Conducting Stakeholder Analysis

There are three steps to follow in Stakeholder Analysis:

1. Identify who your stakeholders are.

2. Prioritise your stakeholders by their power, influence, and interest.

3. Understand your stakeholders and what motivates them.

1. Identify Your Stakeholders

Start by brainstorming who your stakeholders are. As part of this, think of all the people who are affected by you and your work with influence or power over it, or who have an interest in its successful or unsuccessful outcome.

2. Prioritise Your Stakeholders

You now have a list of people and organizations that represent your stakeholders. Some of these may have the power either to block your work or to advance it. Some may be interested in what you are doing, while others may not care, so you need to work out who you need to prioritise. You can map out your stakeholders and classify them on a Power/Interest Grid.

The position that you allocate to a stakeholder on the grid shows the actions you need to take with them:

• High power, highly interested people (Manage Closely): you must fully engage these people and make the greatest efforts to satisfy them.
• High power, less interested people (Keep Satisfied): put enough work in with these people to keep them satisfied, but not so much that they become bored with your message.
• Low power, highly interested people (Keep Informed): adequately inform these people and talk to them to ensure that no major issues are arising. People in this category can often be immensely helpful with the detail of your project.
• Low power, less interested people (Monitor): again, monitor these people, but do not bore them with excessive communication.

3. Understand Your Key Stakeholders

You now need to discover how your key stakeholders feel about your project or organization. You also need to work out how best to engage them, and how to communicate with them.

Questions that can help you understand your stakeholders include:

• What financial or emotional interest do they have in the outcome of your work? Is it positive or negative?
• What motivates them most of all?
• What information do they want from you, and what is the best way of communicating with them?
• What is their current opinion of your organization? Is it based on good information?
• Who influences their opinions generally, and who influences their opinion of you? Do some of these influencers therefore become important stakeholders in their own right?
• If they are not likely to be positive, what will win them around to support your project or organisation?
• If you do not think that you’ll be able to win them around, how will you manage their opposition?
• Who else might be influenced by their opinions? Do these people become stakeholders in their own right?

You can ask your stakeholders these questions directly. People are often quite open about their views and asking for their opinions is often the first step in building a successful relationship with them.

Stakeholder Management is the process by which you identify your key stakeholders and win their support. Stakeholder Analysis is the first step in this, where you identify and start to understand your most important stakeholders to help you shape your strategy and plan going forward.

The first stage of this is to brainstorm who your stakeholders are. The next step is to prioritise them by power and interest, and to plot this on a Power/Interest grid. The final stage is to get an understanding of what motivates your stakeholders and how you need to win them around.