Stakeholder Engagement

Being in touch with the market means being in touch with the people who will shape and influence its future: non-governmental organisations, influencers, decision-makers, consumer groups and thought-leaders. SustainAbility can help you map and prioritise the spectrum portfolio of stakeholders in your business or in a particular issue, and facilitate effective engagement that brings insight to societal expectations, the dilemmas you need to manage and opportunities to innovate.

What We Do
Our starting point is to understand your company’s openess and preparedness for external engagement, through research and interviews to understand needs, limitations and future aspirations. This work provides the basis for advice on priority stakeholders and methods of engagement.

We typically map and prioritise stakeholders according to likely influence / impact and the company’s ability / credibility to engage.

We then engage directly with key stakeholders to understand their interest in direct corporate engagement, any groundrules and expectations. This enables us to formulate and facilitate an appropriate engagement – in individual meetings or a roundtable or combination.

We manage and report the output in a way that informs corporate strategy development or options appraisal needs. We also make sure the loop is closed with the involved stakeholders in a way that builds their trust and confidence.

Further Information
Many of our reports provide insight to different types of stakeholder groups, and to the value of different approaches to engagement. Of particular interest will be The 21st Century NGO which provides a model for NGO engagement. Gearing Up looks at the role governments have to play. The Changing Landscape of Liability looks at the role of stakeholder engagement in helping to appraise both legal and moral risks facing business.

We also have an Issues Brief that looks at NGOs in developing countries.

It is unusual for any of our projects to not involve stakeholder analysis or engagement of some sort, to help garner intelligence, inform an options appraisal, reporting process or just build mutual understanding.