Stakeholder Engagement & Partnership Building

What is a Stakeholder?

Stakeholders are any persons or organizations that are impacted, positively or negatively, by the actions,attitudes, and intentions of your organization. Engaging stakeholders is an important business management tool that can help you make better decisions, deliver better products and services, improve your operations, and increase your value in your community and network.

Stakeholders can be internal or external.

Internal stakeholders are your employees, management, executives, shareholders, boards and committees. You can engage these groups in your business and strategic planning exercises; change management planning; professional development planning; and continuous improvement activities. Internal stakeholders can provide intimate feedback on business processes, internal relationships, staff morale, organizational weaknesses and strengths, and opportunities for improvement.

External stakeholders are your clients & customers, civic leaders & politicians, other businesses, your professional network, and community members. Engaging these groups can help you gather feedback on your products & services; build better relationships between network members; obtain a third-person perspective on your organization’s reputation and external appearance; and extract critical information to shape your business and strategic planning.

Work with Doran Strategic Consulting to take the temperature of your organization or network, through a well-planned stakeholder engagement process. Doran has experience with conducting organizational reviews, customer surveys, community network building, peer-to-peer groups, business alliances, and stakeholder consultations.

Building Valuable Partnerships

Business is built of partnerships. Finding ways to create mutual benefit is core of all business transactions and relationships. Organizations that take partnership building seriously can achieve results beyond their own internal capacity.

Richard Branson captures the value of partnerships from a different perspective. He said, "The brands that will thrive in the coming years are the ones that have purpose beyond profit." Indirectly he is referring to business relationship where the benefits extend beyond financial transactions or profits.

Real value comes from the mutual benefits that people and organizations create by working together.

Whether it’s through the creation of a new business venture, or a business to business partnership, or via company culture, or network building, partnerships provide a mechanism to define and be accountable to one another.

Doran Strategic Consulting has a great deal of partnership building experience and can help you with any of the following:

1. Business Development: client or customer acquisition; pipeline building and management; customer engagement; and client relations management (CRM).
2. Network Building: establishing a network of like-minded organizations and setting network-level goals; building innovation networks; engaging network members; developing credos; mapping networks and regional resources.
3. Industry Sector Clusters: engaging industries from discrete sectors to build local capacity, share information, tackle regional goals, and advocate for change.
4. Fundraising: using partnerships to raise captial to support your organization or a program; through sponsorships, endowments or private investment. Doran has extensive contacts in government and private funding organizations; and has contacts in Ontario Angel Investor Network and venture capital community.

Key Words: networks, supporters, community engagement, employee engagement, partnership building, collaboration.