Stakeholder Mapping
What is the research method about?
Stakeholder mapping is the practice of visually placing people/groups who are influential to your endeavor on a graph, usually against the two variables of influence and interest. The intention of this practice is to represent the who influences your work and at what capacity. By representing the different influential members of your idea, patterns and interconnected relationships begin to emerge which help you better position your effort and resources towards initiatives that will have the most positive influence. It is important to distinguish that a stakeholder is a person or a group of people who are invested in an endeavor and range largely in influence.
When is it typically used?
A stakeholder map is a very helpful tool in developing any project product or proposal. Understanding who makes up your audience is the first step in tailoring your business plan or product launch in accordance. You must understand your audience in order to develop a persuasive argument. Since this information is critical to the direction in which point the trajectory of a campaign, proposal, product, or even research endeavor later on in the project, it is helpful most helpful to conduct a stakeholder map very early on in the process.
Who involved and in what capacity?
This question is a little ironic since you can only clearly understand who is involved in your business endeavor by conducting a stakeholder map. By laying out on a map who influences your company and at what, it begins to be clear who is involved. That being said, creating a stakeholder map is generally an internally conducted a fair that does not require active participation from the parties represented on the map itself.
How is it done?
Using any medium that can support a visual representation of a quadrant and plotted points, you can quickly get started. A stakeholder map is generally comprised of a an X and Y axis, one representing the variable of interest in the other the variable of influence. A rough stakeholder map can be conducted using anecdotal understanding of the dynamics at play, but using actual data — i.e. financial influence or qualitative data from stakeholder interviews — will help make a stakeholder map more concrete.
Why would designers use it? Give an example.
Creating a proposal requires the tactful art of understanding how to communicate with your stakeholders depending on both yours and their needs and interests. Since designers specialize in the practice of nuanced communication, they exercise this skill all the time. A concrete example might be designing marketing material for a brand’s social media. If a stakeholder map is available during this process, the tone of voice, language and symbols can be curated according to how that audience is related to the brand. This allows for more direct and effective marketing, since one-size marketing certainly does not fit all (or at least does not fit well).
