Stakeholder Management: Notes from Campus Programs to Corporate Rooms
Running campus events, ambassador programs, and competition teams has given me an unexpected education in stakeholder management. Here's what I've learned about keeping everyone aligned without losing the plot.
Stakeholder management sounds like something that happens in boardrooms and PMO presentations. In reality, it happens everywhere there are multiple people with different interests attached to the same outcome. Campus life is full of it.
The Two Failure Modes I've Seen Most
The first is over-communication: sending updates to everyone about everything, creating noise that makes people tune out the important signals. The second is under-communication: assuming alignment because nobody is complaining, then discovering a misalignment when there's no time to fix it.
The answer isn't to find a perfect middle volume. It's to segment deliberately. Not everyone needs every update. What each stakeholder needs is the subset of information that is relevant to their interest and decision-making. Mapping that explicitly, even informally, changes the quality of every communication you send.
What each stakeholder needs is the information relevant to their interest. Sending everyone everything is not communication, it's noise.
The RIYI Experience
Being selected for the REHDA Institute RIYI Mentorship Programme, among 60 students from 15 universities nationally, exposed me to a different tier of stakeholder complexity. Working with senior industry mentors, institutional coordinators, and peers across institutions simultaneously requires a different level of intentionality about how you show up in each relationship.
What I've noticed is that senior stakeholders value specificity and accountability above almost everything else. They don't need frequent contact. They need to know that when you do contact them, you've done your homework and you're making a specific, considered ask.
A Framework That's Worked for Me
- Map stakeholders by interest (what they care about) and influence (how much they can affect the outcome)
- Set expectations explicitly at the start of any initiative, don't assume shared understanding
- Proactive bad news beats reactive surprises every time
- Build feedback loops into the program design, not as an afterthought
The best feedback I've received as an ambassador and program organizer has consistently been about follow-through, showing up when you said you would, sending what you promised, delivering what was expected. That sounds basic. But in environments where the norm is to overcommit and underdeliver, consistency is a genuine differentiator.