Stakeholder engagement

All our work is driven by the needs of our stakeholders (Figure 3.1). Strengthening relationships with stakeholders and using technology to build audiences for our reports and data were a strong focus in 2018–19.

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Figure 3.1: AIHW’s stakeholders

Government policymakers at all levels (local, state, Commonwealth) including policy officials and agencies with similar or complementary responsibilities

2. Service coordinators

Governments and other organisations conducting service-level planning and looking to benchmark and improve their performance

3. Researchers and analysts

Academics and professionals looking to ‘deep dive’ into issues and build stronger evidence

4. Frontline practitioners

Health and welfare practitioners and providers looking to use local area data in their day-to-day work (e.g. GPs, nurses, clinicians, preventative health sector)

5. Influencers, advocates and communicators

Journalists, consumer groups, non-government organisations (NGOs) and others looking to influence health and welfare policy or local planning, and educate consumers

6. Professional associations

Professional associations (e.g. Australian Medical Association, Australian Council of Social Service) that advocate on behalf of their members to governments, research institutions and other bodies on issues of health and welfare

7. Consumers and casual users

Consumers looking to use data to inform their decisions and casual users looking for ‘quick grabs’ (e.g. service users, students and schools, parents looking for data on immunisations).

Our new Stakeholder Engagement Strategy has a clear goal—‘to continue to be recognised as the trusted source of Australian health and welfare data, and that our data drives better decisions and improved outcomes for Australians’.

We undertook an extensive stakeholder engagement project that involved a strategic planning workshop and in-depth interviews with key stakeholders. As a result of the project, we have expanded our engagement with state and territory departments and non-government organisations through consultations and briefings on forthcoming releases. We also increased our engagement by attending and presenting at conferences and inviting experts to speak to AIHW staff (see Guest speakers).

We also continued our strong engagement through our network of more than 100 advisory groups and through our websites and social media platforms.

Communication strategies

We began developing an overarching Digital Communication Strategy which looked at our digital communication assets—including multiple websites, applications (apps) and social media platforms. The discovery phase, completed in January 2019, involved workshops with all staff and an audit of all our digital assets. The concept was split into 2 strategies: social media and website.

These strategies will enable us to better organise content and create clear pathways to data. The goal of the website strategy is to develop a more data-centric website and to enable geographical exploration across all topics. The social media strategy will act as a blueprint for the role and growth of social media. It focuses on implementing best practice for our social media platform outputs to improve the quality of our messages, increase our audience reach and build on the depth of engagement with our stakeholders.