or unimportant. But this couldn’t be further from the truth. In fact, you probably have more secondary stakeholders than primary stakeholders, and their collective potential influence is going to be substantial.
Whether you need to come up with a list of primary and secondary stakeholders, or you’re curious about how you can better engage your (often overlooked) secondary stakeholder groups, this guide is for you. We share definitions, examples, and practical tips to help you identify and engage your secondary stakeholders.
What Is a Secondary Stakeholder?
Stakeholders include the individuals, organizations, and groups that may be impacted by, have an influence on, or an interest in your project or organization.
A secondary stakeholder may indirectly influence or be indirectly impacted by your organization’s activities. Common types of secondary stakeholders include local community members, advocacy groups, government entities, media groups, NGOs, and industry associations.
They may include business stakeholders that don’t have a direct financial stake or decision-making power in your organization, and they’re not involved in your day-to-day activities. However, they may still have an interest in your actions, operations, and broader impacts, and be able to influence your reputation.
Primary vs. Secondary Stakeholders
You could define as any individuals, organizations, or groups that aren’t your primary stakeholders. A primary stakeholder is likely to be directly impacted by your project or organization and/or directly able to influence your decisions and outcomes.
It’s easy to remember the difference between primary and secondary stakeholders: primary stakeholders are directly influential/impacted, while secondary stakeholders are indirectly influential/impacted.
Understanding both groups is critical for comprehensive stakeholder management, with both primary and secondary stakeholders requiring some level of engagement.
Secondary Stakeholder Influence
It’s important to realize that although secondary stakeholders don’t exert direct influence, their potential for indirect influence shouldn’t be overlooked. Secondary stakeholders can indirectly influence your project, work, or organization, through:
- Social influence: Organizing social media campaigns, encouraging boycotts, creating petitions, and speaking up at community forums can cause social acceptance of your organization or project to increase or decrease.
- Advocacy: Lobbying for new regulations, requesting stricter enforcement, providing evidence to regulatory bodies, and filing complaints or reports with oversight agencies can impact your work.
- Public perception: News coverage, editorial content, and investigative reporting can help to shape what the public thinks and how they behave towards your project or organization.
It’s also worth considering recent research on the growing popularity of social media and the internet. These new channels have amplified the influence of secondary stakeholders — making them more important to the engagement process than ever before.
Are You a Stakeholder Professional? Make sure you’re subscribed so you don’t miss out on important news, updates, and more insights like this.Examples of Secondary Stakeholders
Each organization or project will have a slightly different set of secondary stakeholders, each with specific ways they indirectly influence or are impacted by your project. But to help you start thinking about who your secondary stakeholders might be and how you can engage with them, we’ve included some common examples below.
Trade Unions
Trade unions are organizations formed by workers to collectively represent their interests (within a company, across multiple sectors, or across an entire industry) and negotiate with employers. They’ll likely support your project if it could lead to better working conditions, increased pay, and professional development opportunities for workers. However, if any issues come up that impact their members, they may:
- Provide legal support or advice
- Lobby for legislation changes
- Organize strikes or collective actions
By engaging and consulting with trade unions, you can identify potential issues ahead of time, minimizing potential brand reputation damage and costly project delays.
Media Groups
Media group stakeholders include any organizations and individuals that may create, distribute, or control media content (on digital, radio, print, or television) in relation to your project or organization. By distributing and framing information, they can shape public narratives, determine what stories are prominent, decide how issues are framed, and expose potential issues and controversies.
By managing and engaging with media groups as secondary stakeholders, you can proactively build relationships with journalists, allowing you to:
- Share information on project milestones, significant developments, and opportunities for consultation
- Reach your other stakeholder groups via news publications
- Avoid misinformation with consistent messaging across all channels
- Respond quickly with accurate, helpful information in a crisis
Government Entities
Local councils, state governments, federal governments, elected officials, and their internal organizations are another secondary stakeholder that can potentially impact your project and organization. Their concerns include regulatory compliance, environmental impacts, employment standards, transport impacts, and other key issues their voters are focused on.
Building relationships and engaging with government entities can help you to:
- Stay up to date on relevant legislative changes
- Share your perspectives on policy changes that may impact your project or organization
- Ensure your organization is meeting regulatory standards and submitting reports on time
- Document interactions and relationships with government representatives
Communities
As a secondary stakeholder, communities generally include those stakeholders that work or live in the same region as your project or organization. That said, they may also be defined as people with shared interests, religion, values, or customs. These communities may indirectly impact your project by influencing government decisions, protesting or challenging your decisions, granting or withholding acceptance, and influencing access to local suppliers and workers.
Community engagement can allow you to tap into local knowledge and resources that benefit your project and help you make better decisions. Members of the community can help you identify potential issues early in the process, and contribute important historical and cultural context. With meaningful input from your communities, you can get their perspectives and increase the likelihood that your project goes smoothly and that your organization makes life better for these communities.
NGOs and Interest Groups
Non-government organizations and special interest groups could include environmental organizations, indigenous groups, human rights groups, non-profit charities, health and safety groups, think tanks, research institutions, and industry-specific groups.
Each of these secondary stakeholders may play a different role in your project and consultation, depending on their specific interests and methods of influence. It’s worth exploring which groups will expect to be informed about your project and expect to have a say in your decisions. Then proactively engage with those groups, providing relevant opportunities for them to participate in your work and offer their perspectives.
General Public
The general public stakeholder includes any member of society with an interest in your project or organization that does not fit into your other primary or secondary stakeholder groups. They want your organization to contribute to the good of society by following the appropriate legislation, protecting the environment, and treating employees well. Their impact typically comes from their purchasing power, word-of-mouth and online recommendations, social media content, and ability to apply political and regulatory pressure.
Engaging with this stakeholder group is where you’ll see some crossover between stakeholder relations and public relations, although your consultation process will focus on managing the expectations, needs, and interests of key members of the public. When you get it right with members of the general public, you can gain or maintain your social license to operate.
How to Identify Secondary Stakeholders
We’ve defined what secondary stakeholders are and looked at some common examples. But how do you identify who your secondary stakeholders are?
Identifying secondary stakeholders is a natural outcome of the stakeholder analysis process, which encompasses:
- Identification: Undertake key stakeholder identification to create your initial stakeholder lists based on internal brainstorming, a review of similar projects, and any people, groups, and organizations you expect to be impacted by, have an influence on, or an interest in your work.
- Assessment: Conduct a stakeholder assessment, which may involve examining each stakeholders’ interest, concerns, potential influence, degree of impact, and networks.
- Mapping: Use stakeholder mapping to understand who your primary stakeholders, key decision makers, and influential stakeholders are, and who your secondary stakeholders are.
- Reviewing & Adapting: Remember that stakeholders change over time, so be sure to regularly revisit your initial stakeholder lists and keep them up-to-date.
Best Practices for Engaging and Managing Secondary Stakeholders
We’ve included some of our favorite tips and best practices below to help you better engage and manage your secondary stakeholders.
Develop a Clear Communication and Engagement Plan
Many organizations can benefit from creating a communications plan specifically for their secondary stakeholders. This is because primary stakeholders are more likely to require a hands-on approach, whereas most of your secondary stakeholders may only need occasional updates via your online channels.
Stakeholder engagement best practice suggests tailoring your communications plan to specific stakeholder groups — not just primary vs secondary stakeholders. So, consider the messages, channels, and frequency of communication best suited to different secondary stakeholders, whether it’s media groups, government representatives, community members, or interest groups.
You should also create a stakeholder management plan that includes your primary and secondary stakeholders — and the engagement activities you plan to undertake.
Build Trust Through Transparent Relationships
Trust is critical to the success of your stakeholder relationships. But secondary stakeholders may face more barriers to trusting your organization because they have less visibility over your activities than primary stakeholders — and they’re also less able to influence those activities.
With these barriers in mind, you might need to put extra effort towards building trust through:
- Transparent communications: This study found that transparency is essential to rebuild trust and maintain healthy community stakeholder relationships following a crisis.
- Community participation: By playing a role in community initiatives and supporting civic engagement in your community, you’ll demonstrate a genuine interest in the good of others.
- Corporate social responsibility: By doubling down on CSR efforts, you can enhance trust with local communities, activities, and other interest groups.
- Encouraging engagement: Invite your secondary stakeholders to participate in your consultation opportunities, keep them updated on your project, and show how their input has influenced your decisions.
Monitor Feedback and Address Issues Quickly
Even if you have regularly scheduled stakeholder feedback mechanisms, like surveys and interviews, you should be aware that stakeholders may provide feedback via other channels at any time. Monitor for feedback across social media, news media, and community groups so that you can address potential concerns proactively and prevent reputational damage. A basic process for feedback monitoring could involve:
- Identifying channels stakeholders are likely to use
- Setting up brand monitoring tools and social listening tools (such as Google Alerts and Brandwatch)
- Setting up alerts for keywords relating to your brand name or project across those key channels
- Assigning feedback to the relevant stakeholder (if known) in your stakeholder management system
- Analyzing feedback to understand topics, themes, sentiments, and how urgently you need to respond
- Responding to the stakeholder publicly or privately to address their concerns
- Including any brand mentions (and actions taken) in your regular stakeholder reporting
Use Technology to Enhance Engagement
The most effective way to engage and manage your secondary stakeholders is with digital tools — especially purpose-built stakeholder management platforms.
Our favorite tips for getting started with stakeholder software include:
- Starting with the basic features and getting these right before implementing complex capabilities
- Identifying champions within your organization who may become superusers, and letting them try the software first (so they can help bring the rest of your team onboard)
- Getting clear on your rules and processes for recordkeeping when you structure your account
- Making the most of any training, onboarding, and support provided
Systems like Simply Stakeholders offer a full suite of advanced features for stakeholder engagement, all in one place. But if you don’t need advanced features, you can also enhance your engagement and get started with a mixture of digital tools, from email and spreadsheets, to simple project management software and file sharing technology.
Harnessing the Power of Secondary Stakeholders
There’s so many reasons to harness the power of secondary stakeholders through engagement and go beyond tapping into their influence on your project or organization. Effectively engaging these stakeholder groups can also help you mitigate risk, increase legitimacy, gain strategic insights, improve decision-making, strengthen your networks, comply with regulations, and operate responsibly and ethically.
Looking for a way to better identify, prioritize, manage, and engage all your stakeholders? Discover the Simply Stakeholders platform and our tools for stakeholder mapping, reporting, analysis, communication, and so much more.
