Stakeholder Engagement in Social Enterprise

The enablers of the social enterprise system are varied. There are government actors who promote the space through policy, there are private investors, who seek to create value through their investments, there are donor-agencies who work towards meeting certain important goals through their donoations.

Each body of stakeholders interacts with the sector in a certain way, and follow explicit or implied rules of engagement. Governments want enterprises to implement policy decisions, investors look for a whole slew of indicatiors – mainly financial, and donors look for documented evidence of outreach, of impact.

Of these various roles, the role of a grant maker is often crucial to building a fledgling enterprise, or program. However, sometimes the good intentions behind grants fail when grantmakers do not engage more closely with the communities that they serve. The lack of engagement sometimes leads to weaker programs, poor understanding of the issues and less-effective organizations.

This is the issue that authors Kathleen P. Enright and Courtney Bourns tackle in a recent issue of Stanford Social Innovation Review. The paper goes into several examples of where grant making has not acheived its results, and some of the reluctance shown in engaging with stakeholders.

But importantly, it highlights a method to further engagement. To start with, Enright and Bourns suggest three questions grantmakers need to ask to establish the need for further engagement:

1. Are your strategies for change inclusive of the grantees and community members?

2. Is your staff, including board memebers, competent enough to understand what is happening in the community?

3. What can you do to build stronger relationships with grantees and other stakeholders?

The article also points to the benefits of engaging with stakeholders. Some of the benefits it discusses are: develop a deeper understanding of problems, creating new and better solutions, building more effective organizations.

Finally, the article also points to several tools to engage with stakeholders at different levels, including surveys, focus groups, listening sessions, inclusion on internal panels and staff.

For the complete article, visit the Stanford Social Innovation Review website.