Stakeholder Engagement

We help strengthen stakeholder and community engagement, and ensure companies have a social licence to operate. 

A social licence is required to advance project development and throughout operations, and it must be earned and maintained through trusted and meaningful relationships. As a social licence is the implicit consent of a community for the operation; gaining and maintaining this licence requires alignment between the mineral project and the community on values. A social licence can be enhanced when opportunities arise from proactive strategies, transparent stakeholder engagement and objective reporting. Strength in these areas will lead to reduced corporate risk.

In today’s climate, social performance is extraordinarily important given the heightened importance of ESG criteria by investors, governments and regulatory bodies, for example:

• Need for meaningful Indigenous consultation given UNDRIP, and the Duty to Consult; as well as a desire of Indigenous peoples to participate in the development for the benefit of their community;

• Demand for social performance in provincial legislation

• Importance of social reputation for attainment and retention of employees;

• Supports the regulatory and permitting process;

• The need to comply with the Global Reporting Initiative’s guidelines; and

• Coming standardization for ESG performance criteria.

With a strong link between social performance and financial performance, and given the changing climate, it is clearly in the interest of the project to be prepared by engaging stakeholders early and establishing systems to stay above the curve.

Our Integrated Solution

Located in Northern Ontario, we support projects by forging sustainable stakeholder relationships.

Having aligned values with the community is one of the most important foundations for a project to gain a social licence.

Limestone Partners’ approach is informed by our in-depth understanding of the regional economy, issues, stakeholder and stakeholder dynamics. We are northerners: our regional stakeholder relationships are diverse and unsurpassed.

Communications Strategy

Understanding your stakeholders well is important to ensure your success in building trusted relationships.

STAKEHOLDER IDENTIFICATION AND ASSESSMENT

The first step to a strategy is knowing the community before going in with online and personal engagement, to get a sense of community personalities which matter greatly.

Our advanced research methodologies can show the current state of impressions, and factors that may lead to a more positive image, to allow re-framing these conversations. With deep northern community knowledge, Limestone also assess how impressions and issues might develop, in specific communities, to offer strategic foresight that can allow the project to stay ahead of the curve. Our expertise in strategic planning capabilities allow tailored strategies that are able to position the project to capture opportunities from the stakeholder environment, effectively. Together, Limestone’s capabilities can deliver informative insights on

• What do stakeholders think of the project?

• What motivates then and what triggers them?

• How do these stakeholder issues effect the project?

As community life is important in the North, Limestone goes beyond traditional stakeholder management to also address how to build capacity for residents to participate in the project, through employment or supplier roles, as well as ensure infrastructure can support such developments.

STAKEHOLDER PLANS

Limestone works with you to advance resource exploration and development projects by earning trust in host communities, and forging the basis of productive long-term stakeholder relationships.  Our unique research and engagement processes effectively examine risks, engage stakeholders and address immediate issues.

Good plans are designed to adapt and manage risks effectively and proactively.

Plans may include:

• impact-benefit agreements with Indigenous peoples;

• building training capacity for employment of local individuals and for supplies from local entrepreneurs;

• engagement with local, non-governmental stakeholders on political, economic and environmental issues to guide decisions;

• engagement with municipalities, ensuring their issues are addressed, including local infrastructure and accommodations; and

• a focus on environmental issues.

Strategic plans define the value for all parties and communicate their objectives over the long term; set engagement objectives to ensure accountability with SMART goals and propose structures, frequencies and documentation standards for meetings with public stakeholders.

Limestone draws on an extensive range of expertise of research capabilities, including: strategic analysis, situational analysis, focus groups, media analysis, engagement planning, stakeholder mapping and management.

Stakeholder Engagement

The tools used at the time of engagement must be appropriate for the complexity and nature of the project. Limestone takes participants, and makes them partners in decisions.

Stakeholder management is not only important at the onset of the project, but also during its operation. Strong engagement can lead to outcomes, such as permitting for future sites, expansion, stronger performance in financial markets, stronger profitability, retainment and attraction of local employees and better reputations for future projects.

For each stakeholder, Limestone considers the social dynamics of the project and examines each stakeholder’s agenda holistically in terms of where they come from and why they are doing what they are doing – in other words, attempts to understand their latent agenda.

Based in the North, the Limestone network runs deep with an advanced understanding of potential avenues to achieve the following:

Building trust takes time. We help you do that.

Social Performance Metric Capture

More transparent reporting of ESG means better performance in financial markets, stronger social reputations and better profitability due to less environmental, social, health and safety issues.

Limestone Partners is northern Ontario’s affiliate and implementation specialists of Net Benefit software, which facilitates stronger reporting and tracking of stakeholder consultation, engagement and commitments.

This software facilitates:

• Benefits Tracking - The Benefits Tracking module allows users to easily track project benefits throughout the entire value chain. Secures third-party access allows contractors and sub-contractors to safely enter their own data to provide a complete picture of project benefits.

• Commitments Monitoring - The Commitments Monitoring module allows users to track all commitments made throughout a project’s lifecycle.  Efficiently and proactively monitor task management, reporting, and accountability to ensure that commitments are being met.

• Stakeholder Engagement - The Stakeholder Engagement module allows organizations to log and maintain accurate stakeholder records. This includes contact information, interaction history, and additional metrics that help build transparent and trusting relationships with stakeholders.

What this means for you is that your socio-economic impact can be easily quantified and reported to external audiences.

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