Image credit: Freepik

Reimagining Stakeholder Management

In essence, effective stakeholder management revolves around uniting key individuals, harnessing their influence, authority, and expertise to drive the success of initiatives such as product, service, project or event launches. Nurturing your relationships helps manage stakeholder expectations and importantly, opens up access to resources and support at a time critical to your initiative.

As the Manager of the NSW Host Market at Silicon Valley’s start-up, Hipcamp – a global eco-tourism company, I facilitated the growth of the Australian host community and developed relationships with local governments to influence agritourism and eco-tourism policies. Our host community comprised of landholders who opened up their land to campers by creating a listing on Hipcamp and charging a fee, similar to Airbnb’s model.

Working closely with the farming community to assist them in setting up accounts, I expanded my services to provide business advice and zoom sessions for hosts wishing to expand their operations into eco-tourism businesses as an alternative revenue source to primary production. Through (virtual and in person) workshops on business skill development, I created a capacity-building program that could be adapted based on Hipcamp’s objectives and our host community’s changing needs.

Image credit: Local Government NSW, 2022

However attracting the host community was the first challenge. It’s not always easy accessing your target market when they’re not tech savvy and put more trust in human interaction, so my communication strategy involved a mix of social media ads and community meetings held in person – called Town Halls – often hosted in country town pubs, supported by hardcopy handouts with QR codes linking prospective clients to landing pages.

Whilst Hipcamp couldn’t live without hosts, we also experienced a lot of barriers from councils, so my two-pronged approach involved developing relationships across the local government authority landscape, to showcase the benefits of eco-tourism across the regions and influence future policies. These relationships were established through a mix of meetings with council operational staff, presentations to mayors/councillors and sponsoring the LGNSW Destination and Visitor Economy Conference in Orange, NSW, and hosting trade stalls at events. As a sponsor, I arranged Hipcamp’s participation in the panel sessions and speaking opportunities to strategically take advantage of larger audiences of policy and decision makers.

Image credit: Photos by Boaz, 2018

You can’t expect your stakeholders to stay loyal if you don’t offer them support in return. From its inception in 2008 to 2018, I was involved in Dragon Dreaming Festival in various roles including as director, secretary, communications officer, lifestyle department manager and artist liaison manager. It’s a well known fact that most arts, music and culture events are run on a shoe-string budget, and it was no different for this event. However the festival and its entertainment offerings flourished in size during that time.

The secret was taking extra steps after each event to go further than just appreciating and acknowledging our stakeholders: the artists, performers, volunteers and tradespersons who helped create the event. These contributors often gave their time and resources at significantly reduced rates, and in lieu of their contributions I would use the remaining time in the year to help them achieve their professional goals.

Image credit: Photos by Boaz, 2016

Being in a unique position as an event manager part of a global event network, I used my position to create connections for our contributors, facilitating tertiary and professional placements, secure gig contracts and career opportunities. This fostered long-term relationships and increased the likelihood of future support and collaboration.

Our patrons were also very much part of our important stakeholder community, with our main channel of communication at the time being Facebook. In this context, between 2008 and 2015 I grew the page’s following from zero to 16,000 with regular content including behind the scenes anecdotes, artist/performer stories, featured artwork and music, as well as important announcements.

*Cover image credit: Freepik