Community and stakeholder engagement
Do you need to develop and maintain positive relationships with your stakeholders?
Stakeholder relationships and social licence to operate are the key to the successful delivery of infrastructure projects.
Building trusting stakeholder and community relationships is a key focus for Australian businesses. Without strong, positive and collaborative relationships, projects can experience delays, reputational risk is increased, and conflict can escalate, often resulting in reactive and costly management.
Let us help you identify key stakeholders and communities, understand their key issues and risks and develop risk mitigation strategies.
Positive stakeholder relationships facilitate productive partnerships, open and constructive conversations, achieving a balance between community and business interests.
Our experience in this area includes managing a number of large-scale infrastructure projects that impacted on stakeholders both at a local and national level.
We can assist you in the development approvals phase right through construction and commissioning. We can be the first team in and last out, ensuring that stakeholder relations are managed to deliver project success and minimising impact on local people.
Community and reputation risk management
How can you manage your reputation in the face of community and stakeholder risk?
Sometimes companies embarking on new projects or expansions are faced with risks such as community concern, misunderstandings and opposition. We can help you to identify these risks and work more closely with communities to alleviate issues.
Let us help you to:
Gather information about stakeholder and community issues
Develop stakeholder and community engagement strategies to address concerns
Provide you with in-house or external support to implement strategies and manage community concerns on your project
Assist you with community risk assessments based on differing scenarios and outcomes (including frequency, likelihood, and consequences), risk minimisation strategies and support
Assist you to understand the social, political and legal implications of ignoring community concerns
Issues Management
While our focus is on developing positive relationships with stakeholders, it is a grim reality that from time to time issues arise that will throw you a curve ball.
Our issues management experience has been developed through years of working in high profile government agencies and corporates, which by their sheer scale and activity have attracted negative and unwelcome attention.
We can offer your business unmatched expertise in preparing and implementing your issues management strategy.
Whether you are looking for a reactive or a proactive issues management plan we can mobilise a team to assist you at short notice.
Our issues management services include:·
In-house support to manage your issue
Full scope of resources to support a comprehensive issues management plan
Media management, including traditional and online/social media, briefing spokespeople and sentiment analysis of issue
Third party/external endorsement and advocacy identification
Let us help you to manage difficult stakeholders and activist networks - from "deep dive" research and social media monitoring to full background profiles.
We use IBM-developed software to background, link and identify operative risk; all information is open-sourced and fully referenced.
Our researchers have been monitoring social media professionally for more than 10 years - providing information, commentary and analysis to international and national companies, institutions and governments.
While the trend is for algorithmic social media monitoring, nothing replaces "eyeballs" for a faultless analysis and this approach is complemented by the deep corporate knowledge held by our researchers in the energy and industry fields.
Government Liaison
Kath Elliott Communications has been working with all levels of government for more than 20 years.
From lobbying Federal politicians in the nation’s capital, to liaising with local councils on development and infrastructure issues, we have unparalleled experience and expertise in navigating our way through the different government levels to best represent your business.
Our work in this area includes:·
Advocating on behalf of clients and maintaining political engagement and momentum on issues
Creating and leveraging interest and support
White Paper preparation to influence policy and legislation
Position papers
Organising face to face meetings with ministers, their advisors, department heads, councillors, and council staff
Community distress writ large at Menindee
Risk and Operative Reporting
We have developed our own proprietary research tools and resources to manage sentiment, activism, risk potential and mapping of hotspots to provide swift and accurate reporting on issues.
Monitoring all social networks, our systems can provide real time reporting on issues and discussions.
Clients can access information about their business through an email alert summary delivered directly into their inbox, and request additional information on a case by case basis.
This service is unique in Australia and to Kath Elliott Communications’ clients