What have we learnt from the Stakeholder Summit? - and why we need more
What is the value of bringing 100 or so stakeholder engagement professionals together in one (quite big!) room?
After all, at the time of the COVID-19 lockdowns, wise people predicted that this would be the near-death of the conference industry. Why travel for in-person events when you can hear every presentation online? And you can network yourself silly by using Teams, Zoom, GoogleMeet and all the other tricks of the working-from-home culture.
Many of us tried it, and it certainly works for some things – some of the time.
But gradually, the human instinct to congregate and press the flesh has re-asserted itself. Although many excellent conference organisers and venues went out of business, there has been a resurgence – with a smaller market, but a more discerning one.
To attend an industry event, these days, there needs to be a compelling reason.
So, reflecting upon Tractivity’s Stakeholder Engagement Summit (and you can download the published presentations here) what might we have learnt?
There are four things I believe are worth considering:
Now is the time to focus on stakeholder management
There are subjects and disciplines which have been the subject of conferences for decades.
However, stakeholder management is not one of them. It is a new topic around which to meet. One that is rapidly professionalising. One where lots of individuals and organisations have ‘dabbled’ but where the distinction with other activities remains blurred.
So public relations and public affairs appear to include it. Customer relations, investor relations, supplier relations and employee relations all feature aspects of stakeholder management, but all tend to operate slightly differently.
We are at that point where best practice and best technology seem to be coalescing around common standards and shared experience. It’s the time to compare notes.
There are more specialists
Google job titles such as “Stakeholder Engagement Manager” or “Stakeholder Relations Director” and you will be astonished at how many there are! I have no statistical research, but my instinct is that the numbers have increased dramatically.
It reflects the increasing tendency for Companies, Voluntary bodies and Public bodies to establish specialist units for the purpose and stop relying upon part-time roles for those in the Communications departments.
With greater numbers comes the need for more training and more thought leadership. I look back to 2003 when I persuaded colleagues to establish the Consultation Institute. It was at a similar stage of evolution with many new appointments of less experienced people enthusiastically keen to learn from those who had been doing the job for a longer time.
Cross-sector learning is becoming the norm
The days when stakeholder management professionals were reluctant to learn from other sectors are over. Of course, there are differences.
The NHS hold a very special position in relation to a huge range of stakeholders – in a sense we are all its stakeholders! And the relationship can be intensely local.
Regulators, to take another example, are locked into an embrace with participants in specific industries with a very technical component to the interfaces. Contrast these with a local authority that delivers over 200 separate public services and might need to have a dialogue with community organisations on any permutation of these.
They operate in different worlds. Yet they are beginning to see how common tasks and approaches can bear comparison and offer insights worth studying and learning from.
The technology is maturing
Think back to the early days of spreadsheets or, more recently, first-generation websites.
How much of a minority sport these tended to be? They were ‘clunky’ and tended to reflect what the techies thought was needed rather than what customers found most useful.
What needed to be fast tended to be slow, and those routines that were lightning fast were often those that were rarely needed. It takes years of small but steady improvements to produce applications that feel just right for experienced users.
Tractivity is no exception and has recently been investing in a significant development that will greatly enhance its performance.
There is one further factor. As more organisations commit to stakeholder management, the message space is getting rather crowded. Like advertising, being noticed is a question of either being imaginative and creative. Or just investing squillions more than the other guy.
Either way, stakeholder engagement staff are already hungry for new ideas and open to forging new links with other practitioners.
As is traditional with the better conferences, I have no doubt that those who attended the Stakeholder Summit all found the conversations with new colleagues and acquaintances every bit as useful as the formal presentations (including mine!).
In the coming years, I hope to see more events. Hopefully not too large. Big is not better. Maybe more specialised, or with breakout sessions where there can be an in-depth focus on the dilemmas and trade-offs inherent in this activity.
There is, undoubtedly, a role for website-hosted thought-provoking articles, short thematic videos and online training. But to debate key messages, probe in more depth and compare experiences, there are few substitutes for meeting together as we did in Manchester.
Written by Rhion Jones
Rhion Jones was the Founder Director of the Consultation Institute and is an acknowledged authority on all aspects of public and stakeholder engagement and consultation. He advises Tractivity and will be contributing expert analysis and commentaries on current issues.
Rhion now publishes thought leadership articles regularly as the Consultation Guru.