This blog post is the third article in the four-part series, The ROI Imperative. Tractivity Chairman, Paul Rivers, explores why organisational inertia and fragmented data are the real barriers to effective stakeholder management, rather than rival software platforms.
Read the first article here, and the second one here.
Our biggest competitor isn't a platform
Ask most software companies who their competitors are, and they'll give you a list of platforms. We could do the same; there are other stakeholder management systems on the market, mostly built and supported in Canada or Australia, with limited or no UK roots and a marketing strategy that amounts to a feature checklist.
But if I'm honest about what we're really up against, it isn't them. It's the way things already work.
In the vast majority of organisations we speak to, stakeholder management is happening already, just not through a single, integrated system. It's happening through a patchwork of tools that have accumulated over time, chosen for individual tasks, never quite designed to work together. Outlook for emails and contacts. Survey Monkey for consultation feedback. Eventbrite for events. Mailchimp for mass communications. And underneath all of it: spreadsheets. Many spreadsheets. Maintained by different people, in different formats, with different governance, or no governance at all.
The problem with the patchwork
The patchwork feels manageable when you're in it. People have found their workarounds. They know which spreadsheet to look in. They've built a rough process around the gaps. And the individual costs of each tool are low enough that nobody has added them up and asked whether the total makes sense.
But consider what this actually means for an organisation. When a key member of staff leaves, their stakeholder knowledge, painstakingly built up across folders, inboxes, and spreadsheets that live on their machine, largely goes with them. There is no institutional memory. There is no audit trail. There is no way to demonstrate, to a regulator or a board, the full picture of your stakeholder engagement activity.
And there is almost certainly a data security problem that nobody has fully confronted yet. If personal data about stakeholders is sitting in ungoverned spreadsheets, shared via email, or stored on personal drives, that is a GDPR exposure. IBM's 2024 research put the average cost of a data breach at £3.9 million. It also found that one in three breaches involves shadow IT: the unsanctioned tools and files that accumulate when organisations don't have a structured approach to their data.
A message for CEOs
I want to speak directly to the chief executives and directors reading this, because the patchwork problem isn't really an IT problem. It's a governance and risk problem that sits at the board level.
Ask yourself these questions. Do you know, at any given moment, how many spreadsheets containing stakeholder personal data exist in your organisation? Do you know who has access to them? Could you demonstrate to a regulator the full history of your engagement with a particular community or influential stakeholder group? If a key member of your team left tomorrow, would that knowledge walk out the door with them?
If the honest answer to any of those questions gives you pause to reflect, then the status quo is not a neutral position. It is a risk that is accumulating, quietly but dangerously, in the background.
Fragmented data is not a technical problem. It is a governance risk, and it belongs on the CEO's agenda.
The cost of the patchwork, calculated honestly
Here's something else worth considering. The organisations we speak to who use the patchwork approach, Outlook, Survey Monkey, Eventbrite, Mailchimp, and assorted spreadsheets, and these are just examples of such software, are often spending more in licence fees, cumulatively, than a Tractivity subscription would cost. And they are getting far less. They have no integrated view of their stakeholders. No single source of truth. No ability to run reports across their engagement activity. And they're paying for multiple tools that barely talk to each other, many of which are underutilised in exactly the way I described in my first post.
Consolidation isn't just tidier. It's typically cheaper, more secure, and strategically far more useful.
In my final post, I'll draw these threads together and explain what we actually mean when we say Tractivity is a different kind of partner.
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