Traditional approaches to stakeholder engagement treat people as thoughtless zombies. Who are to be channelled down narrow paths, with spam communications. Instead, create a web of engagement empowering people to engage through building awareness with our projects in their own way.
Stakeholder Engagement Is not Down To the Right Pitch
Stakeholder engagement is often the main challenge in creating effective projects. Clearly, if you want to have any kind of social impact; being able to engage people with your project is essential for success. Stakeholder engagement is often seen as something you do to people. It plays to the fantasy of the heroic leader. Tying into the idea that everything should be done through dominance. You give them a presentation or a pitch. Maybe add some fancy pants charts and promise how this idea will solve their dearest wishes. Help them achieve their goals. Why shouldn’t they buy-in, it is common sense. That’s just how it’s done on TV. Of course in this model if it doesn’t work, it’s all your fault. You must have got the pitch wrong.
In marketing, a similarly direct technique is to use the communications funnel. Which is designed through a combination of activities to restrict the people you are trying to engage down a set path. Except these approaches often don’t work and we pay the price. The only option we give people at each stage is to force the decision opt in or opt out. Feeding into the cycle of stress and unmet demand.
Stakeholder Engagement Failure results in Project Failure.
A lack of stakeholder engagement stops us from achieving our goals. 36% of projects fail because of either a lack of stakeholder buy-in, or poor communications. (Association of Project Managers). Even professional communicators struggle. Engagement is a massive challenge in marketing. Just 4% of visits to sales page converting to product sales in a survey of 75million visits across 10 industries. It seems a lot of people are not following the best-laid paths we have set out for them.
https://apmg-international.com/article/why-projects-fail
Engaging stakeholders with your projects is often your biggest barrier to success. Traditional approaches are linear. Expecting our customers zombie like to mindlessly follow a straight path toward engagement. People are not like that. They think, learn, adapt and make their own decisions. We need a process that will adapt and support their growth. Supporting their journey through a path of knowledge. Helping them to understand how we can work together to make the world a better place.
A Better Approach
I’m part of the lovely Better, Bolder Braver marketing community, who champion ethical marketing. We discussed reaching wider audiences, through understanding the journey of consciousness. This creates a learning journey of 5 levels of awareness as set out by Eugene Schwartz. This portrays the stakeholder journey of one of increasing levels of conscious awareness.
https://betterbolderbraver.com/journey-of-consciousness/
The idea is that the reason that people often disengage, is that people are not at the same level of awareness of what we are trying to communicate. Creating a disconnect between our communications and what they think. To overcome this we have to take them through a journey of learning and understanding. Pitching our communications at their level of understanding.
During the meeting, I had a flash of inspiration. I thought a better model would be to create a ‘spider web of engagement’. This would enable people to move through the communications , not in a straight line way. But in a way that would match their level of consciousness. In this way, people would not be leaving the engagement process because the communication is at the wrong level of understanding. Instead. they would journey through your content and find their own path at a pace that suits them. Their engagement would develop at a pace that matched their conscious understanding as they navigated the web.
Stakeholder Engagement: A Social Network Approach.
The web model also mirrors the interlaced nature of social networks. With multiple channels, people may engage with you in different ways. It will allow you to reach more people from more perspectives. If you need to engage with a wide number of people having a variety of approaches makes a lot of sense.
It also means that ideas can be shared and discussed by stakeholders. Empowering stakeholders to explore your work through many perspectives. Traditional methods emphasise controlled narrow arguments, that are repeated endlessly. The spam approach to communication. Aren’t you sick of spam, spam spam. I know I am. With a web of engagement, spam is not necessary, only a coherent idea that you talk around.
Centering the Web of Engagement
Another advantage of a web is that it is centred. Meaning that whilst you can have multiple strands they should all be connected to the core. This means you can have both diversity and consistency. By understanding how your engagement paths connect to each other, as well as the core, you can maintain consistency in your content. At the same time also appeals to a rich diversity of people.
Moving between the links in the web allows you to gain multiple contacts with the same people. This will help you build trust confidence and understanding. This allows you to build up your content to a place of shared understanding; from which future mutual relationships can blossom.
It also makes it easier for communications planning as it will mean you can produce a spectrum of content. Meaning that it will be easier to talk about a range of issues and still fit them into a coherent engagement strategy. When you do produce the content then you can then fit into a wider web and understand how it links to everything else you have done to engage. It means that whatever new information comes along you will always know how to align it with your wider strategy. Breaking out of the 1-dimensional path.
Spinning Your Own Web of Engagement.
Finally most powerful of all is that you can map your own content web. You can draw out what communication links to what. How are people using and progressing through your content? How do those meetings fit together as part of a wider strategy? Are there gaps in the journey to engagement? Can you instead offer people a sideways step and a new path rather than risk disengagement? Ultimately, you can use the web to map your stakeholder territory. With miniwebs of content around themes and issues that link back to the center in a naturalistic rather than forced way.
Building a web of content allows you to introduce new metrics and understanding into your engagement path. Going beyond simple success and failure, numbers. You can also monitor if people go sideways instead and if so, is there a new parallel path to engagement you can create. The Web of Engagement gives you many more paths and many more opportunities to avoid stakeholder engagement failure.
Engaging and Amplifying Community Engagement.
Once you have mapped your web of engagement. You can also use this tool together with the social media amplifier. The two together can help you map and understand your social media presence. They can help you decide whether to have a narrow focus of tailored communications, or craft your media for a wider audience. So you can quickly create media with purpose and track the path of engagement. Enabling you to build stronger relationships with your online community. These tools can empower you to efficiently prioritise your time and increase your engagement and social impact.
Summary
Creating a web of engagement around your project will mean that you can adapt to a greater diversity of people in a variety of ways. It gives you fail safes if your engagement strategy. Rather than creating a single fragile process on which your whole project might depend.
Learn to create change that flows into engagement: Discover more at edgeofpossible.com
Question:
Do you think this tool is useful. When would be best to use and when not to use it?