collaborative stakeholder communciations
DESCRIPTION
Good communications strategies are the foundation of successful collaborations and effective project delivery.TRANSCRIPT
Stakeholder Communications
Introduction Relevant, timely and transparent communication is the lifeblood of effective and productive
collaboration among stakeholder groups. This paper briefly discusses:
1. Structuring the interactions between the primary stakeholders in this area
2. Communication strategies used to support these primary stakeholder structures - the
distinction has been made between internal communications strategies (intra-stakeholder
communication) and external communications strategies (stakeholders communicating to
the users of their services and the general public).
3. Outreach to aligned professional bodies that form secondary/tertiary level of stakeholders.
Primary Stakeholder Structures Xxxx stakeholders are drawn from a range of department and organisations including (governmental
service providers, non-governmental organisations, policy makers, professional representative
bodies and others). To manage this array of services, xxx needs to perform detailed stakeholder
analysis and to create structures to enable groups with overlapping goals to work together more
effectively. The first step is to identify the current primary stakeholders and establish working
groups to support them. The figure below shows the current primary stakeholders and their group
structures.
(insert your primary stakeholder structure here.)
(Alex - I didn’t include the difference between primary/secondary/tertiary stakeholders since the
client already knew this – let me know if you need help with this.
Figure II.1 Primary Stakeholder Groupings.
While the primary stakeholders are seen to be the main drivers of change, secondary stakeholders,
marginalised stakeholders and even opposition stakeholders are also important and must be
included in the communications processes. The nature and type of communications relates closely
to the degree of collaboration that the organisation is involved in. Collaboration, when seen as a
continuum, ranges from simple consultation to where the stakeholders act as advisors but the
leading agency makes the decisions to full collaboration where all stakeholders have equal
responsibility and accountability in achieving the goals of the group.
Indeed, within the stakeholder groups themselves, varying degrees of collaboration may be required
depending on which activity is being undertaken. An example of this would be the Xxxxx National
Awareness Campaign which benefits from consultation with the Violence against Older People
stakeholder group but Xxxxx makes the decisions with regard to the campaign whereas, in improving
services for older people, the same group would necessarily have more distributed decision making
responsibility.
Figure II.2 a & b Primary Stakeholder Groupings collaborating on service provision (a) and on
external communications (b)
Primary Stakeholder Communication Strategies
Intra-stakeholder Communications As stated above, intra-stakeholder communications are critical to the productive functioning
stakeholder group. The nature of these communications depends on the definition of the
stakeholder group as shown below in Figure II.3. This shows the various information and
communications outputs that may be used to ensure open, transparent and timely information can
be shared among the stakeholder groups depending on the degree of collaboration required from
each group.
“Charter”
The stakeholder charter is a document that is agreed between the stakeholder organisations and
serves as a record of the group operation at a given time although this may also change from time to
time as required by the stakeholder group. The “charter” has the following elements:-
Rules of Engagement.
How the group agrees to work together; takes input from members, resolves conflicts, and escalates
issues.etc.
Statement of the shared goals of the group.
This critical definition of the goals of the group is important to ensure that a coherent
communications strategy can be put in place. Unless the stakeholders have helped to formulate and
take ownership for common goal, it will be almost impossible to reach the stage where they can
collaborate effectively together. It is difficult to get to this stage and third party facilitation may be
required.
Roles and Responsibilities
This identifies the convenor, facilitator etc. and ensures that everyone understands their function
within the collaborating group.
National
)
Regional RAC
Local LAN?
Consultation Decision making input
Shared & transferred
responsibility
National
Regional RAC
Local LAN?
Consultation Decision making input
Shared & transferred
responsibility
Communication Tools & Processes
This section articulates all communications elements ranging from how the group’s decisions are
recorded and disseminated, how often and in what form the groups meet to how information is
shared between the members of the group.
Figure II.3 Communication Elements by Stakeholder Group.
Tracking progress of the group
This is an ongoing process where the progress of the group against its plan can be assessed. A simple
tool to achieve this is a dashboard which can be managed by the convenor This document distils the
progress of the group to a series of key performance indicators (KPIs) which can be evaluated on an
ongoing basis and used to focus the group on issues that require attention. The figure below shows a
fictional example of the progress of a working group against its top objectives.
• Stakeholder Charter & artefacts • Write access Information Share • Regular strategy and implementation meetings • Ezine recipients • External campaign consultation/shared decision making • Access to shared calendar • Event speaking opps /invitations •
Primary
Stakeholders
• Ad hoc meetings/ hello meetings • Read access to information share • Ezine recipients • Shared Calendar • Event Invites •
Secondary
Stakeholders
• eZine recipients • Access to shared calendar • Event invites • Tertiary
Objectives KPIs Value Target Status
Objectives agreed - -
Shared Communication Tools in place - -
Roles identified and agreed - -
% reduction of services provision overlap 30% 50%
Top 5 service gap reduction 2 3
€ decrease in ongoing service costs - 200k
% increase in successful case resolutions 2% 30%
% reduction in services user complaints 7% 15%
% increase in service awareness 65% 50%
1. Effective working group formation
2. Improve effectiveness of service inputs
3. Enhance Service Outputs
Key
target acheived
in progress
target not expected to be met
Not started
Figure II.4: Illustrative example of a sample KPI Dashboard.
Information Share
In most stakeholder groups, working documents are either circulated by email or distributed on a
paper format. The downside of this method of updating stakeholders is:
Spam – often large files are circulated to broad stakeholder lists and the spam tends
to mount in proportion to the complexity and scale of the project
Security Risk: documents sent through email are vulnerable while being sent and
paper documents can often be abandoned in the wrong places.
Version Control : it can be difficult to ensure that the version that you are working
off is the most up to date version and in some cases, a lot of work can be repeated
by proofing and correcting documents that have already been changed.
Inefficient collaboration: resources and time can often be consumed as people lose
documents and they have to be resent.
Data loss: key documents may be lost should the system currently housing them
become faulty.
Having an online information share can ensure that when the share is accessed, the most current
versions of the documents are readily available at any time. Data security can be enhanced by having
the share backed up regularly and subject to strong authentication and verification technology.
Access to the share can be controlled on a person by person basis – allowing primary stakeholders to
edit some documents or providing outlying stakeholder groups with the ability only to read files and
not edit them.
Regular Strategy and Progress Meetings.
These are vital for functioning collaborative groups to meet either face to face or via conference call
to assess progress against their goals and strategies. The meetings should occur at least on a
monthly basis depending on how close the group is to the actual execution of the strategy (e.g. the
NSC only meets on a quarterly basis whereas the public awareness sub-committee meets on a
monthly basis). While strategy changes may be discussed, it should only be in the light of the KPI
dashboard to ensure that all stakeholders are working together effectively. There are other proxy
metrics which will also implicitly give a health indicator of how successful the collaboration is:
Are organisations attending?
Are the right people attending?
Are people being pro-active in the meeting?
eZine
The eZine is a monthly email that will be sent to all stakeholders who have asked to receive it. It
takes the form of a mail that contains a serious of story headers and links that direct the reader back
to the xxxx website. The ezine fulfils the function of keeping primary stakeholders up to date
between meetings other stakeholders informed if they are not engaged with xxxx on a face to face
basis.
External Campaign Consultation
During campaign development it may be necessary to have a separate dialogue thread with
stakeholders who have been consulted for their input. This will primarily be through email and will
either distribute material via email or draw the stakeholders’ attention to the document share.
Shared Calendar
This is an online resource that will allow all stakeholders to post their external communication
activities via a simple questionnaire to a common calendar that will allow everyone to get an
immediate assessment of the ongoing activity in any given area.
Website
The website itself is a repository of information that can be used by stakeholders. At the time of
writing (September 2008) it is being redesigned to direct stakeholders to the sections of the site that
are relevant to them such as progress on the National Strategy development, changes to the funding
request process, relevant research resources and thexxx publications list. In addition, it will maintain
an archive of previous eZine articles and event presentations.
Events
In addition to their inherent value for informing stakeholders, events also provide an opportunity for
some stakeholders to interact withxxx on a 1-1 level for the first time. In an informal atmosphere it
would be possible for xxx to garner grass roots support for its strategies.
External Communications in Collaboration with Primary Stakeholders
Garnering Input from Stakeholders
As discussed in appendix 1 above, governmental, non-governmental service providers and
professional representative bodies can amplify and align key communications messages to their
audiences. By correctly harnessing the communications channels of the stakeholders, it is possible to
execute more impactful campaigns.
The difficulty in applying this model however is that the stakeholder organisations must be
comfortable with the communications messaging and that in principle, the timing of any given
campaign should not overlap any campaigns that the individual organisations may be undertaking. In
order to get true “buy in” from the stakeholders it is necessary that they see the campaign as an
extension of their own messaging which due to the subjective nature of marketing and the time
required for consultation can pose difficulties in meeting deadlines and incurring redundant
approval cycles.
The figure below shows how Xxxxx can get the input into any external campaigns that it is planning
by using a reducing input model. Given enough time, it is possible to consult and work with relevant
stakeholders to agree which audience should be addressed and even what direction the messaging
could take. In addition, the early involvement of the stakeholders can help identify positions and
messages that would be problematic for them and potentially cause them to turn against the
campaign.
Fig II.5 Primary Stakeholder Group Input into Campaigns over Development Time.
While creating a brief, it is possible to use the agreed collaboration structures to inform that brief
and engender a sense of shared ownership. Once input has been garnered, the main agency can take
control and brief the communications team and vendors.
The second stage is the initial presentation of the creative ideas. These are presented first to the
main agency for initial feedback. As a result of the subjective nature of creative, the input from the
stakeholders is now bounded within the range of the creative options which the Xxxxx itself wants.
Similarly through subsequent phases of creative amendment, the opportunity for input is bound
tighter until in the final phase main agency effectively is simply informing the stakeholders of the
final execution.
The purpose of this shrinking of stakeholder input ability is purely for the purposes of bringing the
campaign to market in such a way that all parties feel t is their campaign but the campaign can be
executed in a limited timeframe.
Amplification
As discussed in Appendix I above, each of the stakeholders has valuable communication channels
both to their own colleagues and key audiences including the general public that can be utilised to
amplify the messaging beyond the activity being conducted by xxx. The same is true of the
governmental organisations and the professional representative bodies. The former will often create
its own siloed public awareness campaigns and the latter have direct and regular communication
lines to thousands of members.
The strategies for leveraging these communication channels are:-
1. Inform the messaging of stakeholder campaigns
2. Extend the campaign development stage into implementation phase.
The first strategy requires the stakeholders to open up their own campaign development process to
the stakeholder group just as Xxxxx have done. The initial stage is the organisations need to share
their campaign planning at a top level through tools such as a shared messaging activity calendar, a
shared file repository where the organisation can post its draft briefs including information such as
target audience(s), campaign messages, planned spend & implementation ideas. Ideally, the
stakeholder should bring the brief development into open session as Xxxxx has done. And, using the
same process of decreasing input, Xxxxx and the other stakeholders may inform the campaign while
execution responsibility lies with the service provider itself.
The second strategy requires the two stages:
a) Garnering “buy in” from the stakeholder.
b) Provision of a correctly formatted campaign execution pack to the stakeholder for
dissemination through its own channels.
Stage a) is difficult because it requires the presentation of the campaign to the stakeholder and
ensuring that the campaign causes no conflicts for the stakeholder. In the case of primary
stakeholder groups, this will have already been done through the existing collaboration structures,
secondary stakeholder groups and representative bodies do not have the opportunity of these
intensive collaboration structures and must be communicated with either using existing
communication protocols (see above) or consulting on an ad hoc basis.
An additional benefit of this, of course, is that the process of informing non-primary stakeholders is
that it can prepare them for any unforeseen demand on their resources as a result of the halo effect
of a campaign e.g. the awareness campaign causes more people to call the National Crime Helpline
even though it is not specified as a call to action of the campaign execution.
During the second stage, campaign packs are designed to do the following:-
I. Provide an easy to understand campaign rationale showing messaging, audience,
creative, dates of execution, calls to action etc. that can be used by the stakeholder
organisation to inform its workers and partners.
II. Detail the agreed action that the stakeholder will take e.g. place campaign call to
action on website
III. Campaign execution guidelines (essentially a brand guide for the campaign).
IV. Provide campaign material that can be re-packaged using the campaign guidelines
V. Agreed methods of reporting on campaign impact e.g. helpline spikes
VI. Incentive for the stakeholder organisation e.g. T-shirts for call centre staff etc.
VII. Escalation instructions for questions that can be answered promptly.
An additional element might be a visit from Xxxxx to help train stakeholder staff which would again
serve to provide additional commitment from a stakeholder organisation.
Assessment of Stakeholder Capability
While there may be an aspiration of having all stakeholders take campaigns and run with them,
expectations need to be informed as to the stakeholders’ capabilities from a communications
perspective. This is especially true of the smaller NGOs who may not have access to sophisticated
communications channels or processes and in many cases it is rare for service providers to have
formally devised a communications strategy or communications calendar for any medium term
period. A high level mapping of the stakeholders’ communication capabilities has been engaged in
using social audit, appreciative enquiry and historical impact assessments. The benefit of course is
that collaboration at a national and regional level will “raise all boats” in terms of getting an effective
message to victims, general public and perpetrators.
Leveraging Representative Bodies as Stakeholders There are many professional representative bodies in Ireland ranging from trade unions (e.g. ICTU)
to the typically middle class professions (e.g. Law Society, ICGP) to special interest bodies (Disability
Federation of Ireland). The common attribute is that they have a clearly defined set of members
whose interests they represent and highly developed and active internal communications channels
and procedures. Figure II.6 shows a selection of some of the largest groups in Ireland. By carefully
selecting and developing a working relationship with a prioritised subset of these groups, Xxxxx will
be able to:-
1. Amplify the public outreach efforts in driving awareness and changing attitudes
2. Encourage up-skilling of potential front-line service staff (e.g. Nurses, Gardai) through
training and guidance
3. Gain insight into the experiences of front line staff in this area by creating an inward flow of
communication from group members.
There are challenges in achieving this which pivot essentially on being able to set the agenda with
these groups so that they sufficiently prioritise the issues as something their members should be
aware of or take action on. Typically, these groups represent an attractive target for most special
interest and lobby groups and there is a specific requirement for Xxxxx to differentiate itself and its
message from the general noise.
Association Association Name Members
IBEC Irish Business and Employers Confederation 7500 businesses
ASTI Association of Secondary Teachers of Ireland 122,000 teachers
NYCI National Youth Council Ireland 53 youth organisations
ICGP Irish College of General Practitioners
AGP Asssociation of General Practitioners
GRA Guarda Representative Association 10,500
AGSI Association of Garda Sergeants and Inspectors 2000+
CCI Chambers Commerce Ireland 12,000
CIF Construction Industry Federation 3000
IMO Irish Medical Organisation
INO Irish Nurses Organisation 28,000
POA Prison Officers Association 98% of all prison officers in Ireland
SIPTU Services Industrial, Professional and Technical Union 200,000 individuals
INTO Irish National Teachers Organisation 35,000 members
INOU Irish National Organisation for the Unemloyed
IMPACT 55,000 members
ICTU Irish Congress of Trade Unions 832,000 thought the member bodies
AHCPS Association of Higher and Civil Public Servants 3000
UNITE
DFI Disability Federation Ireland ~120 disability organisations
IACT Irish Association of Counselling and Therapy 3500
IASCW Irish Association of Social Care Workers
IASW Irish Association of Social Workers
Law Society Ireland 8,400
Bar Council of Ireland 2002
Figure II.6 Selection of Professional Representative Associations in Ireland
Strategies for Engagement with Professional Representative Bodies Effective engagement with the professional representative bodies must take place over a series of
steps as shown in figure II.7. :
Prioritisation
Representative bodies can be assessed on two dimensions: -alignment with Xxxxx’s
objectives (and therefore importance to the fulfilment of Xxxxx’s remit) and their assessed
willingness to work with Xxxxx. An example would be the Garda associations who have a
significant overlap with Xxxxx goals due to the frontline nature of the work and who rank
highly in their openness to work in this area. By rating each organisation on these
dimensions, this will clarify which bodies are critical to Xxxxx’s goals and which are likely to
be the easiest to work with. This analysis will yield a shortlist of perhaps 6 key organisations
which require engagement before the others. Further analysis should also yield the key
priorities of these organisations and the potential channels of communication and training
that Xxxxx may be able to leverage.
Engagement
On identification of the key organisations, Xxxxx will make an initial assessment to judge
whether the degree of engagement is simply leveraging their communication channels or
whether a deeper level of collaboration is required e.g. through up-skilling and training.
Xxxxx can then decide at what level engagement is required to take place ranging from 1-1
meetings with senior figures from Xxxxx and the organisation down to simple outreach in
order to place relevant messaging content such as opinion pieces for the organisation’s
member magazine etc.
Agreed Common Goals
Once the organisations have been engaged, both Xxxxx and the representative body should
agree a common goals and strategies to achieve their aims. Given the likely resource
constraints on both sides, initial goals and strategies must be realistic and readily
achievable with the minimum of effort i.e. both organisations should use existing processes
and resources to get the desired effect.
Prioritisation EngagementAgreed
Common Goals
Execution of Strategies
Results Assessment
Figure II.7 Collaborating with Representative Bodies
Example goals could involve outreach to members, training or even research among
members.
Execution of Strategies
The agreed strategies can then be executed over the required time period. As noted above,
these simple strategies can be managed as mini-projects that are aligned with Xxxxx’s main
communications plan efforts.
Results Assessment
Once the engagement is underway, it is critical that good results are obtained and
highlighted to both organisations to ensure further collaboration in the future. This requires
an agreed measurement methodology and the commitment to regular communication and
feedback between both organisations.
Conclusion Strong communications processes in the stakeholder space will greatly enhance the ability for xxx to
achieve the goals it has set out for itself. Not only will it be simpler to facilitate stakeholders’ ability
to collaborate to improve services but it will also ensure that all agencies in this sector are speaking
with a common and very loud voice. Over a longer term, raising the priority in the public’s minds will
also help to ensure that policy can be influenced correctly in this area. Creating robust and effective
stakeholder communications strategies is a complex and iterative task. Once the key building blocks
are in place, there is then a process of repeated evaluation and the rejection of ineffective strategies
and the promotion of effective ones. It is only by actively trying these strategies that this insight will
be gained.