How to Build a Stakeholder Engagement Plan: A Step-by-Step Guide

Every mission-driven organization -- whether a community health nonprofit, a school district, or a municipal agency -- exists within a web of relationships. Funders want accountability. Community members want voice. Staff want clarity. Board members want confidence that resources are being deployed well. And the people you ultimately serve want to know that their lived experience actually shapes the programs designed for them.

The difference between organizations that thrive and those that stall often comes down to how well they navigate these relationships. That is the work of stakeholder engagement -- and getting it right is not optional.

At Giddings Consulting Group, we have seen firsthand how a well-designed stakeholder engagement plan can transform a struggling initiative into one with broad buy-in, stronger outcomes, and deeper community trust. This guide will walk you through everything you need to build one that is grounded in equity, designed for the social sector, and practical enough to implement with the resources you actually have.

What Is Stakeholder Engagement (and Why Does It Matter)?

Stakeholder engagement is the deliberate, ongoing process of identifying, communicating with, and incorporating the perspectives of the people and groups who have a stake in your work. In the social impact space, that includes everyone from the communities you serve and the staff who deliver programs to funders, government partners, peer organizations, and elected officials.

The data makes the case clearly. According to research compiled by the Project Management Institute and other sources, roughly 70 percent of projects fail to deliver what was promised. Among the most common reasons: 69 percent of project failures are linked to poor stakeholder communication, and 26 percent fail due to lack of stakeholder buy-in (TeamStage, 2024). Meanwhile, survey data shows that only about two in three projects have actively engaged sponsors (PMStudyCircle, 2025).

For mission-driven organizations, the stakes are even higher. You are not just managing a project timeline -- you are trying to change outcomes for real people. When stakeholders are disengaged, programs lose relevance. When communities feel unheard, trust erodes. And when funders are surprised by pivots they did not help shape, relationships fracture.

Stakeholder Engagement vs. Stakeholder Management

These terms are often used interchangeably, but they reflect fundamentally different mindsets.

Stakeholder management is a top-down approach. It treats stakeholders as variables to be controlled -- risks to be mitigated, objections to be anticipated, communications to be managed. The organization remains firmly in the driver's seat.

Stakeholder engagement is relational. It assumes that stakeholders hold knowledge, perspective, and power that the organization needs in order to succeed. It invites people into the process not to check a box, but because their input genuinely improves the work.

In the corporate world, stakeholder management may be sufficient. In the social sector, it is not. When your mission is to improve the lives of communities, those communities cannot be treated as passive recipients of your strategy. They must be partners in shaping it.

Why Mission-Driven Organizations Need a Different Approach

Most stakeholder engagement frameworks were designed for corporate project management or infrastructure development. Nonprofits, government agencies, and social enterprises operate in a different reality:

Power dynamics are more complex. Funders hold financial power. Community members hold experiential knowledge. Staff hold operational expertise. Board members hold governance authority. No single group has the full picture.

Trust is harder to earn and easier to lose. Many communities served by social impact organizations have histories of being studied, consulted, and then ignored. Engagement processes that replicate this pattern do active harm.

Outcomes are harder to measure. You cannot reduce community wellbeing to a quarterly earnings report. Engagement must account for qualitative, relational, and systemic outcomes. (For more on this challenge, see our guide on measuring social impact.)

Accountability runs in multiple directions. A nonprofit is accountable to its board, its funders, its staff, its community, and the broader public interest -- simultaneously.

A stakeholder engagement plan built for this reality must center equity, distribute power intentionally, and treat community voice not as input to be collected but as expertise to be honored.

The 5 Levels of Stakeholder Engagement

The most widely used framework for levels of stakeholder engagement comes from the International Association for Public Participation (IAP2), which defines a Spectrum of Public Participation with five levels representing increasing degrees of stakeholder influence. The goal is not to push every relationship to the highest level, but to be intentional about matching engagement to context.

This spectrum has roots in Sherry Arnstein's foundational 1969 article, "A Ladder of Citizen Participation," published in the *Journal of the American Institute of Planners*, which argued that citizen participation is fundamentally about the redistribution of power (Arnstein, 1969). The IAP2 spectrum builds on this legacy with a more practical framework.

Inform

Goal: Provide stakeholders with balanced, objective information so they understand the situation, alternatives, and decisions.

What it looks like: Newsletters, website updates, fact sheets, public reports, open data dashboards.

Limitation: Information flows in one direction. Stakeholders receive but do not shape.

Consult

Goal: Gather stakeholder feedback on analysis, alternatives, or decisions.

What it looks like: Surveys, public comment periods, focus groups, listening sessions, feedback forms.

Limitation: Consultation without follow-through breeds cynicism. If you ask for input and then ignore it, you have done more damage than if you had never asked.

Involve

Goal: Work directly with stakeholders throughout the process to ensure their concerns and aspirations are consistently understood and considered.

What it looks like: Ongoing advisory groups, participatory workshops, community forums with structured dialogue.

Key distinction: Unlike consultation (which is often a one-time event), involvement is ongoing and iterative.

Collaborate

Goal: Partner with stakeholders in each aspect of the decision, including the development of alternatives and the identification of preferred solutions.

What it looks like: Joint working groups, co-design sessions, shared governance structures, coalition-based decision-making.

Key distinction: Stakeholders are not just providing input -- they are sitting at the table making decisions alongside you.

Empower

Goal: Place final decision-making authority in the hands of stakeholders.

What it looks like: Community-controlled budgets, resident-led governance boards, participatory grantmaking, beneficiary-directed program design.

Key distinction: The organization serves as a resource and facilitator, not a decision-maker.

How to Build Your Stakeholder Engagement Plan in 7 Steps

A stakeholder engagement plan is a living document that articulates who your stakeholders are, what level of engagement is appropriate for each, how you will engage them, and how you will track and adapt your approach. The following seven steps provide a structured process.

Step 1: Identify and Map Your Stakeholders

Start by brainstorming every individual, group, or institution that is directly affected by your work, has influence over its success, holds relevant knowledge or lived experience, controls resources you need, or will be responsible for implementation.

For most social impact organizations, this list includes community members and beneficiaries, staff at all levels, board members, funders and donors, government agencies and elected officials, partner organizations and coalitions, volunteers, media, and peer organizations.

Once you have a comprehensive list, map them using a power-interest grid that plots stakeholders along two axes: influence/power (how much ability they have to affect your work) and interest/impact (how much they are affected by your work).

> Equity check: Traditional power-interest mapping can reinforce existing power imbalances by deprioritizing the voices of those with the least institutional power. In mission-driven work, we recommend adding a third dimension: proximity to the issue. The people closest to the problem often have the deepest understanding of what solutions will work. Their engagement should be prioritized regardless of their formal power.

Step 2: Assess Current Engagement Levels

Before designing new strategies, take stock of where things stand. For each major stakeholder group, ask: How are we currently engaging them? What level on the IAP2 spectrum does our current engagement represent? What is their level of trust? Have there been past engagement failures we need to acknowledge?

Consider using a simple matrix:

| Stakeholder Group | Current Level | Desired Level | Gap | Priority | |-------------------|--------------|---------------|-----|----------| | Community residents | Inform | Collaborate | High | Urgent | | Frontline staff | Consult | Involve | Medium | High | | Funders | Inform | Consult | Low | Medium | | Board members | Collaborate | Collaborate | None | Maintain |

Step 3: Define Your Engagement Objectives

For each stakeholder group, define specific, time-bound objectives tied to your organizational goals. Examples:

• "By Q3, establish a Community Advisory Board of 12 residents from the three neighborhoods most affected by our housing initiative, meeting monthly to co-design program criteria."
• "Within 60 days, conduct listening sessions with all frontline staff to identify barriers to program delivery and incorporate findings into our operational plan."

Vague objectives like "engage the community" or "get stakeholder buy-in" are not actionable. Push yourself to define what engagement looks like, who is involved, and what decisions it will inform. Your engagement objectives should connect directly to your broader strategic goals -- our guide on strategic planning for nonprofits in 2026 provides a complementary framework.

Step 4: Choose Your Engagement Methods and Activities

Match your engagement objectives to specific methods. The key principle: the method should match both the level of engagement you are targeting and the needs of the stakeholder group.

Inform: Email newsletters, annual reports, social media, press releases, public data sharing

Consult: Surveys, public comment periods, focus groups, one-on-one interviews, listening sessions

Involve: Standing advisory committees, participatory workshops, community forums, staff working groups

Collaborate: Co-design processes, joint task forces, coalition governance, shared evaluation partnerships

Empower: Participatory budgeting, community-controlled governance boards, resident-led evaluation, beneficiary-directed grantmaking

When selecting methods, consider accessibility. Are meetings held at times and locations that work for community members? Is translation available? Is childcare provided? Accessibility is not an add-on -- it is a prerequisite for equitable engagement.

Step 5: Build Your Stakeholder Communication Plan

For each stakeholder group, define key messages, channels, frequency, the responsible person on your team, and the feedback mechanism. Use the channels your stakeholders actually use, not the ones convenient for you.

One of the most common engagement failures is a communication gap between what was decided and why. When stakeholders provide input and then hear nothing for months, they reasonably conclude their input did not matter. Even when you cannot act on every piece of feedback, communicating what you heard and why certain suggestions were not feasible demonstrates respect for the process.

Step 6: Implement and Document

Start with relationships, not activities. Before launching your first survey, invest in relational groundwork. Meet with community leaders one-on-one. Establish trust before asking for input.

Document everything. Keep records of who participated, what was discussed, what decisions were made, and what commitments your organization made in response. This supports accountability and enables institutional memory -- critical when staff turn over (see our guide on retaining nonprofit talent).

Be transparent about constraints. If a decision has already been made, do not pretend to consult. If funding limits what is possible, say so.

Step 7: Measure, Learn, and Adapt

Establish metrics that track both the process and outcomes of engagement:

Process metrics: Number and diversity of stakeholders engaged, participation rates, representation of key demographic groups, feedback loops completed.

Outcome metrics: Changes to programs or strategies resulting from stakeholder input, stakeholder satisfaction, levels of trust, retention in ongoing engagement activities.

Impact metrics: Program outcomes for beneficiaries, community-level indicators, organizational capacity, strength of partnerships.

Review your engagement plan quarterly. For a broader framework on measuring impact, see our guide on measuring social impact.

Stakeholder Engagement Examples from the Social Sector

Example 1: Community Health Initiative

The CDC's *Principles of Community Engagement*, now in its third edition, identifies ten principles for effective community engagement in health contexts, including trustworthiness as a recently added tenth principle. The updated definition describes community engagement as "an ongoing, evolving process of multidirectional communication with and for people to solve the problems and address the concerns that matter to them."

The Community-Led Health Equity Structural Interventions (CHESI) initiative supported by the National Institutes of Health exemplifies this approach. Community organizations lead the planning, implementation, and assessment of health interventions addressing social determinants of health, with research institutions serving as technical partners rather than primary decision-makers -- stakeholder engagement at the "Empower" level (AJPH, 2025).

A systematic review published in *Global Health Action* found that community engagement approaches in health -- particularly those moving beyond consultation to genuine collaboration -- were associated with improved health outcomes, increased service utilization, and greater sustainability (PMC, 2015).

Key takeaway: When the people most affected by health inequities lead the design of interventions, those interventions are more relevant, trusted, and sustained.

Example 2: Education System Redesign

Chicago Public Schools (CPS) provides an instructive example. When CPS undertook its accountability redesign initiative, the district began with extensive stakeholder engagement before proposing any changes: small-group conversations with parent advisory councils, Local School Council members, and Community Action Councils on a monthly to bimonthly basis, followed by five town hall meetings to listen and strengthen trust.

Similarly, the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce developed a structured Stakeholder Engagement Strategy as part of its Whole Child Framework, recognizing that each stakeholder group brings unique insights essential to creating environments where students thrive.

Key takeaway: In education, engagement must be embedded in the design process from the beginning, with multiple entry points for different stakeholder groups.

Example 3: Nonprofit Strategic Planning

The Bridgespan Group published a Stakeholder-Engagement Toolkit outlining how nonprofits can systematically integrate stakeholder input into strategic planning. Their framework emphasizes that stakeholder input fills blind spots, surfaces questions leadership may not have considered, and builds buy-in for implementation.

Research published in *Strategy Magazine* found that broad engagement of diverse stakeholders during strategic planning increases both plan quality and organizational buy-in (Strategy Magazine). However, gathering feedback only at the beginning of a planning process is insufficient -- stakeholder input needs to be integrated throughout.

At Giddings Consulting Group, we have seen this repeatedly. Organizations that invest in robust stakeholder engagement during strategic planning develop strategies that are more realistic and more likely to be implemented. Organizations that treat engagement as a pro forma exercise end up with plans that sit unused on a shelf.

Key takeaway: Strategic planning is an ideal moment to deepen stakeholder engagement, but only if you let what you hear genuinely shape your direction.

Stakeholder Engagement Best Practices

Center Equity in Every Step

Equity-centered engagement means more than inviting diverse people to the table. It means examining who designed the table, who set the agenda, and whose definitions of success are being used.

The CDC's Guiding Principles for Equity-Centered Communication (CDC, 2023) note that programs and practices are more likely to succeed when they recognize and reflect the diversity of the audiences they aim to reach.

Practical steps:

Compensate community members for their time. If you pay consultants for expertise, community expertise deserves the same respect.

Remove barriers to participation. Provide childcare, transportation, meals, translation, and accessible locations. Offer in-person, virtual, and asynchronous options.

Disaggregate participation data. Track who is participating by demographics. If certain groups are underrepresented, adjust your approach.

Share power over the agenda. Let stakeholders identify priorities, not just respond to yours.

Move Beyond Tokenism to Shared Power

Arnstein's enduring contribution was her insistence that many processes labeled as "participation" are actually tokenism -- they create the appearance of inclusion without redistributing power. She identified informing, consultation, and placation as "degrees of tokenism" because they let those in power claim they heard community input without any obligation to act on it (Arnstein, 1969).

Moving beyond tokenism requires structural commitments:

Give stakeholders real decision-making authority over specific aspects of your work.

Make engagement outcomes visible. Publish what you heard, what you changed, and what you did not change and why.

Invest in stakeholder capacity. Help community members develop the skills needed to participate meaningfully.

Evaluate from the stakeholder's perspective. Ask whether participants felt heard and saw their input reflected in outcomes.

Match Methods to Stakeholder Needs

Different groups have different needs, constraints, and communication preferences. Frontline staff may prefer anonymous surveys over town halls. Community elders may prefer in-person conversations. Young people may engage more through interactive workshops. Funders may prefer structured briefings. Board members benefit from well-organized processes that respect their time. (See our guide on nonprofit board development for more.)

The principle is straightforward: go to where your stakeholders are and make it easy for them to participate. The burden of accessibility belongs to the organization, not the stakeholder.

Close the Feedback Loop

This is the single most important -- and most frequently neglected -- practice. Closing the loop means:

Acknowledging input. "We heard you. Here is a summary of what you told us."

Explaining decisions. "Based on what we heard, here is what we decided and why."

Showing impact. "Your input led to these specific changes."

Being honest about limitations. "We were not able to act on this because of [specific constraint]."

Organizations that close the loop build trust. Organizations that do not train their stakeholders to stop showing up.

Common Stakeholder Engagement Mistakes to Avoid

Engaging too late. Bringing stakeholders in after major decisions have been made sends a clear message: their input is decorative. Engage early, when there is still room to shape direction.

Confusing information with engagement. Sending a newsletter is not engagement. If your only activities are one-directional, you are informing, not engaging.

Surveying without acting. Organizations send surveys, collect data, and do nothing visible with the results. Every unanswered survey erodes trust.

Engaging the usual suspects. Defaulting to the stakeholders easiest to reach creates an echo chamber that misses the perspectives of those most affected by your work.

Ignoring internal stakeholders. Staff are stakeholders too. Organizations that engage externally but ignore their own team end up with strategies their staff cannot execute. See our guide on succession planning for building engagement that survives leadership transitions.

Failing to resource the work. Meaningful engagement takes time, capacity, and money. This is true for engagement just as it is for fundraising -- both require sustained investment.

Not documenting outcomes. If you cannot point to specific decisions that changed because of stakeholder input, stakeholders will reasonably question whether the process matters.

When to Bring in Outside Help

Consider bringing in external support when:

You are launching a strategic plan or major initiative. The engagement process is high-stakes and benefits from experienced design.

Trust has been broken. A neutral third party can rebuild credibility and facilitate difficult conversations.

Power dynamics are complicated. An external facilitator can create space for candid dialogue that internal facilitators cannot.

You lack internal capacity. An external partner can manage the engagement process while your team focuses on implementation.

You need to build internal skills. The best consultants build your capacity to sustain engagement after they leave.

At Giddings Consulting Group, stakeholder engagement is not a standalone service we bolt onto strategy work -- it is foundational to every engagement. Whether we are facilitating a strategic planning process, supporting capacity building, or helping a government agency redesign community programs, our approach starts with understanding who the stakeholders are, what they need, and how to bring their voices into the room in ways that are genuine, equitable, and actionable.

Building a stakeholder engagement plan is one of the most important investments a mission-driven organization can make. If you are preparing for a strategic planning process, launching a new initiative, or recognizing that your organization needs to engage stakeholders more effectively, we would welcome the conversation.

Contact Giddings Consulting Group to discuss how we can help you design and implement a stakeholder engagement plan that centers equity, builds trust, and produces better outcomes for the communities you serve.