We only know what you know...

The role of communication and stakeholder engagement in the delivery of projects has rapidly evolved over the past 20 years. This has mainly been a response to increased community participation, triggered in turn by legislative change and greater social awareness. 

Those tasked with managing such projects have adapted their approach to ensure communications and engagement specialists have a ‘place at the table’ with traditional main workstreams such as operations, finance, safety, technical and so on.

How effective these specialists are can, as with the other disciplines, come down to how well you help them prepare for their work. In the context of communications and engagement, this is determined by the level at which you provide the specialist’s ‘tool of trade’ – information. 

As surely as builders can’t build without blueprints, communicators can’t communicate without adequate backgrounding. While most are more than able to produce ‘answers’ on your behalf in the absence of enough data, doing so risks their (and therefore your) credibility with stakeholders.

What then do we define as ‘information’? There is, of course, the literal sense but the professional communicator needs input far beyond the dot points and basic numbers typically making it on to project websites, into fact sheets, and displayed on PowerPoint.

An early and thorough awareness of the main project objectives and challenges, as well as the methods and mitigations to be employed in avoiding and accounting for them, is needed. The greater the scope of this information, the more fruitful their efforts will become.

One major benefit project teams should leverage their communications and engagement specialists for is their ability to see things from multiple perspectives, especially from the viewpoint of external stakeholders.

Through their regular contact with those potentially affected, and by addressing the needs of influential stakeholders such as politicians and the media, communicators constantly have their ‘finger on the pulse’, putting them in an ideal position to understand prevailing project sentiment.

A flow-on consequence is that they will very likely know the questions being posed amongst stakeholders about your proposal, as well as the ‘myths’ and rumours circulating about it. This is obviously useful knowledge for shaping your message and will help you tell your ‘whole’ story.

It’s clearly not possible to anticipate absolutely everything your stakeholders will ask when your project enters into the public sphere. It is, however, also not entirely unreasonable for them to expect the people who represent you might know a little more than they do.

With the unprecedented access to information we all now have, you can and should expect stakeholders will do their research and draw their own conclusions, rightly or wrongly.

Giving your communicators no option but to repeatedly say ‘let me get back to you on that’ is a surefire way to not just disengage them, but could very well drive them to subscribe to contradictory theories and gossip, making cutting through with your message even more difficult.

If your communications and engagement specialist hasn’t been onboard since the very start of the project, one of the first exercises you should undertake once they’re engaged is a ‘Q&A’ brainstorming session.

Even without much of a briefing, an experienced professional will almost always identify a matter which has gone unnoticed by the wider team. If your communicator is asking the question, it’s almost guaranteed that your stakeholders will be as well.

Most projects have been worked upon for a significant period by the time they’re ready to be made public. Don’t sell your message short – arm your communications and engagement team with as much as you can before they make their way into the field. After all, they only know what they know.