Step 4: Action Plan

As a follow-up to step 3 consulting, you can now start to draft an action plan:

• Make a retrospective analysis on your initial objectives and ambitions and use your learning experience with the stakeholder engagement to address the short- and long-term goals earlier set by you and your company.
• Make sure to incorporate successes of the process into your action plan and use this information for future engagement activities, in order to improve the overall process.
• Build a public reporting document from your action plan that tells the whole story including prior engagement activities and noting future plans. This way you are able to demonstrate how your engagement activities and stakeholders affect your business strategy or operations. Finally, be sure to invite stakeholder feedback to further improve your engagement strategy as you loop back to Step 1 and plan future activities.  And keep in mind to continue your communication with your stakeholders as part of your long-term strategy.
• Ensure that current and future decisions and actions take into account stakeholder concerns, expectations and perceptions, as well as key discussions and interventions.
• Ensure that roles and responsibilities are well-defined; and offer realistic time frames for completion.
• Consider every output captured from the event and meet it with a response that explains the rationale behind your decision to take or not to take an action (a careful explanation should be considered).
• For each action identified, define the action plan in close collaboration with those responsible for implementing each action.