Stakeholder Engagement Examples and Successful Campaigns

Looking for some inspiring, new stakeholder engagement examples? We all know we need to do better stakeholder engagement. But sometimes it can feel like the same old approach isn’t working anymore. Been there, done that. 

Sometimes you need a little injection of creativity and inspiration to help boost engagement and participation and get your stakeholders to sit up and take notice. So, we’ve put together four creative stakeholder engagement examples. 

Feel free to steal an idea or two for your upcoming campaign…

1. Police Engaging Stakeholders on Social Media

An impressive number of police and law enforcement agencies make excellent stakeholder engagement examples these days. So, if you’re ever looking for inspiration from an organization or institution that’s not typically liked by communities, check out the social media accounts of police service agencies around the world. 

Here are two prime examples:

Queensland Police Service

While many of their social media posts are serious and informative, Queensland Police Service is known for mixing in humour, puns, and cute animal pictures (where appropriate) on their Facebook and Twitter pages, which help to keep their community engaged. With over 1.1m Facebook followers and 236K Twitter followers, an impressive 20% of Queenslanders (estimated) like to stay in touch with their content. 

QPS also use their social media platforms to get the public involved in reporting people of interest and finding missing people.

New Zealand Police

Like the Queensland Police, New Zealand Police do a great job of engaging their community online. Not only with their Facebook and Twitter accounts, but also with this hilarious recruitment video that went viral (now with over 1.9m views). 

By communicating in a way that stakeholders can relate to, with a mix of funny content in everyday language and local humour, New Zealand Police engage their local community through social media at scale.

Note: Social media isn’t just great for stakeholder engagement. It’s a goldmine for stakeholder monitoring and even stakeholder management. You can find your stakeholders and influencers (with the right search terms), monitor conversations and concerns, and respond in real-time.

2. Amazon Studios Engage Users Throughout the Production

Amazon Studios are exactly what they sound like — Amazon’s television and film production distributor. I wanted to share this stakeholder engagement example because Amazon Studios pioneered a unique and transparent way of engaging consumers throughout the production and filming process. While they no longer operate this way, this example still offers some great ideas and inspiration.

From 2010-2018, anyone could submit scripts and concept videos online to Amazon Studios — all reviewed by staff within 90 days (at least, that’s their stated aim). If a project moved into development or distribution, the writer would get paid $10,000+. At the time of shutting down this program, Amazon Studios had 20,694 movie and 6,973 TV series projects listed on their website, and in March 2013, Amazon had over 23 films and 26 television series in active development.

Beyond the initial submission process, Amazon also set up Amazon Preview, which is an invite-only community for giving feedback on concepts, storyboards and test footage. This process used to be limited to boardroom executives and focus groups, but instead, it was opened up to everyday users.

Engaging users throughout the production was a smart move at the time for Amazon Studios. They could find out what users wanted and give it to them. Plus, involving users behind the scenes with a real chance to contribute their ideas boosted engagement, loyalty and connection to the brand.

3. Unilever Sustainable Living Plan

Unilever, whose products include a long list of popular food and beverage brands, cleaning brands and beauty brands, is a great stakeholder engagement example of large-scale change and transformation. 

In 2010, Unilever created its blueprint for a sustainable business, its Sustainable Living Plan. The goals were to reduce environmental impact while improving the health, well-being and livelihoods of people worldwide. They were looking to create transformational change in these areas, going beyond their organization to change whole systems and contribute to the 17 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.

This involved a multi-stakeholder approach to help grasp and address the challenges holding back society from sustainable change. Unilever’s stakeholders for this project include shareholders, employees, governments, NGOs and civil society organizations. In order to “deliver change at scale,” they knew they needed to partner with key players. But also engage their employees using initiatives like sustainability training, employee surveys, leadership programs and management programs.

While their plan is ongoing, Unilever has already seen some promising results, like continued growth for brands that align most closely with sustainability. And they’ve won awards for their sustainability initiatives.

Learn about public involvement can help sustainable infrastructure projects.

4. Facebook CSR & Stakeholder Engagement Example

As the #1 social media network, Facebook has a complex stakeholder environment — billions of users from nearly every country and culture, as well as advertisers, shareholders, employees and government organizations. But at the end of the day, their top priority always comes back to users, because without engaged users, they’d quickly lose their value to other stakeholders.

Other than developing and improving their product, Facebook has created some features geared at both engaging users and demonstrating their corporate social responsibility (CSR). For example:

• Birthday donations – Facebook added a feature allowing users to collect charity donations on their birthdays
• Crisis response – This feature helps users connect and stay updated during natural disasters or crises

At a time when Facebook is facing criticism and scandals around privacy, censorship, not filtering violent materials or hate groups, hacks and a lot more, they probably need to invest in a few more CSR and stakeholder engagement initiatives to try to win users back.

Think Creatively and Go Beyond Stakeholder Engagement

Feeling inspired by these stakeholder engagement examples? Ready to create your stakeholder management plan? While you’re more than welcome to use these examples as inspiration, you’ll still need to think outside the box to come up with a stakeholder engagement plan that fits your organization and stakeholders. 

It might take a little time to figure out, but it’s worth the extra effort. With the right creative ideas, you can even go beyond stakeholder engagement to create a highly impactful brand experience with long-term and far-reaching benefits.

But first thing’s first. Before you can create your stakeholder engagement campaign, you need to get your foundations right and make sure you have the full stakeholder landscape. It’s where all smart organizations start (like the ones in the above examples). You’ll need the right stakeholder engagement software to manage your stakeholders, with the right planning tools to get started. 

Get started with our free tool and build your stakeholder management plan today!