Strategic Community Relations: Developing Successful Community Partnerships

The necessity to build active community partnership projects is growing across various nations. The stakeholders within your strategic community of the Government, Communities and the Corporations can either be your greatest advocates or your greatest risks. We must learn how to engage positively with the stakeholders and build long-term strategic relationship.

The stakeholders in the community partnership projects will have a keen interest in the outcome. Some are more important to the life of the community projects which impacts social and economic development, while others impact businesses. Successful projects rely on effective stakeholder engagement. We must understand various stakeholder types, perspectives, and attitudes to ensure they are fully engaged and willing to work with us. It is critical to build rapport and trust, while avoiding conflict and misunderstanding. While there are many tools and techniques we can use to plan, analyse and monitor stakeholder engagement, we must also analyse the mindset of our stakeholders – a deeper level of analysis – to understand how they might view various situations, and how we can best respond to them.

This course is designed to be practical, interactive session that explores tools and techniques that enable greater understanding and connection with your stakeholders including the Strategic Stakeholder Engagement Framework”. This framework examines your stakeholders’ needs and mindset in depth to enable better planning and monitoring of the engagement process. In addition, we will present key principles of effective stakeholder engagement that allow a more insightful level of stakeholder analysis, along with how we can be more mindful working with them.

The Learning Objectives

• Understand the stakeholder engagement process and how to plan for successful stakeholder engagement in community partnership projects.
• Identify different stakeholder types and segments.
• Learn various techniques to categorise and analyse stakeholders.
• Understand the importance of remaining mindful when working with stakeholders.
• Use the ‘Strategic Stakeholder Engagement Framework’ to perform stakeholder analysis and map level of interest and power of influence to design communication strategy.
• Understand communication styles and how to communicate more effectively.
• Apply methods to increase connection and build rapport with stakeholders.

Objective

The Learning Outcomes:

• Identifying & Analysing Stakeholders
• How to map out stakeholders
• Analysing and understanding different relationships
• Building & Maintaining Relationships
• Creating a stakeholder management plan
• Communicating and engaging with your stakeholders
• Zippered organisational relationships
• Working Together
• A partnership approach

The Course Outline

Stakeholders and engagement principles

• Defining stakeholders and stakeholder types
• The stakeholder engagement process
• Stakeholder identification
• Classifying and categorising stakeholders
• Stakeholder engagement planning

Stakeholder analysis

• Common stakeholder management tools:
  • Trust matrix
  • RACI
• Using personas
• Empathy mapping
• Introducing the ‘Strategic Stakeholder Engagement Framework’

Creating connection and rapport

• Barriers to stakeholder engagement
• Building rapport and trust
• The importance of mindfulness and empathy
• Communication styles and effective communication techniques
• Mindful listening and remaining present

Plan and practice

• Using the ‘Strategic Stakeholder Engagement Framework’ to plan successful stakeholder engagement
• Monitoring and reviewing stakeholder engagement
• Managing conflict
• Practices to maintain connection and awareness
• Generating and maintaining buy-in
• Working collaboratively and building consens