Coordinating stakeholder engagement across the diverse and dynamic Sacramento region takes more than a contact list and a shared drive. With 28 member jurisdictions, shifting priorities, and a wide range of partners and stakeholders, the Sacramento Area Council of Governments (SACOG) needed a better way to stay aligned—internally across departments and externally with the jurisdictions and communities it serves.
Previous tools and systems weren’t designed to capture the full complexity of stakeholder relationships, often resulting in fragmented information and missed opportunities. With Consultation Manager, SACOG now maintains a centralized, dynamic record of stakeholder activity that enables more intentional, coordinated engagement. This shared system helps teams avoid duplication, identify outreach gaps, and equip leadership with timely, relevant information, whether preparing for a meeting with a city manager, coordinating messaging across jurisdictions, or reporting back to the board.
SACOG at a Glance: Coordinating Planning Across a Diverse Region
The Sacramento Area Council of Governments (SACOG) is the federally designated Metropolitan Planning Organization (MPO) for a six-county, 22-city region in Northern California. As a Council of Governments (COG), SACOG plays a critical role in helping local jurisdictions collaborate on long-range planning across sectors such as transportation, housing, land use, climate, and economic development.
SACOG’s work is rooted in coordination and convening, bringing together cities and counties with vastly different needs to align on regional priorities that benefit the whole region.
“We serve a very diverse region—politically, racially, economically, and across the sectors that make up our economy,” said Alex Cole-Weiss, External Relations Analyst. “SACOG is really where a regional perspective comes together. We use regionalism as a strategy to improve quality of life for everyone.”
Alex is part of SACOG’s Government and Public Affairs team, which leads strategic external engagement. While technical staff across SACOG often work closely with local agencies on planning and implementation, Alex’s team focuses more on building and maintaining relationships at a broader, regional level.
“Our transportation and land use planners manage day-to-day coordination with staff across jurisdictions,” she explained. “But from a strategic standpoint, our team helps shape the broader engagement strategy from a 30,000-foot view.”
This regional lens is essential in a landscape where opportunities to improve housing, infrastructure, and climate resilience depend on cross-jurisdictional collaboration.
“Regionalism means recognizing that people don’t live, work, or travel within a single jurisdiction,” explained Alex. “They’re connected and interdependent. Our role is to bring communities together and to help them find shared strategies for prosperity, while adapting to the unique needs of each place.”
Scattered Data, Missed Opportunities
Despite SACOG’s commitment to strategic regional engagement, the reality before Consultation Manager was that critical information about stakeholder relationships and outreach was fragmented across emails, spreadsheets, and individual memories. This disconnected approach made it difficult to maintain continuity with staffing changes, coordinate follow-ups, or gain a comprehensive view of who was engaging with whom, creating blind spots and inefficiencies that limited the agency’s ability to collaborate effectively and act strategically.
Teams captured engagement in different ways—or sometimes not at all—and there was no consistent method for documenting conversations, tracking next steps, or understanding the full scope of ongoing relationships.
“We didn’t have a formal system in place,” said Alex. “If someone attended an event and needed to share information, they’d usually just send an email. That was our process.”
While spreadsheets were occasionally used, most institutional knowledge was passed along informally, if at all. Valuable context lived in inboxes, hallway conversations, or within staff members’ heads. This made it challenging to spot engagement trends across departments or build on previous work.
“We weren’t realizing our full potential to deliver for our jurisdictions or meet agency goals because we didn’t have the information flow or cross-team collaboration needed to be truly strategic,” Alex explained.
Without a centralized system, SACOG risked duplicating efforts or missing important opportunities to collaborate. Leaders didn’t always have the insight they needed to prepare for conversations, and internal teams lacked a unified view of ongoing engagement and where gaps might exist.
Recognizing these challenges, SACOG began searching for a solution and selected Consultation Manager for its direct focus on stakeholders and ability to track all interactions at a project level. The rollout started with a small pilot team, testing real-world scenarios and refining how the platform fit into daily work. As SACOG’s workflows have evolved, so has the platform, adapting to different teams’ needs for tracking and reporting on stakeholder engagement efforts.
Putting the Platform to Work
With Consultation Manager in place, SACOG didn’t just gain a new tool; it gained the infrastructure to support more intentional, coordinated engagement. What began as a pilot is steadily integrating into a core part of the agency’s workflow, helping staff across teams organize, share, and act on insights.
One of the earliest applications was strengthening relationships with tribal nations—an area Alex was particularly motivated to improve. Before implementing Consultation Manager, there was no clear way for the SACOG team to track outreach or show progress over time. With Consultation Manager in place, they began documenting touchpoints and building a visual record of engagement.
“When I joined, I really wanted to improve our tribal government relationships,” Alex shared. “Just logging all the touchpoints we had and being able to show that progress visually—that was huge. Our Executive Director said, ‘This is great. This is exactly what I want to show our board.’”
SACOG also used the platform during a long-range planning cycle to organize and track staff-level interviews across all 28 jurisdictions. Simultaneously, the Executive Director was preparing for one-on-one meetings with city managers across the region. Because Consultation Manager centralized jurisdiction-specific engagement as it happened, the team could easily generate reports tailored to each city, ensuring leadership had the most relevant, up-to-date context going into every conversation.
“Our Executive Director was meeting with city managers while we were gathering staff input,” Alex explained. “Having timely information within Consultation Manager helped him walk into those meetings well prepared and able to navigate the conversation with confidence.”
Internally, Consultation Manager is helping eliminate guesswork and reduce duplication. Instead of relying on email threads and side conversations to stay aligned, teams can now reference a shared engagement history and build upon past efforts more strategically.
“We can now look at the entries holistically and get a picture of what’s already happened and build on that,” said Alex.
Building a Culture of Strategic Engagement
Since adopting Consultation Manager, SACOG has experienced a noticeable shift in how staff think about their external engagement and the positive impact of organized and timely stakeholder data. Teams now collaborate more effectively, backed by a centralized record of stakeholder activity that provides historical context, improves planning, and informs strategic decisions.
“Before Consultation Manager, people were holding the data in their heads. Now we have a place to put it and pick it back up when we need it,” Alex said. “We can track the arc of a relationship. That helps us understand what’s been effective, what conversations we’ve had, and what we’ve learned—without starting from scratch every time.”
More than just a CRM or documentation system, Consultation Manager has helped SACOG align internal workflows with external engagement goals.
“Consultation Manager helps us work out loud,” Alex added. “It makes our work more transparent internally and more coordinated externally.”
Looking Ahead: Expanding Use and Showcasing Impact
As Consultation Manager becomes further embedded in SACOG’s operations, the focus is on expanding its use agency-wide and leveraging its reporting tools to communicate impact. With implementation of the regional plan underway, SACOG sees the platform as essential for tracking progress and demonstrating real-world outcomes.
“We don’t just want a plan that sits on a shelf. We want to show how we’re implementing it and how we’re influencing positive change across the region. This tool is one way we can do that.”
To continue building buy-in and visibility, SACOG is preparing to share platform data at an upcoming all-staff meeting, highlighting success stories and encouraging deeper adoption.
“You need champions. You need people who are all in,” Alex said. We’ve learned that the value [of using Consultation Manager] is emergent. It becomes clearer the more you use the system.”