Seven Simple Ways to Start Listening to Stakeholders
Most organizations think they know what their stakeholders want. They make decisions in conference rooms, boardrooms, or strategy sessions based on assumptions. Often good ones, but still assumptions.
The truth? If you want to make an impact, with the people you serve, employ, or collaborate with, you need to know what they think, not what you think they think.
Stakeholder engagement gets dismissed as slow, expensive, or “something we’ll do later.” But it doesn’t have to be. It can start small, be highly effective, and completely reshape how you prioritize, communicate, and build trust.
If you’re not sure where to begin, start here. You don’t need a big budget or a six-month consultancy, just curiosity, clarity, and the willingness to follow where the answers lead. And yes, I realize that’s a slightly risky thing for a consultant to say, but listening really is that accessible.
1. Start by Knowing Who You Need to Hear From
Stakeholder engagement starts with a map, not a megaphone. Before you ask a single question, list who your stakeholders are: staff, customers, community partners, suppliers, board members, regulators, even critics. Then narrow that list to a manageable, representative mix.
When I worked with Natural Selection, a collective of safari lodges in southern Africa, our first step was simply identifying who mattered most to their impact story: past and present employees, community leaders, conservation partners, guests, and board members. What emerged from dozens of perspectives was surprising: a shared understanding of why their work mattered and how to connect it to those most affected by it.
Make sure your outreach captures a balance of internal and external voices, and, this is key, track each participant’s role when collecting input. It’s nearly impossible to design meaningful messages or strategies without understanding whose perspectives you’re hearing.
2. Design Surveys with Intention
Surveys are an easy win, low-cost, scalable, and surprisingly revealing, if you take the time to structure them well. Keep them short (five to seven questions is plenty) and mix question types:
Quantitative (scaled or multiple-choice) to find trends.
Qualitative (open-ended) to uncover context and emotion.
Before hitting “send,” ask yourself:
What do we really want to learn?
Who exactly do we need to hear from?
How will we use and share the results?
And once you collect responses, share what you learn, especially internally. Transparency builds trust. When teams see that their input leads to visible action, engagement deepens. Consider showing summary results in a staff meeting or internal newsletter, or reflecting key takeaways in a “you said, we did” format. It not only closes the loop but also reinforces a culture where feedback drives decisions.
Always test your survey with two or three people first, small tweaks in phrasing can mean big differences in clarity.
A small note here: while these simple approaches work well for most organizations, there’s absolutely a time and place for more rigorous research methods (representative sampling, controlled studies, and academic-grade analysis). When stakes are high or decisions are far-reaching, pairing light-touch listening with more formal methodology can produce stronger, more reliable insights.
3. Balance the Numbers with the Narratives
Good engagement blends data with dialogue. The metrics show what people think; the conversations explain why. Use short interviews, focus groups, or informal check-ins to give life to the patterns your survey reveals.
This dual lens (quantitative + qualitative) helps you avoid over-correcting based on outliers and keeps strategy rooted in real experience.
Numbers pointed to the issues, but stories explained them. In both the tourism and health projects, short interviews and informal conversations revealed motivations and cultural context that the survey data alone couldn’t.
If you’re not sure where to start or who to talk to, gather your team for a quick brainstorming session. List everyone affected by your project or organization and note how each group interacts with your work. You’ll often find overlooked voices hiding in plain sight: support staff, field partners, even repeat customers who know your systems better than you do. Getting those names on paper is the first step toward turning data into stories that truly represent your stakeholders.
4. Visualize What You Learn
Data gains power when you can see it. Once you’ve gathered input from multiple groups (as we did with Natural Selection) the challenge becomes making sense of it. That’s where visuals help.
A sustainability lead I met at Danone shared a simple but brilliant approach: she plotted stakeholder priorities on an X/Y graph: one axis for importance to stakeholders, the other for importance to the organization. By asking just a few straightforward questions (What matters most to them? What matters most to us?) she could see where alignment was strong and where more work was needed.
It’s such a simple exercise, but the visual makes everything clearer. You can spot blind spots, overlaps, and areas that need conversation rather than assumption. And you don’t need fancy software to do it; sticky notes, a whiteboard, or a quick spreadsheet work just as well.
Turning feedback into something visible makes next steps obvious, and makes the conversation feel real for everyone involved.
5. Build Listening into Everyday Practice
Stakeholder engagement shouldn’t be an event; it should be a rhythm. Add a short reflection question to staff meetings, a feedback box at the end of community sessions, or an annual mini-survey that tracks what’s changing. The goal isn’t perfection, it’s consistency.
The more you ask, the more people trust that their voices matter, and the more your strategy stays aligned with reality.
6. Use WhatsApp to Reach Hard-to-Reach Stakeholders
For organizations working across regions or with dispersed groups, like field teams, community leaders, or rural partners, WhatsApp can be a powerful listening tool. Across much of Africa, it’s already woven into daily life, even in remote areas where email access is patchy. That makes it one of the most practical ways to reach voices that often get overlooked: people in far-flung villages, local leaders, and community members with valuable insights but limited access to formal feedback channels.
You can use it to send short polls, gather open-ended responses, or invite quick voice notes that capture nuance you might miss in a survey. A 2020 study in Malawi used WhatsApp focus groups with adolescents to discuss health and family planning, and found participants were more candid and engaged through messaging than in person (Gates Open Research, 2020).
To do it well, keep it simple: define your goal, protect privacy, note who’s responding, and close the loop with a quick follow-up. Used thoughtfully, WhatsApp bridges distance, builds trust, and gives a voice to stakeholders who might otherwise never be heard.
7. Don’t Mistake Social Listening for Stakeholder Listening
Many organizations rely on social listening to track what people are saying online, scanning platforms like X, LinkedIn, Facebook, or TripAdvisor for mentions, sentiment, and trends. It’s a useful pulse check: you can spot themes, identify advocates or critics, and understand how your work is being discussed in real time.
But here’s the catch: social listening tells you what people are saying, not why. It reflects the loudest voices, not necessarily the most representative ones. And it’s reactive—you’re observing, not engaging.
Social listening should inform your engagement strategy, not replace it. Use it to identify patterns worth exploring, refine the questions you ask in surveys or interviews, or see if your messaging is resonating. But the most valuable insights still come from conversations, with the people you serve, employ, or partner with, where you can ask directly, listen deeply, and understand the “why” behind the “what.”
In every project I’ve led, the richest insights came not from what people posted online, but from taking the time to ask, What do you think? and really listening to the answer.
Final Thought
Stakeholder engagement doesn’t have to be complicated. It can start with one question, one conversation, one open mind.
But once you begin, once you see the clarity and connection that come from listening, it’s hard to imagine planning without it. What starts as a simple act of outreach quickly becomes a more strategic, structured way of working.
Over time, listening naturally grows more sophisticated. You might map your stakeholder ecosystem, analyze influence networks, or weave feedback loops into annual planning. The process evolves with you.
It doesn’t have to be big to be meaningful, but it does have to be intentional. When you treat listening as a core part of your strategy, not an afterthought, you uncover insights that shape everything from communication to program design to long-term sustainability.
It’s an investment of time and trust. One that pays dividends in stronger relationships, smarter strategies, and deeper impact.
Ready to find out what your stakeholders really think? Let’s talk about how to build a listening strategy that fits your organization.
