Engaging for Impact: Stakeholder Engagement Workshop
Create a Winning Stakeholder Engagement Plan
Discover how to develop an effective stakeholder engagement plan that drives collaboration and maximises research impact. This workshop equips you with practical strategies to identify key stakeholders, build meaningful relationships, and foster long-term partnerships. Learn how to design tailored engagement plans that align with your project goals and deliver impactful results. Whether you’re starting a new project or seeking to enhance existing collaborations, this workshop is your roadmap to success.
Workshop Elements
Building Effective Stakeholder Networks
Extending your connections
Understanding the power of relationships is essential for successful stakeholder engagement. This element of the workshop focuses on helping participants develop and expand their professional networks, both within academia and beyond. You’ll learn how to identify and connect with a diverse range of stakeholders, from research collaborators to policymakers and industry leaders. By cultivating strategic, operational, and personal networks, you will gain access to valuable resources and insights, enhancing the impact of your research.
Stakeholder Engagement Strategies and Techniques
Designing and implementing a plan
Successful engagement goes beyond just communication; it requires a structured approach tailored to the needs of each stakeholder. In this segment, we will explore how to assess stakeholder power and interest, categorise stakeholders, and develop engagement activities that align with your project’s goals. You’ll gain hands-on experience in designing your stakeholder engagement plan, incorporating methods such as interviews, focus groups, and consultations to ensure sustained collaboration throughout the research process.
Understanding the Psychology of Connection and Influence
Building trust
Engaging with stakeholders is not just about sharing ideas—it’s about building trust, influencing decisions, and creating long-term partnerships. This part of the workshop dives into the psychology behind stakeholder interactions, helping you understand different behavioural styles and preferences. By recognising the communication needs and motivations of various stakeholders, you will be able to engage more effectively, influence key decision-makers, and foster strong, lasting collaborations that lead to meaningful research impact.
Workshop Goals
- Develop a shared understanding of stakeholder engagement and its critical role in research impact.
- Build skills to identify, categorise, and connect with key stakeholders effectively.
- Learn practical strategies for fostering trust, respect, and long-term collaboration.
Key Benefits
- Gain clarity on stakeholder roles and levels of engagement tailored to your project’s needs.
- Enhance your ability to articulate project visions and missions that inspire stakeholders.
- Access actionable tools and frameworks, such as the Partnership Canvas, to design value-driven collaborations.
- Improve stakeholder communication through understanding behavioural styles and preferences.
Deliverables
- A personalised stakeholder engagement framework tailored to your project or research goals.
- Clear strategies for initial engagement, sustaining relationships during the project, and delivering impactful results.
- Practical exercises to reflect on your current networks and identify opportunities for growth and diversity.
Whether you’re an experienced researcher or new to collaboration, this workshop provides essential insights and actionable steps to turn stakeholders into impactful partners. Join us to transform the way you connect, collaborate, and create change.
Why choose this workshop?
Genuine engagement with research stakeholders is crucial for achieving meaningful research impact. However, for many researchers, engagement skills may not come naturally or be well-practiced, especially when interacting with individuals or organisations perceived to hold significant power. Navigating these interactions involves managing diverse dynamics such as aligning ideas, timing, and the complexities of behaviours and personalities. Our approach goes beyond identifying who to engage with and how—it delves into the psychology of connection and influence, providing the tools to foster meaningful, long-term collaborations that drive impactful research outcomes.
Your workshop facilitators
Dr Tamika Heiden
Tamika has dedicated over a decade of her career to impact pathways through knowledge translation and the identification and assessment of research impact. Tamika is passionate about making a difference and delivering projects that create significant and lasting change for her clients.
Tamika’s more than a decade of career experience as a researcher and research manager in the fields of health, sport and medical research, along with her formal qualifications in knowledge translation and impact make her one of the few specialists that doesn’t just talk the talk. Tamika enjoys helping her clients to form partnerships, develop impact plans, and be rewarded for their efforts.
More recently, Tamika founded and hosted the annual online Research Impact Summit. Tamika’s passion for impact, along with the summit success, has led to her becoming known as the “Australian powerhouse of Research Impact”, and resulted in her winning the 2018 Knowledge Mobilization Forum award for Innovation. With a 4000 strong audience representing 47 countries, Tamika has interviewed more than fifty experts in the fields of stakeholder engagement, translation and implementation, and research impact.
Cathie Withyman
Cathie Withyman is a research impact communication specialist. She has worked with leading universities and government departments both domestically and internationally to develop and craft engaging and insightful impact narratives.
Cathie possesses over 15 years experience partnering with researchers, program managers and communication professionals to facilitate training and skills development in the effective communication of research and program impacts. She is a master at drawing out the true nature of impacts and weaving this into a compelling narrative.
A key achievement of Cathie’s to date has been the compilation of a leading Australian University’s submission to the Australian Research Council’s 2018 Impact and Engagement Assessment. Cathie managed the development and authoring of 12 Impact Case Studies and 10 Research Engagement Narratives over an intense six-month period.
She is skilled at coaching and mentoring research academics to plan, record and report on research impact. She has developed training programs and resource materials to support academics in this increasingly important area of their work.
Feedback from our attendees!
I'm glad I attended the workshop
I’m glad I attended the workshop because, amongst other things, my understanding of research impact was broadened beyond citations and I am better informed to communicate research impact to funding agencies, policy makers, and non-experts.
The workshop was useful
The workshop was useful to me because it raised several questions that every researcher should ask themselves when preparing an article — or, more generally, during their research activities. It serves as a reminder of why we do what we do and for what purpose. So for me it was a helpful reminder!
The speakers are very well versed in the area of research impact
The speakers are very well versed in the area of research impact, providing such insightful and inspiring information, transferring their research experience to other research projects.