It’s no longer enough to express your team’s goals to stakeholders — they want to see data. Presenting them with figures and progress reports can help tip the scales around funding — especially if they like what they see.
To effectively communicate in your next stakeholder communications meeting, lean on financial reports, including clear narratives, visual aids, KPIs, forward-looking statements, and interactive platforms. This approach could mean the difference between expanding your team’s budget and stakeholders pulling the plug on funding.
Here is what to consider.
5 Tips to Nail Your Next Stakeholder Meeting
If stakeholder engagement is at the top of your upcoming priority list, it’s important to take the right steps and implement the right data. Today, plenty of tools and platforms assist you with this, allowing you to present KPI data in a way that’s easy to understand.
Alongside those reports and visuals, you must craft a compelling story. What has your team achieved, what are the next steps, and how can your story and financial reporting communicate that?
Consider these five tips for optimal stakeholder communications.
1. Craft Engaging Narratives
When you get into a room of stakeholders, you want to grab their attention and hold it. To achieve this, you must master the art of storytelling. When you create an engaging narrative, you can influence decisions and create connections.
Think about what you want to highlight in your presentation, then craft a story around that information.
2. Visualize Data with Charts and Graphs
No stakeholder wants to read through a dozen pages of figures to conclude what’s happening within an organization or department. You must present data in a way that’s easy to visualize. This approach also gives you the upper hand in telling your narrative. Think of financial reporting charts and graphs as a way to enhance data storytelling.
3. Highlight Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
In an ideal scenario, the stakeholders will have helped pick some significant KPIs. Involving them ensures your visions are aligned. This process also helps widen the diversity of metrics based on varying perspectives.
Whatever financial reporting software you’re using should be able to effectively track your desired KPIs, creating summaries of the related data. The more concrete data you have, the easier it is to support your narrative. Focus on not only the greatest achievements but also the risks and opportunities. Paint a clear picture, allowing your KPI data to do a lot of the talking.
4. Provide Insights and Prospects
You’ll want to shift from the present to the potential future to secure funding. What does your data say about likely future trends, especially if you implement X, Y, and Z?
Make the connections between what your data says and what that means for the organization or team moving forward clear. Remember, you need to focus on the needs and objectives of stakeholders. Financial performance is always a key area of interest, as is everything from social impact and safety to product or service quality. You can weave these variables into your narrative.
5. Leverage Interactive Financial Reporting Tools
So much technology is available that helps automate financial reporting so that you can focus more on your storytelling abilities and stakeholder relationships.
The top financial reporting tools make it easy to visualize data so stakeholders can make more informed decisions. The same applies to how you present your information, as clear data will help guide your narrative.
You can leverage accounting software, business intelligence tools, and more comprehensive financial management platforms. What options and platforms make sense for you will depend on what you aim to track, how in-depth your reporting needs to be, your company’s size, etc.
Related: Understanding Different Types of Financial Reports
Financial Reporting for the Win
Transparent and informative financial reporting can facilitate optimal stakeholder engagement. It’s best to start implementing strategies well before your next stakeholder meeting so that you can start tracking KPIs and collecting invaluable data.
Take a holistic approach to financial reporting, ensuring that your reporting objectives align with your organizational strategy. Throughout this process, you may uncover things yourself — data that helps you better understand where your organization has been, where it’s going, and what your role is in that.
MRINetwork can assist you with anything related to talent and recruitment strategies. Sometimes, data shows that certain teams need to expand or make changes to improve the odds of hitting certain goals.
At MRINetwork, that’s what we do. We help you place the right people into the right roles. That way, top talent helps you achieve growth so they like what they see at your next stakeholder meeting — learn more about MRINetwork’s capabilities today!
You can also check out these resources:
- The Importance of Financial Reporting
- Financial Reporting for Small Businesses: Challenges and Solutions
- Trends Shaping the Future of Financial Reporting