Stakeholder Engagement: What It Means & Why It Matters
Stakeholder engagement is the process of identifying and working with individuals or groups who have a stake in your project, especially those with high interest. It includes activities like mapping, planning, communication, feedback collection, and ongoing relationship building, including the creation of a communication plan aimed at creating better outcomes for everyone involved.
But what exactly is stakeholder engagement in project management? Why does it matter? Who needs it—and when? And how do you do it well?
If your work impacts others or depends on their input, stakeholder engagement isn’t just a best practice; it’s essential. From public sector leaders and sustainability teams to project managers and policy makers, nearly every professional benefits from understanding how to engage stakeholders effectively, including those with low influence.
In this guide, you will discover what stakeholder engagement involves, from understanding your stakeholders to choosing the right methods for communication, collaboration, and follow-through. We’ll explore why it matters, how it fits into your broader strategy and strategic priorities, and the tools and best practices that can help you do it thoughtfully, consistently, and effectively.
What Isn’t Stakeholder Engagement?
A common misconception is that stakeholder engagement is the same as stakeholder management, stakeholder relations, public consultation, and community engagement. While these terms and associated processes may share some similarities, they do not mean the same thing.
To sum up the differences, it is important to develop a clear plan.
- Stakeholder management typically refers to the planning, execution, and evaluation processes that often lie behind stakeholder engagement.
- Stakeholder relations refers to the process of managing stakeholder needs, interests, expectations, and responsibilities between the organization and stakeholder groups.
- Public consultation is a formal procedure that involves using the public’s views and feedback as part of a proposal and decision-making process.
- Community engagement is a form of stakeholder engagement specific to communities, and typically involves engaging those located in the area impacted by the project.
Why Does Stakeholder Engagement Matter?
To put it simply: stakeholder engagement matters because your stakeholders matter, and their knowledge, participation, and support can make all the difference when it comes to the success of your project or organization.
But let’s get a little more specific. Here are some benefits of engaging with stakeholders:
- Find out information: You’ll be surprised at what you didn’t know before you started surveying or talking to stakeholders
- Promote transparency: By sharing information with stakeholders (especially how your decisions are made) and regular updates on your activities, you’ll demonstrate your transparency (and hopefully encourage stakeholders to reciprocate)
- Build trust: Showing up consistently, communicating with stakeholders, and sharing openly will encourage stakeholders to trust you and your organization
- Gain a social license: Building trust and relationships with stakeholders, and allowing them to have an impact on your project, can help you earn a social license to operate
- Boost accountability: By getting stakeholders involved and keeping them informed, you can help keep your project and organization on track to deliver what you promised
- Make better decisions: A stakeholder engagement plan will help to shine a light on information or factors you were previously unaware of, so that you can make better decisions based on a more complete picture
- Boost sustainability: Through your engagement process, you can learn about the different social, economic, and environmental factors that may be impacted by your project, and how you can operate more sustainably for communities and other stakeholders
- Empower stakeholders: One of the best things about deliberately engaging stakeholders is that you can hand back some power to the people who are impacted by your project (especially marginalized/forgotten groups) and allow them to have a voice
- Reduce risk: Engagement can help you discover risks you were unaware of, so you can avoid or mitigate them, and by engaging with some stakeholders, you can actively manage issues or concerns that may lead to delays or problems
From these benefits, it’s easy to see how a stakeholder engagement plan can lead to more successful projects. On the other hand, ignoring your stakeholders, especially those with high interest, might lead to poor outcomes or even total failure.
The Stakeholder Engagement Process in 5 Easy Steps
We’ve identified five main steps or milestones in the stakeholder engagement process, from planning to evaluation.
1: Create a Stakeholder Engagement Plan
The first step is to get strategic and determine your stakeholder engagement objectives. If you know what you want to achieve, this will help to shape your strategy, plan, and what you choose to evaluate later on. Note that steps 2 and 3 also form part of your stakeholder planning process — some initial stakeholder identification, analysis, and classification will help to determine your engagement approach.
We’re big fans of keeping plans simple — you may only need one page to outline your engagement. Learn more about stakeholder engagement plans or check out our quick start guide.
2: Identify and Assess Stakeholders
Stakeholder assessment includes stakeholder identification, stakeholder analysis, and stakeholder mapping, so that you can begin developing your understanding of stakeholders. Begin by listing all individuals and groups who could be affected by your project, or who could influence its outcome. This includes internal teams, community members, advocacy groups, and anyone with a vested interest. Then note characteristics and attributes that may be relevant to your engagement.
3: Classify Stakeholders
Stakeholder classification involves assigning a category or type to stakeholders based on what you discovered through analysis and mapping. From there, you can segment them into stakeholder groups, plan your engagement activities, and tailor your approach to each group.
You might determine that some stakeholders are primary stakeholders, others are secondary stakeholders, and out of those two groups, some are key stakeholders. Typically, your key stakeholders require engagement earlier on and more frequently because they’re more likely to influence the project outcomes or other stakeholders.
4: Engage with Stakeholders
Now it’s time to implement your stakeholder engagement plan. This will look different depending on your resources, strategy, stakeholder groups, key stakeholders, and what you outlined in your plan. But most of the time, it involves communicating with stakeholders, hosting events, gathering feedback, and encouraging input from stakeholders.
5: Monitor, Evaluate, and Report
Throughout the stakeholder engagement process, it’s important to monitor your stakeholders to understand how they are responding to your engagement approach, the project itself, and the resources you are utilizing. Evaluate your engagement based on the objectives you identified in step 1, and adjust your approach based on stakeholder responses and feedback. Finally, you’ll likely need to report on your stakeholder engagement to both internal stakeholders and the people you’ve engaged with to demonstrate how their feedback has influenced the project.
Quick Tips for Engaging Stakeholders
Aside from following the right process for engaging with stakeholders, we have a few extra tips that’ll help you be more successful.
Follow Best Practices
Some examples of best practices include tailoring your communication and message to stakeholder groups, making your engagement inclusive so that all groups can participate, listening to stakeholders and acknowledging their feedback, and genuinely allowing stakeholder feedback to shape your decisions and project. Effective communication and meaningful engagement help you understand their core values, context, and address stakeholder needs.
Track Your Engagement
You should be tracking your engagement from the beginning, including any potential risks that may arise. This means adding your stakeholders to a stakeholder register (spreadsheet or stakeholder software), tracking any interactions with stakeholders, and recording any feedback. Tracking is important for collaboration, insights, reporting, evaluation, compliance, audits, and more.
Learn About the Principles
You may have already heard about the stakeholder engagement principles, which are vital for the project team, including civil society organizations, such as the International Finance Corporation (IFC) Stakeholder Consultation Principles, the International Association for Public Participation (IAP2) Core Values, and the Association of Project Management (APM) Principles. Each of these offers useful guidance for how companies engage in responsible, best practice stakeholder engagement, so it’s worth getting familiar with them.
Offer Genuine Engagement
Some organizations approach stakeholder engagement like it’s purely for show. They want to tick the boxes, make it look like they care, and hope that their stakeholders stay out of the way. But that isn’t what stakeholder engagement is for, at all. You should be offering stakeholders a genuine opportunity to learn about the project throughout the project lifecycle, with the purpose of getting their input in a way that can influence outcomes.
Continually Evaluate and Improve
You should always seek to improve your stakeholder engagement process and outcomes, particularly considering stakeholders with high influence. Continually evaluate your engagement, review your analytics, ask for stakeholder feedback, and then incorporate that engagement. This will help you keep your engagement relevant and keep your stakeholders engaged long-term, perhaps even in your future projects!
Looking for more? Check out our previous content on stakeholder engagement tips: the dos and don’ts!
What Stakeholder Engagement Tools Should You Use?
Whether you need to engage just a handful of stakeholders or a list of thousands, you’ll likely need to acquire a few tools to support the process and help you engage through two way communication as effectively and efficiently as possible. If you’re assembling your engagement plan toolkit, here’s what we’d recommend including:
Stakeholder Engagement Plan
You’ll find plenty of stakeholder engagement plan templates online, or you could make your own based on our stakeholder engagement planning guide. We also offer an online stakeholder planning tool that’ll help you quickly generate a plan. Whatever you choose, make sure it’s easy to read, easy to keep updated, and something you’ll actually use.
Stakeholder Register
Another important tool is the stakeholder register. This is where you’ll store your stakeholder list, contact information, and any other info about your stakeholders. For a super basic stakeholder register, you might set up a spreadsheet, but for more features (including analytics, mapping, reporting, and tracking), we recommend looking for stakeholder software that can streamline your business needs. Fortunately, even if you start with a spreadsheet, you can easily import it into most stakeholder platforms later on, which might include a detailed communication plan.
Stakeholder Analysis and Mapping Tools
There are so many ways to analyze and map stakeholders and influence groups, though some methods are certainly more practical than others. Ideally, your stakeholder engagement platform will have stakeholder analysis and mapping built into the product, making it easy to update your analyses and generate visualizations. But if you need to manually analyze and map your stakeholders, check out these stakeholder diagrams to see some of the frameworks you could use.
Stakeholder Reporting Tools
Finally, you’ll need a way to evaluate and report on your stakeholder engagement. One tool you might come across is the stakeholder engagement assessment matrix, but once again, it’ll be more ideal if you can use the analysis and reporting tools already built into your stakeholder software.
The best kind of stakeholder engagement tool is one that does everything you need — ideally, all in one place. That way, you have a single source of truth for your stakeholder engagement, your data, and your team.
Ready to turn engagement into impact?FAQ
What is stakeholder engagement in simple terms?
Stakeholder engagement is the process of involving individuals or groups who are affected by or can influence a project, particularly those with decision-making power. It’s about listening to their perspectives, sharing information, and building relationships to create better outcomes.
Why is stakeholder engagement important?
Engaging stakeholders helps build trust, promote transparency, and surface valuable insights. It leads to stronger decisions, fewer risks, and broader support, especially for projects with social, environmental, or public-facing impacts.
Who counts as a stakeholder in a project?
Stakeholders can include internal teams, community members, customers, government agencies, NGOs, advocacy groups, and others who have an interest in—or are affected by—your work.
What are the steps in the stakeholder engagement process?
A typical stakeholder engagement process includes:
- Planning
- Implementation
- Identifying and assessing stakeholders
- Segmenting stakeholders
- Communicating and collecting feedback
- Reporting on progress and outcomes
What’s the difference between stakeholder engagement and stakeholder management?
Stakeholder engagement focuses on collaboration, two-way communication, and active involvement. Stakeholder management is about strategically planning and coordinating those interactions to meet project goals.
How do you know if stakeholder engagement is working?
You can evaluate success by looking at participation levels, quality of feedback, improved stakeholder sentiment, and how well stakeholder input is reflected in project decisions or direction.
What tools are used for stakeholder engagement?
Common tools and resources include stakeholder registers, mapping templates, communication logs, and feedback forms. Platforms like Simply Stakeholders bring all of these together into one place to simplify the entire process.
