Powerco in collaboration with Frank Engagement
The Opportunity
Powerco is one of Aotearoa New Zealand’s largest electricity and gas distribution businesses, delivering energy to more than 1 million people across the North Island.
As Powerco plans and delivers long-term infrastructure, gaining insights from customers, iwi partners, communities and stakeholders is critical in ensuring strategy and project delivery are well understood and informed by local perspectives.
Across the energy sector, expectations around engagement are evolving. Communities increasingly expect to be informed early, consulted meaningfully and involved in decisions that affect them. For infrastructure providers, this means engagement must be planned, structured and integrated into programme and project planning.
Powerco had established an engagement function but needed to develop stronger strategic foundations for how engagement worked across the business. The Communications and Engagement (C+E) team recognised an opportunity to build on this work by introducing engagement structures, or blueprinted forums, to their mahi with customers and stakeholders across projects of different sizes and to inform challenges the energy sector face.
Powerco partnered with Frank Engagement to design practical engagement structures, that could be tailored to distinct regions and communities, which would strengthen consistency, support programme delivery and help the organisation scale engagement across future infrastructure investment.
Our approach
We applied our 4D engagement methodology: Discovery, Design, Develop and Delivery. This project focused on the Discovery and Design phases, establishing the foundations for consistent engagement practice across Powerco’s programmes and projects.
The Discovery phase focused on building a clear understanding of Powerco’s existing engagement practice and the needs of upcoming infrastructure programmes
Discovery
We reviewed Powerco’s existing engagement strategies, internal processes and customer insight work, and worked closely with the C+E team to understand how engagement was currently delivered across the organisation.
Workshops with the C+E team explored:
- Existing engagement activity across regions and projects
- Opportunities to strengthen consistency and visibility of engagement work
- Stakeholder landscapes for major infrastructure investment
- How engagement could support programme planning.
Design
Drawing on the Discovery insights, we designed fit-for-purpose engagement structures that could support the organisation’s infrastructure programmes and projects across the network.
The work explored how engagement activity could operate across different layers of Powerco’s work, from large infrastructure programmes through to individual projects and ongoing regional relationships, helping the C+E team strengthen how engagement supports project planning and delivery.
The structures focus on helping the team determine how engagement should scale depending on the nature of the work underway. This included considering factors such as project size, complexity, potential community impact and the range of stakeholders involved.
For Powerco, this was particularly important as the organisation delivers multiple projects across each of the five regions it operates in at the same time. Establishing clearer engagement structures helps the team apply a consistent approach to engagement planning, while still allowing flexibility to respond to local community and stakeholder needs.
The recommended solutions were a large programme engagement structure, a specific project engagement structure and a standing customer engagement forum. We delivered a strategy document outlining the recommended engagement structures, supported by stakeholder mapping, engagement guidance and practical tools for implementation.
The Outcome
The Engagement Structures Strategy provided Powerco with a practical model for structuring engagement across programmes, projects and regions.
The work clarified how different engagement activities can operate together, from strategic programme engagement through to project-specific consultation and regional customer forums. This helps ensure stakeholders are engaged in ways that are appropriate to the scale and complexity of each project or programme of work.
By establishing clear and repeatable engagement structures, Powerco strengthened the foundations for consistent engagement across future infrastructure programmes, supporting more coordinated planning and stronger relationships with communities and stakeholders.
