Stakeholders can make or break a bid. Yet in many bid environments, “stakeholder management” and “stakeholder engagement” are used as though they mean the same thing. They do not.

In this Lunch & Learn, Nina Long Christiansen, Founder & Managing Partner of APACE Consulting, will explore why the distinction matters, particularly in complex bids and partnership-led opportunities where multiple organisations, decision-makers, subject matterexperts, and internal agendas must be aligned behind one compelling clientstory.

Drawing on her recent APACE Consulting Bid Leadership Series article, Nina will show why stakeholder management and stakeholder engagement are both essential, but not interchangeable. Management provides the structure a bid needs: governance, communication, coordination,and control. Engagement creates the conditions that make a bid stronger:ownership, trust, momentum, and advocacy.

A proposal can be well managed and still lack coherence, conviction, or a clear sense of the client’s world. The difference often lies in whether stakeholders were simply kept informed, or truly brought into the process.

The session will focus on the practical challenge of managing the mechanics of a bid while engaging the humans who influence its success. Nina will share how bid teams can create clarity, build trust, improve contribution quality, and reduce misalignment, especially when working across organisational boundaries.

Towards the end of the session, Nina will be joined by Matthijs Huiscamp, CEO of Altura, for a conversation on how AI may influence the future of stakeholder management and engagement in bids. Together, they will explore where technology can support bid teams with better structure, visibility, coordination, and insight, while also considering where human judgement, trust, influence, and relationship-building remain essential to winning work.

‍

What you’ll learn in this session

• How to distinguish stakeholder management from stakeholder engagement in a bid environment
• Why management alone can leave even strong proposals exposed to misalignment
• How early engagement improves trust, contribution quality, momentum, and ownership
• Why partnership bids require amore intentional approach to stakeholder relationships
• Practical ways to create shared visibility across teams, partners, and decision-makers
• How to bring stakeholders into the process, not just keep them informed
• What AI may begin to change in stakeholder management and engagement, explored in conversation with Matthijs Huiskamp, Founder & CEO of Altura.

‍

Who should attend

• Bid managers, proposal managers, and bid writers
• Capture, sales, and business development leaders
• Alliance and partnership managers
• Senior stakeholders involved instrategic bids
• Subject matter experts contributing to major proposals
• Anyone working on complex bids involving multiple teams, partners, or decision-makers
• APMP members and proposal professionals interested in the future of bid leadership and AI-enabled bidding

‍

Speaker: Nina Christiansen

Nina Christiansen is Founder & Managing Partner of APACE Consulting, specialising in strategic alliances, bid leadership, and partnership development.

Nina works with organisations to improve how they pursue, structure, and deliver complex bids, particularly where partnership, stakeholder alignment, and cross-organisational collaboration arecritical to success. Her work focuses on helping teams move beyond process compliance to create proposals that are strategically aligned, commercially focused, and genuinely client centred.

Through APACE Consulting’s Bid Leadership Series, Nina shares practical insight on the human, strategic, and operational disciplines that sit behind successful bidding. Her perspective combines hands-on bid leadership experience with a strong focus on trust, clarity, and the relationships that determine whether organisations can truly win together.

‍

Event details

• When: Thursday, 9 July 2026, London
• Agenda:
  • Arrival, lunch and networking
  • Welcome & intro
  • Stakeholder management vs. engagement: Why your bid needs both. - Nina Christiansen + Matthijs Huiskamp
  • Q&A
  • Networking
• Catering: Lunch included
• Cost: Free to attend

This community Lunch & Learn is hosted by Altura, the full-cycle bid management platform that helps modern bid teams manage, create, and optimise proposals to win more complex deals.