Advocacy groups are a different type of stakeholder than local residents or customers. They represent a constituency they themselves do not fully know, they have a mandate that is constantly under discussion, and they have a reason to position themselves differently in a formal conversation than in the informal approach leading up to it. Anyone who asks an advocacy group something does not automatically get the answer from the people the organization claims to represent.
When you approach an advocacy group, the first question is usually not the question you ask. "What do you think of this plan" yields a different answer than "where does this get stuck with your constituency" or "which commitment from us would make the difference for you". Advocacy groups are trained in giving the answer that best serves their position. That is not a criticism, it is their role. It does mean that the question you ask determines which part of their knowledge you get to see.
What management often wants to know is whether an organization will resist. What an advocacy group often wants to make known is that it wants to be heard before a decision is made. Those two do not always align, and the conversation gets stuck the moment one of the two parties assumes that the other is answering the same question.
An advocacy group will rarely say unprompted that an earlier commitment has been forgotten, or that an adjustment that seemed small to you was, for them, the signal that they were not being listened to. That only comes up when specifically asked, and often only after a lead-up in which trust is first rebuilt. A single conversation does not reveal that pattern; a repeated conversation, with the same questions over time, does.
That is why the distinction between what you think is going on and what an advocacy group says is going on must be the first thing to surface. Not as a final verdict, but as a starting point. The way you sharpen that distinction for other stakeholder groups is described at what is a trust baseline; for advocacy groups the same principle applies, with the difference that the constituency of an advocacy group in turn also has its own internal and external image.
Advocacy groups mainly remember what was promised and did not happen. A large investment that fails to materialize is often still understood as a matter of priority or budget. A small commitment, such as feedback within an agreed timeframe or an invitation for a follow-up conversation, that is not honored, is read as a signal about how seriously the relationship is taken. That is the reason a commitment tracker is not about the broad lines of policy, but about the small lines that an organization can effortlessly let slip without management noticing.
Advocacy groups also often compare. They know what has been promised to local residents, to employees, to suppliers, and draw conclusions from that about consistency. Anyone who wants to know how a conversation with other stakeholders is structured on that front can read about it at how do you conduct a structured conversation with local residents and at how do you conduct a structured conversation with employees. The questions differ per group, but the rhythm of asking, committing, and reporting back to whoever you spoke with is comparable.
We cannot determine what an advocacy group truly thinks of your organization or your plans. No one knows that until the organization says so itself, and even then the question remains whether that is the full picture or the picture that is strategic at that moment. What is possible: making visible the difference between what your management assumes about the position of an advocacy group and what that organization actually says in a structured conversation. That difference is an outcome in itself, even without a judgment attached to it.
The questions that go with this differ from the questions you would ask a financier or a supplier. For those two groups the pattern is worked out at what do you want to know from financiers and at how do you conduct a structured conversation with suppliers, each with its own set of points of attention that fits the kind of interest that stakeholder has.
The inquiry for advocacy groups, including the comparison with the internal picture and the follow-up via the commitment tracker, is part of the Trust Baseline that is currently being built. There is no working instrument yet that you can deploy today. Anyone interested in this can sign up for the waiting list; we will get in touch as soon as there is something to test, not before.
A structured conversation with advocacy groups requires time from the people who conduct it and from the people who prepare it: invitations, reporting, keeping track of who committed to what. Anyone who wants to know which part of those preparatory tasks can be taken over by AI will find, in the work scan from FTE TO AI, a breakdown per task, with an estimate of what remains for people and what does not.
Vraag maar. Het interessantste antwoord komt meestal van wie u nog niet heeft gesproken.
Answers come from this site’s knowledge base. Not tailored advice, and not a scan of your company.