Why You Should Survey Stakeholders

Our latest State of Government Affairs survey shows that many government affairs teams feel understaffed. Additionally, 36% of respondents said it’s hard to get the attention of lawmakers and other decision-makers.

So the question is: how can understaffed government affairs teams build and maintain relationships with hard-to-reach decision-makers?

That’s where stakeholders come in.

Your stakeholders come from many walks of life — they may be an employee who drives a truck for your company or a donor to your PAC. The point is: some may have existing relationships with elected officials that you are unaware of.

With Quorum’s stakeholder engagement tools, your team can survey its network to identify these existing connections and integrate them into your broader government affairs strategy. Using Quincy, Quorum’s AI assistant, you can even analyze survey responses in seconds to spot trends and hidden influence that manual reviews might miss.

What is a Stakeholder Survey?

A stakeholder survey is a questionnaire used by public affairs professionals to understand the interests and relationships of stakeholders. Stakeholders can be anyone impacted by your organization’s work, including employees, donors, and advocates.

A stakeholder survey gathers feedback to understand stakeholder needs, concerns, and ways they can benefit your cause. This information is used to inform your government affairs strategy and tailor your approach to advocacy and public affairs.

Why Surveying Stakeholders is Important

Stakeholder surveys are an essential tool for public affairs organizations to make the most out of stakeholder relationships. Surveys provide three main benefits:

1. Understanding Interests and Concerns

Knowing why stakeholders care about your cause can help you build stronger relationships with them, leading to higher engagement. For example, if your organization covers multiple topics but some stakeholders only care about one, you can segment your audiences to only send them messages they care about. This reduces engagement fatigue and motivates stakeholders to take action.

2. Gauging Level of Engagement

Some stakeholders are eager to attend hill days, gather signatures, and organize events, while others only want to stay informed on the issues. Surveying your network allows you to understand where individuals sit on the ladder of engagement, which helps with targeted messaging and activation.

3. Identifying Important Relationships

Surveying stakeholders can save your organization countless hours by identifying “grasstops” relationships. With over 7,000 state legislators in the U.S., it is highly likely that someone in your network has a personal or professional connection to an elected official. By uncovering who is politically or socially acquainted with a particular legislator or staffer, you can lean on existing trust instead of building a relationship from scratch.

How to Conduct a Stakeholder Survey

Stakeholder surveys can be conducted in many different ways, depending on the organization’s goals and available resources.

Online surveys are the most effective and cost-efficient way to gather feedback at scale. While phone interviews or focus groups provide depth, they are difficult to manage for large networks. Regardless of the method you choose, follow these five steps:

1. Determine the goal of your survey. Identify your intended outcome first. Are you looking for relationships with specific committee members? Or seeking local volunteers to lead a regional group? Beginning with the end in mind ensures your questions stay relevant.
2. Create a series of questions. Keep your questions direct. Remember: the more questions you ask, the lower your completion rate will likely be. Focus on high-value data points like existing relationships or top policy concerns.
3. Distribute your survey. Use a platform like Quorum to distribute your survey to a segmented list of stakeholders. This allows you to track responses individually and automatically update your CRM profiles. Quick tip: Coordinate with your human resources department to distribute surveys to employees, as internal buy-in often increases participation.
4. Gather and organize survey responses. Avoid manual data entry in spreadsheets. Modern public affairs software automatically maps survey data to stakeholder profiles, saving your team hours of administrative work.
5. Analyze the data and take action. With an organized dataset, you can use Quincy AI to summarize the “why” behind stakeholder feedback, helping you quickly identify your most influential champions.

With the right tools, like Quorum’s stakeholder engagement software, you can efficiently conduct these surveys and use the resulting insights to move the needle on your policy goals.

Stakeholder Survey Question Examples

To elicit meaningful feedback, public affairs teams should consider including the following questions:

• What policy issues are most important to you and your family?
• How satisfied are you with our organization’s current advocacy efforts?
• What are your thoughts on our current government affairs strategy?
• Who do you believe are the most influential elected officials in your community?
• Have you ever interacted with an elected official on behalf of our organization?
• Do you have a personal or professional relationship with any elected official or staffer?
• Are you interested in participating in a fly-in to Washington, D.C. or your state capital?
• Are there other groups or organizations we should partner with to advance our goals?

Manage Your Stakeholders With Quorum

Quorum’s Stakeholder Engagement tool helps public affairs professionals manage their networks through a centralized platform. You can send out surveys, analyze relationships between stakeholders and officials, and monitor feedback in real-time. By leveraging Quorum’s patented AI, teams can transform vast amounts of survey data into actionable intelligence, allowing organizations to respond more quickly to the shifting legislative landscape.

Frequently Asked Questions