Doing Unto Ourselves as We’ve Done Unto Others

Two months ago we decided to direct our service at ourselves, to see if we can take what we dish out. To that end we started a new section of our website, Discovering Stakeholder News, to carry stories about our clients’ stakeholders and their experience with our service.

Axiom provides Stakeholder News services — a new combination of grassroots conversations, catalytic questions, story-sharing, electronic publishing and social media tools for feeding successes and accelerating positive change in organizations and associations. We wanted to discover if that was happening.

The results of sharing grassroots stories can be unpredictable. Our CEO tells prospective clients that in three months time they will likely have different reasons for continuing to engage us than the ones for which they originally hired us. That’s because the specific results Stakeholder News gets can be surprising.

On top of getting comfortable with surprises, once you’ve interviewed a stakeholder with a declared intent to publish their story, you have an obligation to share what they’ve told you. We preach it so we ought to practice it.

What we’re discovering is that we had little to fear. There have been, and continue to be, results. That being said, we never would have known if we didn’t go out and ask. The elegance of the dynamic isn’t lost on us either. Results are being reported in story form.

Storied results include:

• A member of a client association doubled its engagement in story sharing.
• A client stakeholder attributed a fundraising success to stories shared.
• A municipality was inspired to learn more about hiring people with disabilities.
• Questions asked generate a resident hand-washing campaign in long-term care.
• An organization found itself on the radar with key influencers and funders.
• Stories shared amongst colleagues inspired a friendly competition to initiate change.

Each of these, and more stories can be found in our Discovering Stakeholder News section.

Through the series we are also mining for constructive feedback. And we’re getting it.

Bubbling to the top of the list is that sources find the questions we’re asking thought-provoking. Given that, they would like more time to consider their answers. While this verifies the time we take to craft catalytic questions is worth it, if we want the best possible answers we have to give our sources more time with the questions before going on the record. Whenever possible, we are now acting on that feedback.

Two months into Discovering Stakeholder News we see every reason to keep it going. In coming months we will be providing an e-newsletter to help build community and share lessons learned amongst those who employ Stakeholder News. If you’d like to be put on the list let us know by e-mailing webmaster@axiomnews.ca.

It is truly remarkable what happens when organizations and associations commit to engaging their stakeholders in systematic and meaningful ways.