USE CASE
How an Australian Renewable Energy Company Optimised their Land Acquisition & Community Engagement processes
Company overview
This organisation is strongly committed to developing community friendly energy solutions and sound environmental stewardship practices to minimize their potential impacts on local habitats and communities.
Using Borealis since: November 2022
Users: 40
Teams using Borealis: Community Engagement, Land Acquisition, New Sites, Project Development
Requirements
To mitigate these risks, the Australian unit implemented a dedicated Community Relationship Management system, which met their needs at the time but could not respond to their growing requirements.
Ultimately, they needed a tool that would allow teams to link stakeholder records to land data, so they could geographically map stakeholders and properties; a function that was critical to their business, but which most stakeholder management systems could not provide.
Identifying the people we need to talk to geographically around the project is a critical piece of work no CRM has been able to assist us with. We’ve really capitalized on that with Borealis in the past 8 months.”
Main challenges
Data integrity:
Collaboration:
Identifying stakeholders:
Reporting:
Just trying to realize the amplitude of the work – what you need to do, who to talk to, what reports you have to create – can be very difficult. Borealis has helped with that. It gives us the ability to plan and populate tasks into the future in a clear, reportable way, which is not something I anticipated in a CRM. Traditionally, that has been separate, and it’s an advantage to be able to see what we have done in the past versus what we plan to do in the future.”
Solution: Irth's Borealis for Stakeholder Engagement and Land Management
Borealis is a complex program – which can be daunting – but the intuitive user interface has enabled people to look past that. The business has fully adopted the system and now it’s a well-established part of everyone’s daily activities.”
Key benefits
- Data is centralized, structured, and accessible, improving collaboration between project teams.
- Linking stakeholder records to geographic land data helps teams make informed, data-driven decisions and efficiently implement benefit sharing initiatives.
- Maps and data are dynamic and always up to date, helping users quickly identify the people they need to engage with and monitor progress in real time.
- Establishing a single source of truth provides better visibility, so teams can plan activities, allocate resources efficiently, and populate future tasks in a clear, reportable way.
- A well-documented engagement history makes it easy to demonstrate accountability to stakeholders, investors, and regulators and to fasttrack project approvals.
- With automated reporting, teams can schedule and send regular reports to track key metrics, like the number of communications with stakeholders, topics that were discussed, and progress on the tasks for each project.
Rolling out a new solution
When adopting any new corporate software solution, the best practice is to start with a pilot project. For this reason, the organization decided to adopt Borealis for a single project to ensure the software would fit their real-world needs before implementing the solution on a broader basis. This trial project gave users a chance to identify any potential issues, optimize configurations, and streamline their workflows on a small scale before expanding use of the tool across the business.
Within 6 months, teams had embraced the new system and expanded use of Borealis to manage approximately 25 development projects.
Thanks to the initial pilot team’s efforts, other divisions within the Australian business unit with similar needs can build on their success, replicating their proven configurations and processes to implement a tried and tested solution quickly and easily. In fact, the Asset Management Program has launched a pilot project of their own to consider adopting it for that side of the business.
To our credit, expanding the license to the broader business went quite smoothly. We already understood the data migration process and how to use the mapping. Throughout the onboarding process, Borealis support staff had a good response to our suggestions and requests for improvements.”
Breaking down silos
Before using Borealis, sharing information between project teams could be an inefficient, cumbersome process. The land team created maps showing the geolocation of stakeholders and project assets, but while these maps were perfect, they were static. As community outreach activities identified new information, changes had to be communicated back to the land team so they could manually update the GIS models and output new maps.
Centralizing all information about community engagement and land data in a single system has improved efficiency and collaboration across the organization. Data in Borealis is dynamic, accessible and always up to date. This provides better visibility in real-time, helping teams respond more quickly and proactively.
Borealis has brought the Community Engagement and Land Management teams together. Before that, we didn’t have visibility on the live information about geolocation of stakeholders; we would only receive those as outputs. There was no synergy, and data governance was a big challenge. It’s more obvious now when and how we need to update, and a lot more seamless to do so.”
Managing benefits sharing initiatives
As Australia’s clean energy transition continues to accelerate, benefits sharing programs play an increasingly important role in securing project social acceptance.
While traditional compensation programs offer incentives to landowners who are directly impacted by the project, benefit-sharing programs extend these incentives to the broader community. By offering economic incentives, project developers demonstrate goodwill and foster positive relationships that help contribute to project success and sustainability.
The organization is committed to providing benefits to the communities around their projects. Traditionally, this involved measuring the distance from each turbine to identify eligible properties and determining who owned each land parcel; an inefficient, time-consuming process that risked oversights.
Using the mapping function in Borealis, they can now geolocate their turbines and define appropriate buffer zones around each asset to instantly identify all affected landowners and properties. Teams can then classify them by proximity and add them to the relevant engagement plans to simplify their outreach efforts for compensation.
Internationally, our company has a history of offering energy rebates and other benefits to communities around our projects and over the past few years, we’ve begun developing similar benefit programs in the Australian context. Using Borealis for program development has allowed us to forecast cost and tailor programs more efficiently than I ever imagined we could.”
Reporting
The business uses the built-in analytics and reporting features in Borealis to monitor, measure, and understand outcomes in real time. They currently have 40 active users, a number that is growing quickly. The Community Engagement Manager uses a custom dashboard to monitor system usage and track progress to ensure that the platform is used to its full potential.
He also established automated monthly reports at the project level, as well as a business-wide report. Every month, Borealis generates updated versions of each report and emails them to all appropriate recipients. This ensures that the right people always have accurate, up-to-date information about important KPIs, including the number of communications for the month, stakeholders who were involved, topics of discussion, and the status of tasks that were set. Certain external users who
receive reports from the system have been provided with read-only accounts so they can log in to review the underlying data as needed.
Users can also generate detailed reports on demand, and export these as Excel or PDF files to demonstrate accountability and fast-track project approvals.
People love Analytics – they go straight into it to check out the widgets because it’s so visual.
Summary
This renewable energy company takes pride in delivering socially responsible renewable energy projects. To proactively manage project data for their many and varied clean energy projects, they required a fit-for-purpose software solution that would allow them to manage stakeholder engagement and land data in a single platform. They selected Borealis, a modern, fit-for-purpose stakeholder relationship management system.
Implementing Borealis software has improved efficiency and collaboration within the Australian business unit. The system has become an integral part of their daily activities, allowing project teams to manage complex stakeholder relationships and benefit-sharing initiatives strategically and successfully.
Borealis has transformed our stakeholder engagement processes. The ability to integrate geographic mapping with our stakeholder data has helped us significantly reduce risks and work more efficiently. The planning and task management features provide a clear, effective way to plan and reflect engagement for our projects.”
