A stakeholder is anyone that has an interest in a particular project. That can be because it affects them personally, or because their resources are needed to make it happen.
Public consultations require input from members of the public and from key stakeholders. For many government-run consultation processes, the involvement of stakeholders is even a legal requirement. Stakeholder engagement is therefore key to the success of any project, and a workshop is one of most interactive forms of stakeholder consultation.
What Is A Stakeholder Meeting?
A stakeholder meeting is an opportunity to hear the advice and input from relevant parties regarding a new policy, action plan, strategy or project.
Who those stakeholders are depends entirely on the project, but often involves government officials, experts in a particular area, representatives from the community including local councillors, and campaign groups make up a stakeholder meeting group.
A workshop is one of the more-hands-on kinds of stakeholder meetings. It often takes place over a longer period of time, and involves more open discussion than other kinds of meetings.
A workshop isn’t always necessary to get a project moving, and less labour-intensive meeting types may sometimes be enough. However, if you think your project could use some time and space to ‘work out the kinks’ and generate stakeholder-buy in, a workshop might be the right option to solidify your stakeholder management.
Identifying and Mapping Stakeholders
Before you can plan any stakeholder activity, you first have to identify who your key stakeholders are.
The more diverse your stakeholders – representing different viewpoints and relationships – the more successful your workshop will be.
The best way to identify which stakeholders should be prioritised is to map them onto a stakeholder power-interest matrix. Stakeholder mapping evaluates stakeholders along these axes:
- Power: The ability of a given stakeholder to influence the outcome of a particular project. They may own some of the resources, hold political power, or otherwise have the ability to ‘make or break’ a project.
Interest: The amount the stakeholder is personally affected by the project. This could include representatives from the area including councillors, or a campaigning group.
Stakeholders that hold a high degree of power over a project always need to be engaged. For those with a low interest, persuading them that they should care about the project is key. For those with a high interest, helping strike the balance between competing viewpoints will be the most important part of your workshop.
Stakeholders with low power but a high interest should also be prioritised, as they can provide insight into the value of the project, and should play a leading role in how it is discussed.
Stakeholder mapping can be a lengthy process, where you should first create an exhaustive list of all relevant parties. Once that’s done, you can begin paring it down until your workshop is the desired size, but still contains a multitude of views.
Once you’ve identified these stakeholders, it’s time to plan your workshop and stakeholder management.
How To Run A Stakeholder Workshop In 6 Steps
Step 1: Set Appropriate Goals
The first step in running a successful stakeholder workshop is setting the right objectives. Your objectives will most often be shaped by the project, plan or policy itself, as well as the objectives of your organisation as a whole.
For public bodies, workshops provide a platform to develop public initiatives, consider their challenges, hear new perspectives and set actionable goals shaped by government officials, community members and key stakeholders.
This means asking yourself the following questions ahead of time:
- What is the end outcome you’re looking for from this activity?
- What are the outcomes that potential stakeholders may want to see?
- What are the risks and benefits of holding a stakeholder workshop to this project?
- What barriers to participation might stakeholders face and how can they be mitigated?
- What sort of resources will you need to run the workshop?
- How will you evaluate the success of the workshop?
Once you’re clear on the purpose, remit, and limitations of the workshop, you’ll be better able to decide what resources you’ll need to run it and the types of activities you’ll want to conduct. Remember, the objectives of a given workshop will decide most of how it works in practice.
A workshop with a primary goal of encouraging participation from local government and local campaigning organisations in a particular project may look very different to a workshop where the main purpose is gathering information on the views and positions of a specific community, for example. Set your stakeholder expectations right from the start to increase their engagement effort and maximise your project management .
Step 2: Sort Out The Details
Once you’ve established your objectives, it’s important to get the details right. That means right from the start you will need to know what your team’s roles and responsibilities are, and make sure someone is covering all bases.
Some of the details that need to be decided well ahead of time are:
- The date and time: It’s important to give stakeholders as much notice as possible to ensure the highest possible attendance. Take into account who your stakeholders are, and your budget when considering whether your workshop will be a multi-day residential event, a single evening or something in between. You may want to consider the calendar of your stakeholders too, avoiding election cycles if you wish to engage elected officials for example.
- The venue: If you’re booking a venue, will your stakeholders need to travel far to arrive and what transport options are available to them? If you’re holding your workshop online instead or offering hybrid options, what kind of tools and online spaces will you use to facilitate this?
- Decide what resources you need: You’ll need to decide ahead of time how many facilitators you need at the workshop, as well as how much space and time. The quality and quantity of activities and materials will also decide how many hours of preparation time you need to put aside beforehand.
Remember that it is not only the amount of stakeholders present or the length of a workshop that will decide how much resourcing goes into running it. It also depends on how controversial the subject matter is, and how aligned the goals of the different stakeholders are with each other. Make sure to take this into account in your plans!
Step 3: Prepare Relevant Materials And Resources
After you’ve sorted out the details, it’s time to decide on the materials, resources and activities you’ll have available at your workshop. Once again, much of this will depend on the workshop objectives that you should already have decided on.
Typically a workshop uses a combination of tools to disseminate information and get stakeholder feedback. This usually involves presentations and case studies, interactive activities, and group-wide discussions. Discussion groups can either be with all stakeholders or, depending on the size of the workshop, broken down into smaller working groups to ensure all stakeholder input is heard.
Some tips for good material preparation include:
- Send out materials ahead of time to let participants familiarise themselves with the material.
- Keep your audience in mind when preparing presentations, write them with the least informed participant in mind.
- Always try to maximise participation by preparing resources of different kinds, like presentations, worksheets, mind maps etc.
- Always have potential barriers to participation in mind; keep your material in easily digestible language and formatting.
Step 4: Set The Agenda
Now you have your activities planned, your resources ready and your material available, it’s time to set the agenda and create a strong stakeholder engagement plan.
A stakeholder workshop, particularly one with a large number of stakeholders or over a long period, will contain various stages. It’s important to have a strong stakeholder engagement strategy, such as breaking up the types of activities they’re participating in.
Remember, a good stakeholder workshop is diverse, and that means there should be a diverse range of activities. However, even the most homogenous groups will get bored doing too many similar things. Never do back to back powerpoint presentations if you can help it!
An Example Workshop Agenda:
So what might an agenda look like? There’s no one size fits all solution, but generally speaking you’ll want your workshop to follow this general pattern.
- Introduction: Allow your participants a chance to get to know one another. This is a good time to have icebreaker activities and give time for casual interaction. It’s also a useful time to introduce yourselves, the facilitators, to the group.
- Familiarisation: Give some time to let the participants get familiar with and establish the objectives of the workshop and how the workshop will be conducted. This can be done via presentation. It’s important to do this even if you’ve sent lots of information ahead of time.
- Activities: How many activities and what they look like will vary, but be sure to give breaks between each activity and vary your activities. Interactive activities that involve discussion, voting, and opportunities for feedback are particularly important to effective stakeholder engagement.
- Closing and planning for the future: Some would argue the end of a stakeholder workshop is the most important step, because it’s where it is often when it is most important to get commitments from stakeholders as to what they will do moving forward.
Step 5: Facilitate The Workshop
Facilitating stakeholder input in the workshop on the day involves sticking to your agenda, ensuring resources and materials are used effectively and as planned, and keeping everything running smoothly. On the day, there are also a few extra considerations to be aware of:
First of all, effective facilitation means having clear ground rules and communicating them clearly.
For projects where stakeholders are already well-aligned these may not be as important. However, many stakeholders workshops will begin with participants that have vastly different ideas and desired outcomes, which could cause conflict without proper moderation. Public bodies may clash with community representatives, and experts may disagree with each other on the best course of action, leading to conflicting stakeholder perspectives. All of this is useful feedback for your workshop, but needs to be kept within defined limits.
Secondly, particularly in an in-person setting, accessibility is key. Make sure that all your activities are open to all, with proper accommodations made for those with specific needs. Have all your participants fill out an accessibility form beforehand so you’re prepared on the day, and no one gets left behind.
Thirdly, make sure you’re gathering as much feedback and data as possible. You may come away from a workshop thinking you have a good idea of what the general consensus was, but evidence is how you will back that up.
Gathering data, such as from interactive sessions, votes, feedback forms, etc. will be important for tracking stakeholder positions and using your workshop to develop effective public initiatives that are well researched and evidence-led.
Step 6: Analyse Your Findings
Once your workshop is done and you’ve made sure to get as much feedback as possible, it’s time to analyse and evaluate the data.
You’ll want to communicate with stakeholders about what action points and outcomes were decided, as well as other relevant information concluded by the workshop in order to close the feedback loop. You’ll also want to be able to report back on what different types of stakeholders cared about, common issues raised, and popular solutions.
If your workshop was very small, it may be possible to manually analyse your data for that important information or report just on overall outcomes. If you have a lot of data however, it may be time to bring in analysis and consultation tools that can help turn complex information into more easily identified trends.
Once you’ve evaluated your workshop and decided on your next steps, it will be useful to have that data analysis ready to identify shifts in stakeholder positions over time. Particularly when it comes to developing public policy or project planning, this type of ongoing data analysis can be what creates a responsive and flexible process.