Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to today's webinar, Effective Stakeholder Engagement, How to Do It Well. Today's webinar has been held on the lands of the Wairarung and Bunurong peoples of the Kulin Nation, and we wish to acknowledge them as traditional owners. I also acknowledge and pay respects to their elders, past, present, and emerging, and extend an acknowledgement to any First Nations attendees we have online today.
Further to that, I note a number of our attendees are dialling in from across Aotearoa, New Zealand. We extend acknowledgement to Maori as tangata whenua of Aotearoa. I'm Kylie Berg.
I'm the Director of Business Development here in Alan Clark's Australian office. I've been with ANC for five and a half years here in Melbourne, but my accent is a giveaway to my Kiwi roots. Prior to joining Alan Clark, I worked across a range of agencies in Wellington.
Since joining Alan Clark, I've worked with clients at the Commonwealth and state level, and of course, I've adopted an AFL team. It's my pleasure to be hosting today's discussion alongside Linda Gyorke and Sam Byfield. I'll pass to them to introduce themselves.
Linda. Thanks, Kylie, and good afternoon, everyone. It's a pleasure to be here today.
I'm Linda Gyorke, and I'm the Director of Consulting here in the Australian office of Alan and Clark. My role sees me delivering client work in Australia and overseeing the delivery in our office here in Australia. I've been at Alan and Clark for five years, and during that time, I've had the great privilege of working on a number of large and complex reviews, evaluations and policy and regulatory projects in the health, social services and justice sectors.
Prior to my work at Alan and Clark, I worked in the Victorian government in a range of policy roles, and before that as a lawyer in both the private and community sectors. Over to you, Sam. Thank you, Linda, and hello, everybody.
Lovely to see so many people who've joined us today. I'm the Policy Lead in the Australian office of Alan and Clark. In my role, I lead and advise on a range of policy-focused projects across a range of sectors.
Prior to joining Alan and Clark, I held director roles in the Victorian government across a range of portfolios, including health and disability reform, the COVID-19 response and international engagement. I commenced my career as an advocacy advisor in a public health peak body, and I was a research and lecturer at the University of Melbourne's School of Population and Global Health. I've never adopted an AFL team, but I'll happily sit through five days of Test Match Cricket.
Thanks, Sam and Linda. Today's topic is effective stakeholder engagement, how to do it well. At Alan and Clark, we have a catchphrase, we give a damn, and that means we are highly motivated to deliver quality work that makes a difference.
We understand that to genuinely do that well, we need to be really good at finding ways to connect with people who might be affected by a change so that we can truly hear and consider their perspectives. For some of you, this is your first time joining us, so you may not be familiar with Alan and Clark. We're an Australasian-based consultancy dedicated to making a positive impact on communities across Australia, Aotearoa, and the Pacific.
Our areas of speciality include strategy, change management, programme delivery, policy, research, evaluation, and of course, stakeholder engagement. Much of what we're talking about today relates to undertaking consultations for the development or review of policies and programmes, but the principles and tools we will talk about are relevant in a range of other settings and contexts. For example, internal stakeholder engagement within your own organisation, implementing change processes, and any other situation where stakeholder buy-in is crucial.
Before we delve into the detail, a little housekeeping. Please drop any questions you have into the chat. We'll answer some as we go, and we'll loop back to others at the end.
At the end of the session, you'll receive a recording, slides, and some templates from us. To kick off today, I'm going to hand to Linda to provide some framing to our discussion and to explain why stakeholder engagement is so important. Thanks, Kylie.
Look, as many of you here today appreciate, at its core, stakeholder engagement involves listening to the people who have an interest in the outcomes of a piece of work. We do that because it improves those outcomes, but also because it empowers people and ensures that the outcomes achieved are sustainable going forward. To illustrate this, I'm going to share a tangible example that shows the importance of stakeholder engagement.
A few years ago, I was working in the Pacific, and someone told me that they had heard about a seawall being built to prevent coastal erosion. The engineers were clear on what the purpose and the best design for the seawall should be, but prior to commencing the build, they decided to engage with the local community. It became clear that the design would have blocked boat access to the reef, preventing people from going about their daily fishing routine, which provided the meals for their families.
Carly? After consultation, the seawall was built, and a ramp was put in, making it even easier than before the seawall for people to go out fishing. This fostered buy-in from the local community and achieved the result of preventing coastal erosion in that patch of land. Without consultation, that project could have had detrimental impacts for that community.
It could have impacted the trust between the organisation building the seawall and the local community. It could have resulted in significant budget blowouts if demolition and a rebuild was required. Essentially, not engaging with the right people right at the outset carries considerable risks.
So in today's session, we're going to talk you through seven considerations to help you get it right from the beginning. These include clarifying objectives. What are we trying to do and why are we engaging? Stakeholder identification, including what needs input and what doesn't.
Ethical engagement. Stakeholder design, including profile and activity design. Implementation, integration of stakeholder input, and communication of outcomes, including that all-important feedback loop.
So starting with the first step, understanding what you're aiming to achieve sets the foundation for effective stakeholder engagement. Sometimes it's really obvious what you want to achieve through stakeholder engagement. For example, if you're developing an impact analysis or a regulatory impact statement.
In Australia, you're required to work through the seven questions set out by the Office of Impact Analysis. These include requirements to articulate the likely net benefit of each option, including who is affected and the associated costs and benefits, and to show who was consulted and how their feedback was incorporated. Other times, that can be more challenging, and it might not be clear what the purpose of engagement is at the outset, or the purpose may change.
For example, we were recently commissioned to develop a framework for a client. And initially, we all thought that the best way to design that framework would be to get input from key stakeholders across the sector. But that client had recently engaged broadly with the sector on the development of a related plan and had extensive data from that engagement.
To avoid over-consultation with their key allies, we made a decision that they would provide us with the key inputs they already had to design the framework, and that engagement with the sector would happen after a draft had been prepared, rather than in that initial design phase. So, some key questions I ask myself to clarify the objectives are, what do I want to achieve through stakeholder engagement? What resources do I have available? Things like budget, expertise, people. What timeframe do I have? Who is going to be impacted by the work? What will be effective and appropriate mechanisms for engagement? And that will really depend on your answers to the questions that I've already outlined.
And are there other ways that inputs could be sought that doesn't include direct engagement? For example, drawing on insights from prior engagements. An example where we've worked through those questions is when we were recently commissioned to undertake a large-scale review of a cornerstone family violence reform here in Victoria. The review required us to make sure that the policy initiative was still best practise.
We knew we had to engage extensively in order for that project to be successful. We needed inputs and buy-in from those who were working in the sector, but we also needed inputs from victim survivors of family violence themselves as to the impact the reform was having on them. We ended up designing a complex stakeholder engagement approach, which included engagement with over 200 service providers, government agencies, academics, peak bodies and victim survivors of family violence through interviews, focus groups, surveys and other mechanisms.
Thanks, Linda. Sam, we've got another case study that we're wanting to draw on. Can you introduce that for us and tell us what stakeholder process looked like? Of course.
So a few years ago in the Victorian government, I led the development and implementation of a stakeholder engagement strategy to support delivery of major reforms in Victoria's health system. The objective of this reform was to consolidate the medical consumables and equipment supply chain to create a more efficient system and reduce costs for health services in the Victorian government. These reforms included establishing a new organisation to manage these services.
These reforms fundamentally impacted every hospital in Victoria and a wide range of other types of stakeholders across the supply chain. If they'd been done badly, the reforms had the very real potential to disrupt the supply of medical consumables and equipment in Victoria and had the very real potential to impact patients as well. It was critical that stakeholders were engaged closely from the start, were able to feed into the reform process and understood and supported the changes so that they could be implemented effectively.
There were extra layers of sensitivity in these reforms that required very careful stakeholder engagement. Establishing a new organisation meant job losses at another organisation and given the size of the reforms, there was very strong political interest and it was important for the health minister and her office to be briefed at each step of the process and to support management of those more critical or sensitive stakeholders as well. So we're at the point where we've got our objectives and our why.
How do you then identify the individuals, groups, organisations that should have input? Great question. In general, there are a few key types of stakeholders you should consider. At the moment on your screen, you can see a table that summarises the main types of stakeholders and when it's most useful to engage with them.
We've categorised six key types of stakeholders who it might be appropriate to engage with during any stakeholder engagement process you undertake. These can include government stakeholders, researchers and academics, advocacy groups and peak bodies, community representatives and consumers and First Nations people and their representatives. So now we've identified our stakeholders, what we need to do is analyse them so that we understand their roles, interests, influence, their potential impact and the value that they can provide to your stakeholder engagement process.
On this next slide, you can see a simple stakeholder engagement matrix where we reflect the interest of a particular stakeholder and their level of influence. In this context, interest can be viewed as the willingness of a stakeholder to engage while influence can be seen as the ability of that stakeholder to cause or influence change to help you achieve your objectives. Reflecting on these considerations can help you determine which stakeholders you need to engage with and how best to engage with them to achieve the outcomes that you and your stakeholders need.
Understanding the needs of each stakeholder and the value they can provide is really critical. So back to that supply chain example, Sam, what was the stakeholder mapping you undertook for that? So in this particular example, the key stakeholders for these reforms were Victorian Health Services, Victorian Hospitals. These were the stakeholders who day-to-day procurement practises would need to change and who the reform was ultimately intended to benefit.
Within this cohort, there were two particular types of stakeholders. Firstly, there were hospital CEOs, boards and leadership teams whose support was really critical to delivering reforms and ensuring that the reforms were supported and actioned by staff within health services and across the supply chain. Secondly, there were warehouse and supply chain staff who were really fundamental to implementing the changes in each health service and whose expertise about how the supply chain worked on a day-to-day basis was critical to helping us design our reform process.
Looking at it from another angle, the key stakeholders were staff at the organisation whose roles and responsibilities were being altered as a part of this reform. For some staff, that meant changes to job titles and roles. For others, it meant job losses.
For staff whose jobs were potentially impacted by the reforms, engagement was highly sensitive and necessitated engagement with relevant unions and the undertaking of formal consultation processes. There were limitations to the type and extent of engagement that our team or the broader department could have with the impacted staff over that period. Given the role of the health department in funding hospitals and the many sensitivities involved in this work, there were lots of different touch points within the health department that needed to be mapped and engaged with.
So it all sounds pretty complicated, Linda. Potentially another complicated factor, are there any stakeholders that you should avoid or not engage with? Thanks, Kylie. Look, some stakeholders are loud, passionate and sometimes angry.
Engaging with them is part and parcel of any stakeholder engagement process. They're usually passionate and angry for a reason, and that means we have to listen to them. It's important, however, to not be disproportionately influenced by your loudest stakeholders.
Everyone with a vested interest should be provided with opportunities to engage. One obvious exception lies in the tobacco control space. We've done a lot of work here at Allen & Clark in tobacco control.
And for those of you who have worked in that space, you'll be aware that the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, to which both Australia and New Zealand are signatories, stipulates that engagement and consultation with the tobacco industry should be limited to what is necessary for public officials to enact policy and should not provide an opportunity for the tobacco industry to influence the implementation of tobacco control measures and policies. So sometimes you might be guided by a regulatory framework or international protocols relevant to your area, which might mean that there are stakeholders you can't engage with. So I think we're keen to emphasise that engagement can be a really big logistical effort, and it's really important to be organised.
You need really good note-taking. You need someone in charge of making sure that you've tracked every piece of stakeholder engagement that you undertake. How you engage is also really important.
Engaging ethically is at the core of the work that we do here at Allen & Clark. Linda, can you tell us what that means? Yeah, thanks, Kylie. Look, this is critically important.
Whether it's a large-scale review or a small engagement, it's really important to ensure that an ethical lens is applied to the engagement. Sometimes, in order to make sure that we're acting ethically, we're required to go through a formal ethics approval through a human research ethics committee. But regardless of whether the process is required to be formalised or not, an ethical lens should always be applied.
Some factors that I take into consideration to ensure ethical practise include balancing any potential risks or burdens to participants with the likely benefit of the engagement. For example, in some engagements, topics might cause harm or discomfort to stakeholders. They can be distressing or bring up unpleasant memories.
This might be relevant in engagement with children, for example. In some cases, an initiative might impact a child, but it's better to engage with their parent or guardian to mitigate the impact on the child. In other cases, it might be appropriate to engage with a child, but careful consideration of recruitment and approach, as well as formal ethics approvals need to be considered.
I also consider how participants will provide consent. That might sometimes be formal or other times it might be done informally, depending on the engagement, but it should always be voluntary and informed. It's also always important to articulate the limits of privacy and confidentiality.
That might be really simple like having a privacy statement on your website. Other times it might be more complicated. For example, we do a lot of work in the family violence sector, as you've heard.
That means that often our stakeholders are victim survivors of family violence. For those projects, we need to consider the limits to the confidentiality of what people tell us. What if they tell us that they're at imminent risk of harm or someone else's? We need to have clear escalation pathways and processes for when that happens.
We make sure that this is clearly articulated in our recruitment materials, information sheets and consent forms that we distribute to stakeholders. Finally, it's also really important to consider those who are undertaking the engagement. They might be required to listen to some really difficult stories as part of the engagement.
Is there a risk of vicarious trauma or compassion fatigue? If so, in the past we've used external counselling and debriefing services to support our team. We also draw on our EAP provider. It's also important to consider the location of interviews and to make sure that they're safe, both for the stakeholders and those undertaking the engagement.
Part of applying an ethical lens is also considering a trauma-informed approach to avoid causing more trauma or distress. I've touched on some points relating to trauma-informed practise already and we could spend a whole webinar on trauma-informed practise, so we won't go into a lot of detail here today. But the Australian Institute of Family Studies has recently developed a guide on how to do trauma-informed research and evaluation.
It's a 20-page guide packed full of helpful advice to support trauma-informed practise. The link is in the slide deck that you'll receive and you can see it on the screen in front of you. It's important to remember that you should always be applying a trauma-informed lens to your work, regardless of the topic or focus.
Traumatic experiences might not be the focus of the work, but participants may still have trauma histories and it's important to consider that as part of the engagement. Part of that is considering key factors, including things like safety, power and control, trust and steps to mitigate the risk of re-traumatisation. Those steps should be interwoven throughout, including at the planning and design stage, participant screening and recruitment, data collection and analysis and dissemination phases.
In addition to ensuring our work is trauma-informed, we also pride ourselves on operating in a culturally safe way. Engagement with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders is critically important here in Australia. For those joining us from Aotearoa, we know engagement with Maori is really important and we've got an entire session planned that will go into detail about that on the 28th of November.
You'll get an email about that soon, so please register for that. Linda, what else can you tell us about culturally safe engagement? Thanks, Kylie. Look, again, critically important and again, this could be a whole webinar in itself, so I just wanna touch on a few brief points today.
Ultimately, culturally safe engagement is crucial for fostering trust and respect among communities. In general, some key considerations include when engaging with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities, stakeholders should be provided with the option as to whether they would prefer for the engagement to be led by a First Nations individual and co-design is really important. Communication should be undertaken with empathy and all generalisations and assumptions should be avoided.
Have interpreters, relevant translations available as required and generally be responsive and adapt to the needs of the community and be led by that community. Thanks, Linda. And thank you to Nick for this question.
The question is, in Australia, do you have much of a distinction between consultation, engagement and co-design within the public sector? Linda. Thank you. Yes, we do.
So we've done a range of projects in the co-design space here in Australia. We've led a really large Aboriginal primary healthcare evaluation, which was a multi-site, multi-year evaluation of Aboriginal primary healthcare services, which was co-designed between Alan and Clark and Aboriginal co-leads. So we've done a lot of work in that space.
And I think, Nick, I'm assuming this is Nick's phrasing here around the different examples and I think you've done it well. We're doing something, this is a heads up, we're doing something, we want to hear your ideas and we may or may not do anything with them and we're doing something and we want to do it with you. And I think that's a really fundamental part of the stakeholder engagement matrix that we had on the slide as well, which really provides those options around is your engagement light touch? Are you informing your stakeholders of a particular course of action right through to the other end of the spectrum, which is that sort of co-design approach Nick has asked about, that real deep dive into building an engagement or a project from scratch.
And a technical question from Andrea. What does stakeholder mapping look like? Visually, is it a series of concentric rings? Is it a spreadsheet? Is it both of those things? Ooh, that's a great question. It can be any of those things, Andrea.
I think it really depends what sort of process you are running and the size of that engagement. It can really look like anything from a spreadsheet with a list of stakeholders and details about their role, who their key contacts are, who at your side will be doing the engaging, when the engaging will happen, so more of that tracking approach right through which I really like the idea of concentric rings. I think that's a good way of categorising stakeholders by importance, but also understanding overlap in types of stakeholders.
As we sort of talked about, a researcher might also work for a peak body, so there might be overlap in the types of cohorts involved. Yeah, great. Now we're at the stage where we're clear on objectives.
We've mapped our stakeholders. What are your tips for designing stakeholder engagement? So your stakeholder engagement strategy should consider what would be the most appropriate approach for collecting data, and really critically what the particular needs and requirements are of the stakeholders that you will be engaging with. You need to make sure you've got enough time to engage effectively, and that you provide multiple options for engagement to ensure that engagement is convenient for your stakeholders and as stress-free as it can be.
So on the slide now you can see a stakeholder engagement methods matrix. It includes some considerations around ways to engage with different types of stakeholders, when each type of engagement is useful, when it's less useful, and what should be avoided where you can. You'll receive a copy of that after the webinar.
There's a really broad range of different types of methods that you can draw upon to engage with stakeholders. For policy design, development and review type processes, for instance, you might undertake interviews, you might hold group discussions or focus groups, you might have hard copy or virtual surveys, or you might provide opportunities for written submissions as well. At Alan and Clark, we regularly run processes that involve a range of different types of methods for stakeholder engagement.
So a large part of the work we do is bringing all of those different data sources together to understand the messages that they're telling us to sort of triangulate those findings as well. And on that, so in practise, you recently led a pretty high profile, large scale national consultation in the aged care sector. What did that look like? Look, the programme we were evaluating was a big government investment following the Aged Care Royal Commission here in Australia, which is particularly those who are joining from Australia will know, was a really, really a generational process in the aged care sector.
The most important consideration of our stakeholder engagement approach for this particular evaluation was hearing from those people impacted by the programme. In this instance, that involved residents in residential aged care homes, potential residents and their families and carers. Here are some key factors in our design.
Being responsive to the experiences and vulnerabilities of older Australians. As Linda talked about, having a trauma informed approach was particularly critical in this particular evaluation and ensuring that at every step of the way, we had the relevant ethics approvals. And that was really a key lens that we went forward with.
We engaged with peak bodies to understand the settings we were working in to make sure that our engagement was appropriate. Get support with distributing information about the evaluation through various channels that older Australians had access to. But also to tap into the experience of peak and insights of peak bodies into the lived experiences of older Australians.
Building rapport is really critical in any stakeholder engagement process you undertake. But for this project, particularly building rapport with those older Australians in aged care facilities and thinking about moving into aged care facilities was really fundamental. And it was also fun.
Fundamentally, we were being invited to people's homes to speak with them. On a practical level, we made sure that people we're talking to were comfortable. We provided cups of tea and biscuits.
And we provided a shopping voucher to everybody we spoke to as a sign of appreciation and respect for their time. We often use these kinds of incentives when we're engaging with individuals from relevant communities. In terms of the practical tools and mechanisms we used, we provided a range of options for aged care residents to engage with the evaluation.
This included undertaking interviews directly with older people in aged care homes. And we provided surveys that were available in hard copy and online. So people had a range of options that could be participated in at their leisure and convenience.
We also offer translations and interpreting services where we needed to. There were other considerations involved like making sure we engaged with older people in homes at a time that was appropriate to them and worked around their routines and what they needed. We visited aged care homes right across the country to ensure representation across different locations and demographics, for instance, socioeconomic, cultural and linguistic diversities to understand the needs and experiences of people in different areas and from different backgrounds.
Recognising the importance of First Nations perspectives in shaping aged care policies and practises, we prioritised the selection of sites in areas with higher Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander populations and we engaged with several aged care homes that were specific to First Nations people. Thanks, Sam. So where were we at? We've clarified our objectives, we've identified our key stakeholders, we've made sure that we're engaging ethically and we've designed the gold standard engagement approach.
You're now in the implementation phase, engagement's going really well, but Linda, you come across a really passionate stakeholder, one who is critical of the piece of work you're doing or who just seems to be having a bad day and wants to vent. I'm pretty sure everyone is picturing someone right now. How do you manage challenging or difficult stakeholders? Yeah, thanks, Kylie.
Look, we've all been there. I think, firstly, be prepared. Where you know that a stakeholder is likely to be challenging, plan what they might say and your answers to those statements or questions.
But be mindful that it might not always go to plan. So recently I had a project where I knew that a stakeholder was going to be challenging. I prepared my list of questions, I did my research, I was ready to engage, but when I started the engagement, the stakeholder had prepared extensively, including a slide deck.
I had to adapt. I did away with my questions and my script and I just listened. They knew what they wanted to tell me and what they needed to get across and my best option was to just listen.
They were a high power, high interest stakeholder. It would not have served me well to try to steer the conversation to my questions. It was better in that scenario to just sit back and listen and acknowledge their concerns.
So on that, it's also really important as part of that preparation to make sure that you've got the right people in the room. Consider whether they're there and able to adapt and be agile to respond to those kinds of pivots that might be necessary and whether you need someone there to support you as well. Importantly, show empathy and don't take things personally, but where appropriate and necessary, you might need to set the record straight.
When stakeholder engagement is complete, if done well, you should find yourself with rich inputs and data from those you engage with. It's now really important to make sure that you manage these inputs with integrity and respect given the time that people committed to the engagement. There are a range of different tools and approaches you can take to integrating your data into the broader process you're undertaking.
We're not going to go into detail about those, but if you're keen to talk about analysis and synthesis of stakeholder inputs, then please drop us a line and we'd love to have a chat with you. We're going to move on instead to communication of outcomes. Sam, have you got any advice about how to keep stakeholders informed throughout the process? Thanks, Farley.
Yeah, that's a really critical consideration. Stakeholder engagement shouldn't just stop once your interview or other type of engagement has finished. Particularly when you're delivering large scale consultations, you need to consider how to keep stakeholders up to date with progress and findings and where relevant, continue to provide opportunities for stakeholders to feed into a particular process.
This approach respects their input, strengthens the stakeholder relationship and maximises the likelihood of continuing to get good information from them for this or for future activities that you might need to engage with them on. Some of the ways we do this include publishing or providing consultation summaries, reports and other outputs on a website or via email so that stakeholders can see how inputs are being utilised. Hosting in-person or virtual report back sessions so that we can present their progress and findings and also, really importantly, test those findings of stakeholders so we know if they're landing well.
If you can't promise that a final report will be published, is there something else that you can provide to serve this purpose? Can you provide a section of the report? Can you provide an executive summary type document that keeps your stakeholders in the loop? Consider what inputs it's feasible for you to provide so that there's some sort of feedback loop following your engagement. So folks, that's a wrap on the formal part of our webinar. Before we get into questions, I just want to let you know about our next webinar.
In a delightful segue from this one, the next webinar we're doing is effective public consultation. What you can expect from that is a discussion about choosing the most suitable consultation process, common pitfalls in public consultation, strategies to ensure your consultation questions actually get answered, and tips for handling unexpected challenges during the consultation process. We're now going to move into questions.
If you have any, please add them to the chat that are sent through to me here. We can't promise we'll get through all of them, but we can follow up with you after the session. So one of the questions that came through, and thank you to whoever shared this before the session, is how to reach out and engage with population groups that are underrepresented? Linda.
Great question, Kylie, and whoever sent it through. Look, it can be really challenging, and often the answer is time. You need to build time in to develop relationships with those communities in order to be able to recruit successfully from underrepresented communities.
Also building in things like translation of tools, interpreters, local knowledge within your team. So it might be that you bring in people with experience within those local communities so that they know who to contact to be able to recruit appropriately. And often, but at its core, I think it's about building trust with those communities or with those underserviced populations or underrepresented populations and making sure that you've invested that time to be able to recruit appropriately from them.
Another thing to think about there is safety. So we touched on this when we discussed ethical approaches and trauma-informed practise. But safety in recruitment, so whether it's appropriate to just go out and recruit generally by way of kind of a public blast-seeking interest, or whether it might be more appropriate to recruit through, for example, service providers so that you've got that midpoint supporting you in your recruitment to make sure that people are supported and understand what they're being recruited to and what the engagement might look like.
Thanks, Linda. I might just jump in and add that at the start of a process, it's really important to understand who those groups actually are as well. Do your research about who your vulnerable populations are or your underrepresented populations so that you can build a strategy around that.
And don't assume. Yeah. That you know.
Live questions. So Peter, apologies if I've pronounced that incorrectly. This is a great question, Sam.
Can you explain if the engagement initiative involves subject matter experts, engagement specialists, and comms people working together as a team? Which particular one is that referring to? Or is that just a general? Yeah, a general question. Yeah, look, I think they're all critical stakeholders to consider. Communications is important.
So if you're working in a government department, particularly, or an NGO or a consulting firm, having a communication strategy around your stakeholder engagement strategy so you know what your key messages are. For instance, are there media releases that need to go out? Do you need other types of comm support in running your stakeholder engagement is important. What were the other types of? Linda, do you want to touch a little bit on how we use subject matter experts and particular engagements? Yeah, sure.
Thank you. Look, in many of our projects, we are engaging with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities. So on many of our projects, we have Aboriginal leads to support that part of the work.
As I mentioned earlier, when I touched on cultural sensitivities, co-design and making sure that work that relates to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people is led by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people is critically important. So we build that in to our projects at the beginning to make sure that that is happening. We also have a range of experts that we draw on in other projects.
So when we're engaging with children, we would onboard a children's engagement lead. When we're doing work in the disability sector, we will draw on technical experts who have lived experience of disability and who have their strength is leading engagements and designing best practise approaches to make sure that our engagements are appropriate and structured to support the community and are strengths-based to make sure that the work that we're doing is appropriate and that the outcomes will have buy-in from those who are impacted by the work. So you can continue to replicate that and have leads across a number of sectors depending on what the work is that you're doing.
Those are just some examples that we draw on regularly, but it is really important to have people with lived experience and who are experts in that sector leading the work where you can to foster that buy-in from those who are impacted. I guess in terms of the stakeholders you're engaging with as well, it's a really important consideration in terms of making sure you tap into the expertise that's out there, and that might be in advocacy organisations or it might be in universities or peak bodies. I think there's really a whole industry around the translation of evidence into policy.
It's something I've got a really strong personal interest in is taking that research, which might be really deep, really complex, and trying to lift it up and translate it into really relevant policy material and understanding that context. Another excellent question. I'm assuming this is the same, Nick.
So Nick, we'll send you a green notebook for these excellent questions. Tips on influencing upper management, and we had an early question about senior leaders, potentially your example about Minister Sam. How do you influence senior leaders when you might need more time, more budget, or to really convince them that your engagement strategy is the right thing to do? Good question.
Look, I think it's always important to understand, particularly in a government environment, that the more senior a person is, the bigger their responsibilities are. So it's inevitable that there might be times that your particular engagement or project might not be front of mind for senior leaders in that context. Keeping them briefed, keeping them up to date, providing information that's really relevant to them at each step of the way can be a useful way of managing that context.
Also, understanding the broader context that your senior leadership are working in. What are their priorities? What's their day-to-day pressure points? How does your work relate to that? How can you help them do their job as well? Fantastic. Wendy, anything to add? No, look, I think Sam's covered it really well.
I think just making sure that that initial design process is fit for purpose is part and parcel of that influencing senior leadership and briefing at that early stage to understand what their key pain points are to make sure that you're addressing those in the early stages so that you don't get to the very end of your process and you realise that actually you haven't hit the mark with what they were seeking. So that goes to that regular communication and transparency of communication and short and sharp communication for busy people, but also getting it right at the start. So communicating as early as possible.
That goes for any stakeholders, not just senior stakeholders. Early engagement is really important. Fantastic.
We've also got some specific questions in here about specific CRMs to use for collecting stakeholder data. I think we'll follow up with these people individually on some of our tips and tricks about what we've used and what works well on those. So another great question that came in, and I suspect this has come from a Kiwi, how to effectively work across government when there is so much change happening in agencies at present? I got a little bit excited about this question and like a lot of our answers, it a little bit depends and there's no silver bullet.
But my top tip on that is to do your homework early and to be a good human. It's really unlikely at the best of times that the top priority that's fit for purpose that your top priority is someone else's or a different agency's top priority. And that becomes even more pronounced during machinery of government changes.
So you need to know what is going on across agencies or the portfolios that you're working with. Give as much notice as you possibly can that you're going to need input from someone and always build wiggle room into your timeframes. The other thing we like to suggest and it's a bit like to Sam's tea and biscuits example, it sounds really silly, but those simple human interactions, phone call rather than email, have a coffee meeting, go and have a chat and don't drop an urgent request on a Friday afternoon on an agency that's just announced to restructure.
Anything to add to that? I think it's a really good question and it's equally as relevant here in Victoria and Australia. In recent years, we've had multiple restructures across the Victorian public service, for instance. I lived through some of that in my time in the health department.
I think reflecting on it as a manager or a leader in that context, keeping in mind the needs of your teams, your staff is really important and being able to advocate for what they need in a changing environment, but also provide assurance and help translate that broader strategic context into something that's meaningful for staff at all levels in a team. And thank you to Michelle, who I think is also after an Alan and Clark Green notebook. She has shared a tip and her tip is that using CRM data regularly to manage stakeholder engagement means that she knows that the number one thing you need to do is have good, consistent information in order to be able to extract good data.
So thanks very much, Michelle, for that. Unfortunately, Michelle, we're all out of green notebooks because we did too many stakeholder engagement matrices in preparation for this session, but we'll order some more. We'll find you one.
And that's all we have time for. I've always wanted to say that. Thank you all for attending today.
Linda and Sam, I'm going to ask you for one key takeaway that you'd like to leave with everybody. Linda. Thanks, Kylie.
Look, I think planning and design and making sure that you're investing the time and the resources in those early stages are critically important so that you get it right. Understand who you want to engage with at that early point. And then I'm going to stretch it and do a second one.
Be ready to adapt and pivot because inevitably you will need to. So planning and agility are core to good stakeholder engagement. Sam, can you count to one or are you going to go two as well? I'm going to go nine.
Bear with me, folks. No, I think, look, Linda's made some great points. I would just say stakeholder engagement is actually a privilege.
Being able to talk to people, tap into their experiences, tap into their expertise. Hear what their experience is a privilege, but it's also fun as well. So make the most of the opportunity, do it in a respectful and ethical way.
And if you get it right, then everything gets easier after that. Thanks, team. Thanks everyone again for attending.
We look forward to seeing you at our future webinars.
