Stakeholder Mapping
It became quite clear on Friday’s group presentations that the Stakeholder Map is a crucial and very powerful tool in every Design Thinking process but at the same time very complex and a big challenge to get it properly done.
During last week’s classes, we had the chance to learn and apply the methodology of Stakeholder Mapping. The process starts with the simple but quite difficult question: Who can influence or is affected by an organizations’s actions?
In the case of our client IAM, the internet media company, we started with a quite broad approach of listing Stakeholders such as museums, media companies and schools. However, throughout the classes we learned that a Stakeholder Map has to be as precise as possible which led us to name stakeholders such as Tate, Vice, Stack, UAL and Elisava. During this exercise, it became clear to us: Wow, we are dealing with a huge amount of Stakeholders!
After listing all the Stakeholders, the second step of the process is to classify them according to different criteria such as involvement, interest, influence, or relevance. In this phase, several iterations should be done as all of them can lead to different insights.
We did 2 iterations during class where we arranged the Stakeholders in the first round according to their level of engagement and in the second one according to their relevance and interest from a profitability point of view, as can be seen on the graphic.
We shared our results with IAM and had the chance to do another iteration with our client. We would like to share some of the insights we gained thanks to these iterations:
- Together with IAM, we arranged our Stakeholders according to the following clusters:
- IAM Family
- Media Partners
- Learning Partners
- Strategic Partners
- Event Partners
During the year, a Stakeholder can change its position and be part of different clusters.
2. Not only the cluster but also the involvement of the Stakeholders can change drastically during the year. Whereat some partners are more involved during the IAM Festival and the IAM Pop-Ups, others will play a more important role during the remaining months of the year. As illustrated in the graphic, we also need to take into account the fiscal year and its duties such as tax filing, which are not necessarily aligned with the IAM year and the involvement of its Stakeholders.
3. Creation of a funnel: When re-arranging the position of the IAM users and followers, we found it useful to divide them into 4 categories, in which audience are the followers on Social Media, engaged users are subscribed to the IAM weekly newsletter and the IAM Family represents the closest circle of people. The goal is to grow in all three dimensions. To define the potential users is a task that still has to be done!
Throughout this week, we could see that IAM is all about connections. Connecting with people, connecting with partners, connecting through the internet. Our next step will be to take a closer look at these connections, evaluate them, and gain new insights for our ultimate goal: make IAM future-proof!
