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Stakeholder engagement that serves the people your decision affects most
Your review, reform or new standard has to show who took part. The people it affects most are often the hardest to reach in the time you have. We start with stakeholder analysis and stakeholder mapping: who your stakeholders are, what each group needs to take part, and how much interest and influence each one has. From the map we build the stakeholder engagement strategy, then run the interviews, focus groups, workshops and targeted engagement it calls for.
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- We identify who your decision affects, and discuss with you who to engage, how and when, at the start of the work.
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- The groups engagements most commonly miss are communities in regional and remote areas, people with lived experience, and children and young people. We build them into the plan before we choose the methods.
- For Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities, First Nations leads head that part of the work.
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- If your participants or the topic need it, we take the work through formal ethics approval with the human research ethics committee (HREC). Culturally safe and ethical practice is the one thing we do not compromise on, whatever the budget.
When your decision has to show who was heard
If you are writing an impact analysis for the Australian Government, one of its seven questions is who you consulted and how you used their feedback. A review or a new standard faces the same question from the people it affects. We plan for those people first, trying to avoid common engagement pitfalls.
- The people you most need to hear from aren’t present. Marginalised groups are more likely to take part if someone reaches out to them directly, in a way that works for them. We map out who your decision affects, including the groups a process usually overlooks, and choose a method that works for each group can.
- The timetable came first. If you lock in the dates before asking who needs to take part, you may run out of time to perform meaningful engagement. We map your stakeholders and design the strategy at the outset, so affected people are in your plan with enough time to reach them.
- Your stakeholders have consultation fatigue. People who often hear from government may not respond unless they can see why this process is different. We tell stakeholders what decisions your work will inform and what we are asking of them, and we structure the engagement so nobody answers the same question twice.
- Money is put ahead of connections. Building relationships and reciprocity are too often the first things to go when the money runs short. We put the time to forge connections into the plan and the proposal up front, and say why. Investing in relationships early saves time and money later and makes ethics approval smoother.
- The topic is hard to talk about. Victim-survivors and people with lived experience may struggle to speak if the session isn't safe for them. We take a trauma-informed approach, so the sessions do not add to anyone's distress. We also run separate sessions for service providers and users, so nobody speaks in front of someone with power over them.
How we engage
Stakeholder analysis comes first: who your decision affects, who decides, who influences, who the process usually overlooks, and what groups need before they can take part. We then rate stakeholders on how willing they are to engage, and they can change the outcome. That picture is the stakeholder map you plan from. The stakeholder engagement strategy turns the map into a method, timeframe and materials for each group.
The methods a combination of interviews, focus groups, workshops, surveys and written submissions. That makes taking part convenient for your stakeholders and as stress-free as it can be. The mix of engagement methods changes depending on the decision you need to reach. For Victoria's family violence primary prevention workforce approach we ran interviews and focus groups to gather insights and test approaches.
With Cancer Australia we ran collaborative workshops to support priority-setting for the Australian Cancer Plan's monitoring and evaluation framework. On another framework we and the client agreed that the client's key allies would supply the inputs they held, and the wider sector would engage on a draft. That spared the people the client relies on most from answering the same questions twice.
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Establishing autonomy in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander engagement. We build First Nations leadership into a project at the start, and communities can choose to have one of their own people lead the engagement. Co-design is part of that work: Allen + Clarke and Aboriginal leaders co-designed one multi-site, multi-year evaluation of Aboriginal primary healthcare services. For a national aged care evaluation, we prioritised sites in areas with higher Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander populations and engaged with care homes specific to those communities.
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Covering sensitive topics with support for everyone in the room. For the review of Victoria's Family Violence Multi-Agency Risk Assessment and Management (MARAM) Framework, our engagement reached 225 stakeholders, including victim-survivors, through mechanisms including interviews, focus groups, and surveys. We do a lot of work in the family violence sector, so we emphasise confidentiality, and cover what we do if someone tells us they are at risk.
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Reaching children and young people on their terms. Assent is the informed agreement of a child or young person who cannot yet consent for themselves, and it is built into our engagements with youth. That means materials that fit each age, and procedures that ease the power imbalance between a child and the adults around them. We bring in a children's engagement lead if your work needs one. For young people aged 12 to 18 we ask some of them to shape the approach and offer more than one way to take part.
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Running written consultations alongside stakeholder engagement. The infant formula review and the standards for national counsellors each ran interviews and focus groups alongside a written consultation, and we analysed the written responses as well.
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Our process
Every engagement runs through the same five stages, from the stakeholder mapping to the final report. Across those stages, two things separate effective stakeholder engagement from a tick-box exercise: engaging people early enough to matter, and designing each session so everyone can speak. We work through seven considerations on every engagement. They run from clarifying your objectives and identifying stakeholders, through ethics, methods and delivery, to integrating what stakeholders told us and communicating the outcomes. The five stages below carry those considerations from stakeholder mapping to findings your decision makers can act on.
What we deliver:
- A stakeholder engagement strategy and the materials that go with it. The stakeholder analysis and map, and a plan naming who we aim to engage by which method and when. We also prepare the ethics application if the work needs one, and the recruitment materials, information sheets and consent forms each group needs.
- An engagement report. The findings from the interviews, groups, workshops and surveys, integrated and written for the decision they inform, then reported back to the people who took part.
Understand
We start by learning what you are trying to achieve from the engagement, and which parts of your decision need outside input. Then we identify the stakeholders: government, researchers and academics, advocacy groups and peak bodies, community representatives and consumers, and First Nations peoples.
Plan
We analyse each stakeholder's role, interest, influence and the value they can bring. That analysis sets the stakeholder engagement strategy: which group, by which method, in what order, and with what support so your participants can take part safely. Formal ethics approval, if the participants or the topic requires it, comes before fieldwork.
Deliver
We run the engagement: interviews, group discussions, surveys in hard copy and online, and written submissions. Interviews and discussions happen in person or online, at a time that works around the people we are meeting, with translations and an interpreter if needed. Focus group planning keeps each group to four to six people, to allow room for everyone to speak. If a long survey would go unanswered, a text message with three questions can do the job, repeated every few months to build a picture over time.
Review
We integrate what stakeholders told us into the findings. Then we validate the conclusions through inclusive sense-making sessions, where we test them with you before they are finalised.
Close
We give you the report, and we communicate the outcomes back to the people who took part, which closes the feedback loop. If the final report itself cannot go public, we plan with you what your participants will receive instead.
Related Projects
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Read MoreFAQs
Frequently Asked Questions
How do you make sure you hear every voice, not just the loudest?
Everyone with a vested interest gets an opportunity to engage, and the loudest stakeholders aren't given more weight than the rest. Occasionally stakeholders are loud, usually for a reason, so we listen to them without letting them drown out everyone else.
How do you handle difficult stakeholders?
We prepare for them. If one of your stakeholders is likely to be challenging, we plan what they might say and how we will answer, and we stay ready to drop the script. On one recent project a stakeholder with high interest arrived with their own slide deck. We put our questions away and listened, because they knew what they needed to get across.
Who should we engage, and when?
Everyone your decision affects and everyone who can influence it, in an order set by their interest and impact. The people the decision affects most come in first, so what they tell us can help further shape our approach. Peak bodies, advocacy organisations and universities bring expertise worth tapping, and some of your allies only need to supply what they already know.
How do you reach under-represented groups and people in regional and remote areas?
We build in the time it takes to form relationships with under-represented communities. If it is safer for your participants, we recruit through service providers rather than a public call. We also bring interpreters, translated documents and local knowledge into the team. For a national aged care evaluation we visited homes right across the country to cover different locations and demographics, including cultural and linguistic diversity.
What does stakeholder mapping look like?
The form depends on the process and the size of the engagement. At one end it is a spreadsheet that lists each stakeholder, their role, their key contacts, who on your side will engage them and when. At the other end it is a set of concentric rings that sorts stakeholders by importance and shows where stakeholder groups overlap. Either way, we build it before we book the first session, and it sets the method for each group rather than one method for everyone.
How do you keep people safe on a sensitive topic, and what happens if someone becomes distressed?
We weigh the risks and burdens to your participants against the likely benefit, and we choose interview locations that are safe for both interviewees and interviewers. If someone becomes distressed during an interview or a group, we pause, express concern, and offer a break or an end to the session. We give them contact details for support services, because their wellbeing comes before the data.
Can the same team run the engagement and the written consultation?
Yes. If your engagement feeds a written consultation, we can design the stakeholder consultation strategy for the written stage, run the engagement, and analyse the resulting submissions. Learn more about our mixed-methods evaluations here.
15 Topics
+90 Resources
Need to hear from the people your decision affects?
Book time with an evaluation expert.
+40 Webinars
Learn More
Stakeholder engagement resources
Past webinars
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The Power of Story: Driving Meaningful Change Through Narrative
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Past webinars
45 minute watch