Beach Energy

Beach Energy takes stakeholder engagement to a new level

Beach Energy is an ASX listed, oil and natural gas, exploration and production company headquartered in Adelaide, South Australia. Founded in 1961, Beach have operated and non-operated, onshore and offshore, oil and natural gas production from five producing basins across Australia and New Zealand.

Beach recognises its intrinsic role in supporting communities, by actively contributing to sustainable environments and the health, safety and wellbeing of the people living in the areas where it operates. Its community investment strategy focuses on three key areas; education, environment and health, safety and wellbeing.

Beach’s community relations team were looking for a way to capture, manage and measure its stakeholder management to gain a better level of understanding of stakeholder communications across the business. Enter Stage Left – Mipela. The team from Mipela have worked with the Beach team to deliver a stakeholder management solution to assist them with community engagement and consultation processes, with consideration made to land access requirements.

As part of the consultative process, it was also identified that the following functionality could be included in the proposed solution, using X-Info Suite:

• Stakeholder engagement including agreements, grievances, commitments, communications, records management and reporting
• Community investment and grants management including contracts, correspondence and reporting
• Landholder land access including notice of entry, payments and reports.

Both teams recognised the best way to work together was to adopt a continuous improvement approach to the solution – delivering more and more functionality as the solution matures. Whilst some enhancements have been simple configuration changes to workflows, others have been major feature developments, which are now available to other Mipela clients.

Being able to create bulk emails, correspondence and SMS messages against multiple stakeholder contacts simultaneously has demonstrated a huge amount of value to the Beach community relations team. The consistency of messaging and significant reduction in time taken to issue information means the community relations team can get on with other tasks.

“We can now quickly distribute communications to a targeted list of stakeholders and have it automatically recorded as an engagement in X-Info Suite for future reporting purposes,” said Linda French, Group Manager Social Performance and Community at Beach Energy.

Recent industry highlights of regulatory reporting compliance becoming more and more important, has lead to the development of significantly improved reporting from X-Info Suite. Being able to automatically create a report that demonstrates stakeholder engagement from both detail of each email, call, text and in a tabular engagement log summary at the push of a button has been a real advancement for Beach.

“To satisfy different regulatory requirements, we must be able to provide details of our stakeholder and landholder engagement – including extracts of all emails and summaries of engagement,” said French.

“Being able to capture, then create a report that details engagement with relevant persons from a single system like X-Info Suite is a powerful tool when you are accountable to present evidence to regulators. This engagement report has saved a phenomenal amount of manual handling. I am absolutely thrilled with this new functionality,” French added.

Both teams will continue to improve on the value that X-Info Suite delivers to Beach.