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Learn how to identify, prioritize, and work with stakeholders for water services projects to ensure success. Understand key questions and strategies for communicating with stakeholders effectively.
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Water Services Trust FundFinancial Support for Improved Access to Water and Sanitation UPC Projects: COMMUNICATING WITH STAKEHOLDERS
1. Identify Your stakeholders: • Engaging the right people in the right way => project success • Stakeholder: any person affected by your work, have influence or power over it, or have interest in its success or unsuccessful result • Can be both organisations and people but ultimately you can only communicate with individuals so choose these individuals carefully
2. Prioritise Your stakeholders: • You could make a long list of many people who are affected by your work and some of these people may have power to block or advance it • You will need to map them out and classify them by their power over your work and their interest in your work
Working with stakeholders: Some examples • High power, interested people: must fully engage with them and make greatest effort to satisfy them (WSTF, WSB & WSP) • High power, less interested people: put enough work with these people to keep them satisfied, but not so much to keep them bored ( Chiefs, gatekeepers)
Working with stakeholders: Some examples (cont’d) • Low power, interested people: keep these people adequately informed and talk to them to ensure no major issues are arising. Can be very helpful in providing details of your project (CBOs, NGOs) • Low power, less interested people: monitor these people
Understanding your key stakeholders: • You need to know more about them • How will they perceive, or are they interpreting our project? • How they are expected to respond to our project? • Will they turn a project for the community into their own private project? (project and private interests) • Know how to engage them? • Turning skeptics into participants • How to communicate with them? • Communication is key to success?
Key questions regarding stakeholders: • In addition to identifying stakeholders you should also try to map their main interests • What professional, financial, political, social or even emotional interest do they have in (the outcome of) our project? Is it positive or negative? • What motivates the various stakeholders you have identified? • What information do they want from you? • How do they want to receive the information from you?
Key questions Regarding stakeholders (cont’d): • What is the best way to relay information to your stakeholders (one-to-one, organising a meeting, organising a Baraza, writing a report, SMS, phone call, e-mail?) • Who tends to influence the opinions of your stakeholders? • Who tends to influence the opinions that exist about you and/or your work? • Should then, opinion-makers be regarded as stakeholders in their own right? • How to deal with negative views regarding the WSP, the project and your work? How to win the support of critics ...and make use of constructive criticism? • If you can’t win them then how will you manage their opposition?