Take These Steps to Identify and Engage Your Key Sustainability Stakeholders
People are at the heart of any sustainability initiative. Effectively engaging with people who directly or indirectly influence your likelihood of success starts with identifying your key sustainability stakeholders.
The success of any sustainability initiative relies as much – if not more - on the breadth and depth of stakeholder engagement as on robust planning.
As enteleco has detailed in a previous article, this can require navigating more than 60 types of stakeholders.
This article aims to simplify that process, providing an overview roadmap of central steps to identifying key sustainability stakeholders. The insights are based on the free Sustainability Stakeholder Engagement report, which you can download here.
Step 1: Define the Scope
The first step is to look at the scope of your sustainability initiative. What are its goals? Who will it impact? Who can influence its outcome? These questions help you understand the context and the key players involved.
Step 2: Brainstorm Potential Stakeholders
Next, you can brainstorm who might be potential stakeholders. Take a holistic approach and involve different departments within your organisation to get the broadest possible pool of individuals, groups and organisations that can impact or be impacted by the sustainability initiative.
Step 3: Categorise Stakeholders
The next step is categorising the stakeholders into internal, external, strategic partnerships, and indirect influencers. This process will give you a clearer picture of how each group might be influenced by and interact with your initiative.
Step 4: Stakeholder Relationship Mapping
To complement stakeholder categorising, consider stakeholder relationship mapping. This tool can help you visualise the relationship between stakeholder groups and between the groups and your sustainability initiative.
Step 5: Examine Stakeholder Interest and Influence
While there is no absolute rule of what constitutes a key stakeholder, they can be defined as stakeholders who "play the most important role in an initiative’s success.”
By assessing the power, legitimacy, and urgency of each stakeholder group in relation to your sustainability initiative, you will be able to prioritise your stakeholders, identifying which groups require immediate attention and which can be consulted later in the process.
Step 6: Define Engagement Strategies
Based on your understanding of the stakeholders, you can define and develop strategies for engaging each group. Consider their communication preferences, possible reservations or concerns, and what messages might resonate with them.
Step 7: Review and Refine
Stakeholder identification and engagement are not one-time processes. They should be reviewed and refined periodically or when significant changes occur in or around the sustainability initiative.
Learn more at the Sustainability Leadership Lab
Even sustainability experts can get better at stakeholder identification and engagement. That is among the drivers for enteleco’s Sustainability Leadership Lab programme. The programme is for sustainability leaders and professionals looking to develop their skills further and get inspiration from industry leaders.
