Stakeholder Engagement

It is fundamentally more difficult to win volunteers for long-term commitment than for short-term commitments. Volunteers are rarely willing to invest as much time as they were just a few years ago. Stakeholder Engagement enables association members to get involved in specific issues without having to make a long-term commitment to honorary positions. A long-term commitment of these individuals then grows out of the regular participation and a series of micro-involvements.

Changes within organisations aren’t easy. Many member organisations are still stuck with old structures and working models. This often frustrates members because it is time-consuming to actively participate in committee work. Finding the most current information or quickly adding a small but important aspect takes too much time, and so participation dwindles. One of the biggest barriers here is the focus of many associations on attendance dates, such as meetings and events. But members aren’t full time employees at the member organisation. They have their own demanding jobs and challenges and need to be able to participate in easier and less time-consuming ways that are more compatible with their other occupations.

Emails and chats are used for communication, facilitating decision-making and for archiving knowledge. This makes collaboration very difficult for two types of members:

1. New members have no concise starting point on their journey to becoming a valued and actively participating member.
2. Members with less time on their hands can’t quickly get up to speed on the current state of affairs because this would mean sifting through hundreds of emails or chat messages.

Using a Stakeholder Engagement Platform changes your dynamic. They create a digital home for your members. This is the central place to quickly access the most current information and understand what the next steps are. Gone are the days of patching various emails or chat messages together to comprehend the overall picture.

Social Networks like LinkedIn and Twitter are successfully garnering not only the attention of marketeers. More and more members are exchanging innovative ideas and making valuable suggestions to industry colleagues outside the associations’ networking offerings. This negatively impacts event attendance and undermines the value perception of the association.

The use of state-of-the-art methods, such as a stakeholder engagement platform, not only makes collaboration within the association more attractive for all stakeholders. It also creates a community platform with a wide variety of tools to share experiences and interests and enter into dialog with other stakeholders. If the association does not provide a platform to share such input in a usable way, the association regularly misses out on networked knowledge and lots of potential.

Associations form a living and valuable network of knowledge, expertise, and experience. But this knowledge is difficult for members to access and remains largely unused. Due to ever-increasing turnover and the growing challenge of getting members to share, the real expertise within the association remains hidden. Stakeholder engagement platforms enable access to the association’s knowledge with just a few clicks: Whether on a smartphone, tablet or computer, the results, experiences, and expertise are instantly and conveniently accessible and usable at any time and in any place. Members benefit from this knowledge and can multiply the association’s talking points more effectively to the outside world.