3.3.2 Step 1: Strategy

Course subject(s) Module 3. How: Stakeholder engagement and gender dimension

Stakeholder engagement should be aligned with organisational objectives. Here are some considerations:

  • Learn from past and ongoing engagement: Look at your organization’s existing engagement activities. What are the objectives of these activities? Which stakeholders communicate regularly with your company? What groups do they cover well? Where can you reach beyond this existing comfort zone to engage with lesser-known stakeholders?
  • Building trust-based  relationships is inherent to both strategic and operational stakeholder engagement. The purpose may be associated with ongoing activities, such as aiming to ensure that the organisation has a good understanding of stakeholder views or to foster positive stakeholder relationships.
  • Be forward thinking: Consider potential stakeholders from new markets, new technologies, new customers, and new impending regulations. Depending on your objectives, the relevant stakeholders you need to engage with may not play the usual sustainability roles but may instead serve other functions relevant to your business.
  • Be diverse: Make sure to include a rich diversity of stakeholder expertise, geography, and tactics from across the spectrum.
    Make sure that you address include gender and  inclusiveness (see last unit of this section) 
  • Be social: Social media provides an unparalleled opportunity to identify and reach lesser-known stakeholder groups. Canvas blogs, forums, networking, reviews, and news sites to discover stakeholders relevant to your business and to learn about their interests in your activities.
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Responsible Innovation: Building Tomorrow’s Responsible Firms by TU Delft OpenCourseWare is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Based on a work at https://online-learning.tudelft.nl/courses/responsible-innovation-building-tomorrows-responsible-firms/.
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