Stakeholder engagement is one of those terms that gets thrown around in every impact strategy document, ESG report, and grant application. It sounds important. It sounds thorough. And in practice, it’s often a perfunctory exercise that produces nothing useful and annoys everyone involved.

I’ve sat through enough stakeholder forums to know the pattern: a room full of people who aren’t sure why they’re there, a facilitator working through a predetermined agenda, some flipchart paper with dot stickers, and a report three months later that nobody reads. Sound familiar?

It doesn’t have to be like this. Here’s how to do stakeholder engagement that actually matters.

Define what you need to learn

Before you plan a single meeting, be clear about what decisions the engagement will inform. Are you designing a new program and need to understand community needs? Are you evaluating an existing service and need feedback from clients? Are you developing a sustainability strategy and need to identify material issues?

Each of these requires a different approach. The worst stakeholder engagement processes are the ones with no clear purpose — they’re conducted because a funder or framework requires it, without any real intention to use the findings.

If you can’t explain in one sentence what the engagement will help you decide, you’re not ready to do it.

Talk to the right people

Stakeholders aren’t just the people who attend your events or respond to your surveys. They’re everyone who’s affected by your work, including the people who are hardest to reach.

For social impact organisations, the most important stakeholders are usually the people you’re trying to help — your clients, beneficiaries, or community members. And they’re often the people who are least likely to show up to a formal stakeholder forum.

Go to where people are. Hold conversations in community spaces, not corporate boardrooms. Offer multiple ways to participate — face-to-face, phone, online, written. Provide childcare and transport if needed. Pay people for their time if the engagement is significant.

If your stakeholder group looks like a room full of other service providers and government representatives, you’re talking to the wrong people.

Ask better questions

The quality of your engagement depends entirely on the quality of your questions. Open-ended, exploratory questions produce richer insights than closed or leading ones.

Bad question: “Do you think our youth employment program is effective?” (Leading, closed, likely to produce agreeable responses.)

Better question: “What’s been your experience with employment support services in this area?” (Open, non-leading, invites genuine reflection.)

Best question: “If you could redesign how young people in this community get support to find work, what would you change?” (Exploratory, empowering, focuses on solutions.)

Avoid jargon. Don’t use terms like “impact,” “outcomes,” or “theory of change” with community members who may not share your professional vocabulary. Speak plainly.

Create conditions for honesty

People won’t tell you what they really think if they don’t feel safe. This is particularly true for beneficiaries of social services, who may worry that criticism could affect the support they receive.

Create psychological safety. Be explicit that you want honest feedback, including criticism. Use independent facilitators where possible. Offer anonymous feedback channels. And follow through — if someone raises a concern, act on it. Nothing kills trust faster than asking for feedback and then ignoring it.

For staff and partners, the dynamics are different but the principle is the same. If people think their honest input will create conflict or jeopardise relationships, they’ll tell you what you want to hear. Structured confidential conversations are more productive than public forums for sensitive topics.

Document and act on findings

This is where most stakeholder engagement falls down. The conversations happen, the notes are written, the report is produced, and then… nothing changes.

If you’re going to do stakeholder engagement, commit to closing the loop. Share what you heard back with participants. Explain what you’re going to do differently as a result. And if you’re not going to change something, explain why.

This feedback loop is what transforms engagement from an extractive exercise into a genuine relationship. People invest their time and opinions because they believe it will make a difference. When it does, they’ll engage again. When it doesn’t, you’ve burned social capital that’s hard to rebuild.

The materiality assessment trap

For organisations doing ESG reporting, stakeholder engagement is often framed as a “materiality assessment” — identifying the ESG issues that matter most to your stakeholders and your business.

In theory, this is a good idea. In practice, many materiality assessments are designed to confirm what the organisation has already decided to focus on. The questions are structured to produce the desired result. The weighting methodology is opaque. And the “material issues” that emerge look suspiciously similar to the company’s existing strategy.

If you’re doing a materiality assessment, do it honestly. Accept that your stakeholders might prioritise different issues than you expected. Use independent analysis. And be transparent about the methodology so that the results are credible.

Proportionality matters

Not every decision requires extensive stakeholder engagement. For a small program change, a few phone calls to key stakeholders might be sufficient. For a major strategic shift, more comprehensive engagement is warranted.

Match the depth and formality of your engagement to the significance of the decision. Over-engineering stakeholder engagement for minor decisions wastes everyone’s time. Under-engaging on major decisions creates risk and erodes trust.

The fundamental principle

At its core, stakeholder engagement is about respecting the people affected by your work enough to ask their opinion and take it seriously. That’s it. Everything else is methodology.

If you approach engagement with genuine curiosity and a willingness to be surprised by what you hear, you’ll produce better work. If you approach it as a compliance exercise, you’ll produce better box-ticking.

The choice is yours.