What is stakeholder relationship management software?
Public sector, infrastructure and regulated industry teams in South Africa often track stakeholders and interested and affected parties across a CRM, a spreadsheet, or both. Before looking at what's in the platform, it's worth being clear on what stakeholder relationship management (SRM) software is for, and where it stops overlapping with a CRM.
Stakeholder relationship management software holds every stakeholder or interested and affected party, every interaction with them, every issue they raise, every commitment made to them and every report drawn from that record, in one system.
Why a CRM does not do this job
A CRM’s data model is built around an opportunity and a sales cycle. A stakeholder is not an opportunity. A consultation is not a pipeline stage. An objector is not a lost deal.
The data model is different
An SRM tracks relationships, influence, sentiment, consultation and the auditable evidence that engagement took place. A CRM tracks revenue, pipeline and sales activity. They are not the same shape, and forcing one into the other is where the record starts to fail.
Fields a CRM has no place for
How a party registered on a statutory register, which notice version they received, which language they asked for, whether they are an organ of state, the issue their comment belongs to, the sentiment of that issue over time, the commitment made in response and whether it closed. And an audit trail designed for regulatory scrutiny rather than commercial reporting.
The register survives the project
A project team disbands. The obligation, and the community, do not. The next application in the same area starts from a real register rather than from a blank sheet and somebody’s memory.
What's inside the Tractivity platform?
Group comments and grievances into issues, track each with positive, negative or neutral sentiment and a traffic-light status, and run impact analysis. Log commitments with an owner, a value, a due date and a reporting cycle, and track them to closure. This is what an SLP round, a REIPPPP economic development obligation and a licence condition all need.
Where each module maps onto a South African obligation
The same record structures serve every authorisation type. What changes between them is the notice requirement, the comment period and the retention rule, and those are project settings rather than hard-coded assumptions.
Obligation |
Module |
|---|---|
|
Stakeholders and organisations |
|
Stakeholders and organisations, with retention set per record type |
|
Activities, mail synchronisation, mailshots |
|
Issues, activities, reporting |
|
Reporting |
|
Activities, events and meetings |
|
Events and meetings, reporting |
|
Multilingual document output |
|
Enquiries |
|
Mailshots, Engage-360 |
|
Multilingual document output |
|
Enquiries, issues |
|
Issues and commitments |
|
Audit trail, reporting, Enquiries |
|
Role-based permissions, audit trail, collection notices, opt-in state |
How it fits, and what it takes to get live
What it connects to
Integrations
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Microsoft Outlook, for email and meeting transfer and calendar sync
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Microsoft Teams, for creating and managing meetings from inside the platform
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Google Maps, for stakeholder mapping by location
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Email servers, including Office 365, for outbound email and inbound mail syncing
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Calendar sync with Outlook and Google Calendar
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Word, Excel and PDF report generation
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Zapier
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A documented API for custom integrations
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Power BI through scheduled exports
Cloud only through a browser
No local software or plugins for administrators or for public users, and no intrusive or non-essential cookies. That matters for a municipal IT department and for a community member on a phone in equal measure.
Getting live
Live in four to six weeks
Live in four to six weeks on average. Actual timing depends as much on how quickly your data is supplied as it does on us. In that time: contract signed, planning calls, system setup, configuration, data import, checks, end-user training, then launch. This includes a minimum of 20 hours of onboarding, covering your stakeholder data upload, and two 1.5-hour online training sessions with a dedicated Client Success Manager, followed by ongoing system reviews and support through the whole relationship.
How your data gets in
Your data is added to Tractivity however suits you: through the Engage-360 portal, sent in from your own website via the API, uploaded in bulk from Excel, or entered manually. Most projects start with what you already have rather than a blank system, existing spreadsheets, attendance registers and mailing lists most commonly.
See it with your own data
Bring a live project, a register you already keep, or the last comments and responses report you had to assemble by hand, and we'll build you a personalised demonstration.
Worth reading next: POPIA and your stakeholder database, security, data protection and procurement, and public participation software for South Africa.


