Stakeholder Mapping
Not all your stakeholders will have an equal interest in, or influence over, your business. As an example, key, high-priority stakeholders — senior leaders and executives, shareholders, and major customers and suppliers — will care more about your activities and may have more impact on what you do than stakeholders with less invested.
Categorizing your internal and external stakeholders in a matrix like this one has a communications purpose: It can help you determine your messaging, which channels you’ll use, whether one-way or two-way communication is better, and how to strike the appropriate tone.
Know Your Audience
At The Writers For Hire, we understand that a blanket engagements approach is not always appropriate or professional. A key stage in developing your stakeholder engagement plan is understanding who your stakeholders are and what makes them tick. Your engagement plan will be far more effective if you research your key stakeholders, identify legitimate interests and concerns, and ensure you tailor your messages specifically to them.
For instance, you may need to adopt a more professional tone with a high-profile investor who is renowned for appreciating formality in a business relationship. The opposite may be the case with a major supplier with whom you have built a more informal relationship and a relaxed tone is more appropriate.
Our multi-skilled team of qualified writers is not only experienced in tailoring communication for all your different stakeholders, but they are also great at conducting research to learn more about your key stakeholders.
Engagement Goals
Once you have profiled all your stakeholders, you then need to establish your communication or engagement goals such as:
- Informing stakeholders about a developing situation.
- Providing informational reports.
- Creating positive perceptions around products/services, new departments, or the organization.
- Generating leads and sales.
- Explaining your position on a new policy.
- Altering misconceptions about the organization.
Our proactive writing team takes ownership of your stakeholder engagement projects, creating the copy you need even on tight deadlines. We solve all your content requirements on a sophisticated level by providing engagement gap analysis, extensive planning, scheduling, managing all subject matter expert relationships, and employing thorough approval and revision protocols. At The Writers For Hire, you get much more than a freelancer, you get a dedicated writing team.
Stakeholder Engagement Benefits
There are several benefits to effective stakeholder engagement, but it is important to remember that stakeholder engagement is not just a one-off activity, but rather a continuous process to:
- Gain a deeper understanding of your stakeholders’ opinions, concerns, and best practices to help shape your organizational activities. The sooner you engage with your stakeholders, the sooner you start cultivating strong, productive relationships, and the more likely your stakeholders will support you as an active participant in your operation.
- Draw on stakeholder expertise as a source for process and other improvements.
- Foster third-party endorsers.
- Raise the profile of your organization and products/services.
- Improve policy delivery and get honest feedback.
- Build collaborative partnerships.
- Help devise strategies to promote a competitive advantage.
- Improve governance and reduce risks.
- Build trust and goodwill.
- Prevent inter-stakeholder conflicts.
Do any of these scenarios sound familiar?
- You have way too much to write, but you don’t have time to train someone new. You need a standby writer who catches on fast, produces work you barely have to edit, and who works with minimal guidance.
- It’s that time again. Time for change. You’re dealing with a merger, an acquisition, a downturn, or explosive growth. From shareholder reports to employee-facing emails, you need a writing team who can keep stakeholders informed and positive.
- You have a delicate situation and you need to respond quickly – there is no room for mistakes and you don’t have time to babysit. You need a team that understands the nuances of business, can produce meticulous copy in volume, and can ramp up fast.
As a professional writing agency, The Writers For Hire can help you establish your big-picture stakeholder engagement and communication strategy, gather all the relevant data, and systematically develop all the profile-specific content and communications you need. We have all the tools, expertise, and knowledge to handle BIG projects with a multitude of documents at great speed.
With backgrounds in journalism, business, and marketing, our writers know how to craft and convey messages with the intended effect. They’ll quickly learn your business and culture, then incorporate facts and data to create compelling, convincing, and even calming content.
In addition to talented people, we rely on proven processes. Our award-winning project management system keeps your job moving forward and benchmarked, no matter how large it gets.
Our team of friendly, responsive writers is easy to reach and always happy to help with any request, from strategic planning to final proofing.
