Listening to your stakeholders is always important. It’s how you stay in tune with changing needs, perceptions, and valuable information that helps inform and hone your strategy. Listening to your constituency is particularly important in times of crisis. It helps you respond to the challenges at hand but also shows you a path for the future.
I encourage you, however, to be intentional about the voices you seek out and listen to. Often we react to the loudest voices without asking the key question: “are we hearing the views and opinions of a representative sample of our stakeholders?”
Your constituency spans a wide spectrum. On one side, are your biggest advocates and most engaged stakeholders. On the other, are your critics. Your biggest audience falls somewhere in between. The ones you don’t hear from regularly, unless you seek them out.
In order to get an accurate view, you must weigh the opinions and perspectives of all key segments within your community. This can be done in a variety of ways, ranging from comprehensive market research studies conducted by third party experts to short “snap shot” surveys or interviews utilizing in-house resources. No survey technique is perfect. And opinions vary widely, even among experts, on best practices. There will always be some bias in your data. But imperfection or limited resources should not cause inaction.
Here are a few principles every organization should think about before embarking upon stakeholder research:
1. Be clear about your objectives. There is a never ending list of data points your organization could benefit from collecting but time and attention are limited resources for all involved. Prioritize what you are trying to learn and only ask the questions that support that goal.
2. Set a strategy and stick with it over an extended period of time. Trend data is typically valued more than a “snapshot in time” data point. Every sector and situation is different so you need to think about what is the time period in which trends can be measured. In times like these as the world is responding to a crisis, trends may be defined in a matter of days or weeks. In more “normal” times trends typically are defined over a period of months or even years.
3. Allocate resources in your budget and work plans for market research. Stakeholder research should not be a one-time project or reactionary. Organizations should make it a core part of their ongoing strategy, which means planning for it as you would for other key activities.
What you will learn and why it’s important:
Stakeholder research will illuminate your strengths so you can build on those in the future;
Stakeholder research will inform about vulnerabilities so you can create a plan for improvement or abandon those efforts and redirect your resources in activities that will have a greater impact;
Stakeholder research will unveil opportunities – without this important intelligence you will lose relevance and miss opportunities to strengthen your value proposition.
Stakeholder research has long been viewed as a “nice to have” kind of activity. However, I would argue that in today’s world where resources are severely constrained and change is happening rapidly it’s essential to your organization to stay relevant and valuable.
Jeanne Metzger has 25 years of association marketing, development and strategy experience. She helps associations and nonprofits achieve their full potential through stakeholder research, revenue generation, and marketing strategy. Learn more at jeannemetzger.com.
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