How to Plan an Effective Stakeholder Engagement Campaign

Project Managers can learn from many different places. And, you can learn a lot about how to plan an effective stakeholder engagement campaign from the world of marketing.

You are a project manager. You care about getting things right. So you plan meticulously, identify threats, and take steps to mitigate them. The only thing that can get in your way now is one thing: people.

What all experienced project managers know is this:

It is your stakeholders who will ultimately determine whether your project is deemed a success…
or not – of your project.

12 Vital Project Management Rules You Need to Follow

So you need to be equally rigorous in planning your stakeholder engagement campaign. You will need to learn from them, build their trust, and ultimately influence their attitudes.

The Stakeholder Engagement Campaign Planning Process

So what are the components of a stakeholder engagement campaign, and how can you determine the best strategy for each?

In this article, I’ll cover:

• Identify and Understand the Stakeholders You Need to Engage with
• Determine the Message You Need to Communicate, and the Right Tone to Adopt
• Decide What Medium will Get Your Message Across Most Effectively
• Find an Approach that will Motivate the Change You Want to Encourage
• Set up Your Engagement Schedule
• Allocate Responsibilities for Components of Your Stakeholder Engagement Campaign
• Create a Mechanism to Receive, Evaluate, and Act on Feedback from Your Stakeholders

Identify and Understand the Stakeholders You Need to Engage with

Planning your stakeholder engagement campaign is the fourth step in a five-part Stakeholder Engagement process.

In another article, we discussed The Top 20 Stakeholder Analysis Techniques All PMs Should Know.

For major stakeholders whom you choose to prioritize…

You will probably want to create a detailed engagement plan for each of them.

For minor stakeholders…

You will want a plan that has several strands. You will cluster approaches and messages around groups of stakeholders with similar needs, perspectives, or other characteristics.

Determine the Message You Need to Communicate,
and the Right Tone to Adopt

For each stakeholder, the first step in planning your stakeholder engagement campaign is to consider the message or messages that you need to convey. Over the course of a long project, you will need a series of messages. You will build up a narrative that evolves as more information becomes available, or as the stakeholder’s attitudes shift.

Message Calendar

One tip project managers can usefully take from the political campaigning process is to devise a ‘message calendar’. This is a week-by-week (possibly even day-by-day) schedule of the messages that you want to put out or the engagement process you want to pursue.

As important as the message itself is the tone of voice you adopt. Do you wish to be consulting or commanding, informing or instructing, requesting, or requiring?

With each stakeholder and at each stage in your engagement plan, the tone may be different. However, it is vital that you determine the right tone before creating your message. This way, you can test out how it comes across before publishing. Let’s face it: how many of us have sent an email and not thought about tone? And then we discovered the receiver reacted in a way we had not expected nor wanted. Ooops!

Decide What Medium will Get Your Message Across Most Effectively

One of the joys of project work is the vast array of options you have for how to communicate a message. Aside from the world’s best medium (face-to-face, communicating in a shared first language) and its worst (email) media, there are many to choose from. And your job, in planning your stakeholder engagement campaign, is to select those that best meet the needs of your audience; your stakeholders. Don’t simply pick the most convenient for your team.

An early consideration in choosing media is the extent to which you want many stakeholders to get the same message at the same time (broadcast media) or for each stakeholder to get a highly differentiated message (narrowcast media). Some media, of course, can offer both options (for example, many web technologies).

You will also want to note that some media are better at informing and explaining, while others lend themselves better to consultation and involvement. Still others are well-suited to genuine collaboration and partnering.

The figure below illustrates some of the different media available to you, and where they perform best, according to what you want to achieve, strategically.

The Medium and the Message You Need to Communicate

A final consideration will be the nature of the message itself. What is the degree of emotional content (which suggests a personal versus impersonal medium)? And what is the level of complexity and sophistication of your message, which will determine whether long-form or short-form approaches will work better?

Find an Approach that will Motivate the Change You Want to Encourage

A lot of your stakeholder communication will be targeted towards encouraging a change. We shan’t consider the skills of influence and persuasion here, because we have already done so in an earlier article; Persuasion and Influence: A Practical Introduction with My Top 10 Tips. But what I do want to suggest is this…

In motivating a change, a project manager needs to properly understand the range of different motivators that you can deploy.

Fundamental Motivators

The range starts at the bottom, with the most fundamental motivators. These are the basic drives in our lives, like the needs for safety and security.

However, these motivators have something of the ‘if you don’t do this, something bad will happen’ flavor. Whilst aversive motivation is powerful, it is largely a bullying tactic and therefore one to avoid if you possibly can. I would say that this is even the case where something bad really can happen. This is the case with health and safety, or compliance projects. It is always better to find a positive motivator if you can.

Extrinsic (External) Motivators

Of course, people like rewards. Motivating with the promise of a personal gain or benefit of some sort will appeal to the ‘what’s in it for me?’ factor.

However, a lot of recent research shows that this is a poor motivator and fairly ineffectual, unless the person you seek to motivate is either craving the reward on offer in advance, or they feel no other reward is on offer.

Social Motivators

Social motivation factors, like enhanced status, strengthened relationships, recognition by peers, and respect, are powerful. And using them has integrity.

What’s more, the feeling of being part of a social group also creates other powerful motivators like the preservation of reputation, loyalty, and duty. These motivators are powerful assets in a project manager’s toolkit – not just for stakeholder engagement, but team leadership as well.

Intrinsic (Internal) Motivators

Finally, intrinsic motivators are the most powerful of all. This is where you lead others to do something for their own reasons. Maybe pride, achievement, or a sense of contribution. The three most widely used intrinsic motivators in project environments are:

1. giving stakeholders a sense of control
2. making clear the underlying purpose and value of the project
3. creating opportunities for stakeholders to learn, develop, and become more capable.

Once again, these motivators are also valuable to project managers in the team leadership role.

Learn more about Motivation

• Project Team Motivation [Everything You Need to Know]
• What are Intrinsic and Extrinsic Motivation? | Video
• How to Motivate People – 20 Ways to Give Motivation | Video

Set up Your Engagement Schedule

What would a stakeholder engagement campaign be without timescales?

Schedule your stakeholder engagement activities into your wider project plan.

It is best if you treat this as a work stream within a master plan, rather than a wholly separate activity. It is also wise to avoid integrating stakeholder engagement activities with other activity works streams, because in that way you risk mixed messages and mistimings occurring between communications with different stakeholder groups who may, nonetheless, be in contact with one another.

On a larger project, you may have the luxury of a dedicated communications manager. On smaller projects, it is typically the project manager who takes responsibility for leading stakeholder engagement.

Allocate Responsibilities for Components of Your Stakeholder Engagement Campaign

A work-stream needs a work-stream leader. You may or may not have a dedicated Stakeholder Engagement Manager. But, like any other project activity, you need to clearly allocate each engagement activity to a named individual.

As a project manager, you will inevitably involve yourself in a lot of stakeholder engagement activities. Although, this is not always true – see the box below. So, take care to ensure that you only allocate to yourself those stakeholder activities that only you can really add value to. In addition, stakeholder engagement is a great opportunity to fully engage your project sponsor in contributing to your project in high-value ways that less senior and well-connected people cannot.

Front-of-house and Back-of-house Project Managers

One nice model of project management job-sharing is not used as much as it could be. It clearly requires a great relationship, high levels of trust, and immaculate coordination between the role-holders, but it can work magnificently.

This is the idea of two project managers who face in two different directions: one inward, to the team, and one outward, to the client and external stakeholders.

The former, back-of-house PM may be a logical, detail-focused, task-oriented, and technical expert with a bent for administration. As long as their team respects them, they do not need to be a gregarious, confident communicator, if the front-of-house PM fills that role.

It would be the latter who dedicates most of their time to building and maintaining relationships with stakeholders at every level. They need to be confident communicators who enjoy taking o what is, to a large extent, a public relations (PR) role.

‘Who is the project manager?’ you ask. If you ask the team members, you will get a different answer to that you will get from the stakeholders. But working together can free each up to excel in the one arena where they feel most confident.

Create a Mechanism to Receive, Evaluate, and Act on Feedback from Your Stakeholders

Have you ever sent a message and wondered if it had arrived?

Or, if you know that it did, did it get opened?
And read?
And understood?

Even then… was it acted upon?

There are so many ways for our communication to go wrong that it is vital that you set up a way of gauging the results of your engagement process continually. You need to find ways to listen to your stakeholders and hear their feedback.

You will want to take that and consider carefully what it is telling you and, crucially, if you do this, you need a way to channel what you are learning from your stakeholders into your wider project decision process.

This is why we engage with stakeholders, rather than simply trying to ‘manage’ them. These are the people who will determine the success, or not, of your project. Their perceptions, insights, and ideas are the raw material from which you can turn a good idea into a successful outcome.

For More Information

You may like to take a look at ‘The Influence Agenda: A Systematic Approach to Aligning Stakeholders in Times of Change’.https://geni.us/InfAg This is a comprehensive book about project stakeholder engagement, by OnlinePMCourses founder (and this article’s author), Dr Mike Clayton.

It is available from all good booksellers, including all Amazon stores.

What is Your Experience of Creating a Stakeholder Engagement Campaign?

We love to hear tips and advice from our readers, so please do contribute your experience and questions to the comments section below. As always, we’ll respond to any contributions.