What are the best digital communication tools for keeping stakeholders informed?
After you have identified, analysed and categorised your stakeholders, you should have a good idea of how you’re going to keep each stakeholder group informed.
Ensuring your stakeholders have relevant information available when they search it out is crucial to keep them interested. Whenever stakeholders have difficulties finding information, it becomes more likely that they will lose interest in your project.
In this blog post, we'll walk you through everything you need to know about digital communication tools to inform your stakeholders and support your engagement strategy.
There are many benefits to traditional engagement methods, such as face-to-face meetings and focus groups, but they can become combative.
However, digital communication channels offer project managers avenues for informing stakeholders that are cheaper and easier to use than traditional, non-digital counterparts.
They’re also more precise - the correct digital strategy is easily able to target and inform stakeholders in niche segments of an audience. This gives access to a much wider and richer resource of stakeholders, allowing for a deeper and more beneficial stakeholder engagement process.
From a stakeholder manager's perspective, they can also remove the monotonous, repetitive communication activities you have to do and automate many of the processes you lay out in your initial communication plan.
There are numerous possibilities offered by digital tools for informing stakeholders.
To get the most out of the informing process, focus on the areas that are most important to the project and to your stakeholders, and approach each digital communication tool systematically.
Search engines are among the most important resources for information. And, with searches on mobile increasing quicker than those on desktop computers, it’s clear more and more people are using search engines to get the information they need as soon as they want it.
This puts your organisation or project’s website on a digital front page. When a stakeholder is searching for information on a project, it’s more than likely that they’re using search to get the answers.
If your website’s content is out-of-date, sparse, or absent from results entirely, then you’re missing the opportunity to foster a relationship with your stakeholders early on.
Worse still, you could run the risk of damaging the perceived credibility of a project and damaging the stakeholder relationship before it’s even started.
Just because a project’s budget doesn’t allow for a fully bespoke website or a top-level digital campaign, doesn’t mean it can’t be visible on the net. There are plenty of cheaper, theme-based options on blogging sites like WordPress, Joomla or even LinkedIn that can provide an adequate, short-term alternative.
Using SEO - Search Engine Optimisation - to optimise your website so it’s easily found by stakeholders involves utilising similar techniques as a business attracting customers.
Identify the terms and questions your stakeholders are searching for and write content that answers them. This will improve the chances of your webpage being identified as a valuable resource by Google and therefore be found by your stakeholders.
A major benefit of an owned website for a project or organisation is the ability to self-publish news and blog content.
This gives you the opportunity to broadcast updates about the project and keep stakeholders adequately informed. However, for news and blogs to work to their full potential, they need to be kept up-to-date.
If they’re not updated, they’ll struggle to be seen as a reliable information source and won’t draw the necessary audience.
For engaging and informing large groups of stakeholders, there’s no better tool than social media.
The ability to share content and build an audience relevant to a project for free means that large groups of stakeholders can be kept informed at a low cost with relatively low effort.
As well as sharing content, social media can be used as a tool for engaging and building a relationship with stakeholders. This comes in the form of content sharing, as well as token engagements like ‘liking’ or ‘re-sharing’ content within the platform.
The huge variety of social media platforms available, and the nuances between appropriate content platform-to-platform means it is a hard tool to master.
Using it for informing stakeholders can be difficult and time-consuming. Especially on projects that are highly contentious, where it could garner too much negative attention, or on more niche projects, where it’d struggle to get any.
Quick polls have recently become a fixture of the Social Media landscape. They are perfect for gaining feedback instantly in a public forum and demonstrating engagement.
However, the nature of their accessibility and that of the internet make them a prime target for abuse if not managed correctly.
Email has been an essential communication tool for over twenty years and is now as ubiquitous in business communications as the telephone.
The ability to send plain text or rich content directly to a contact’s inbox is an invaluable tool for communications. Email is a quicker, easier and more automatable process than telephone conversations have ever been.
As a means of mass outbound comms, it has suffered its setbacks. With people hesitant about signing up to email lists to avoid spam, and email clients prone to relegating emails to the spam folders, successful email campaigns can be hard to achieve. But, with the right approach, email is unparalleled and as a one-to-one communications tool, it’s essential.
Each digital communication channel has its purpose and its audience.
During the stakeholder management and engagement process, each stakeholder you encounter may have a favourite way of communicating that works for them.
Doing your research to understand which ones your stakeholder groups prefer is the best way to determine where you should focus your communication efforts.
In addition, using their preferred communication channel will improve your chances of maintaining a positive relationship with them and receiving their feedback.
Learn where your stakeholders spend their time and use that information in your favour. Here are a few digital communication channels examples and situations to consider:
Tractivity offers all the digital communication tools you need to manage and inform your stakeholders at all levels in a single system.
Contact us to discover how we can help you take your stakeholder engagement to the next level.