A Quick Guide To Stakeholder Mapping (With Templates)

As more organizations compete to stay relevant in society, a less hierarchical structure based on interdependency and a thorough understanding of the stakeholders is required.

Knowledge of all the factors that influence the success of a product or project will help you develop a more refined approach to achieving the company’s goals.

Here is a quick guide to stakeholder mapping, why your company needs one, and how to create a stakeholder map.

What Is Stakeholder Mapping?

Stakeholder mapping refers to a procedural method of graphically analyzing every component that makes up your industry. This analysis is made based on the interests of each stakeholder and their influence on the organization.

By analyzing the parties making up an organization and their impact, you can get a clearer view of how and where to assign resources, who to prioritize, and the important things that need to be done. Randomly introducing new ideas or throwing resources all over would drastically affect the company’s growth and exhaust your reserves if there are no profitable returns.

Stakeholder mapping takes into consideration both the non-employed stakeholders and the organizational units — starting from the Chief Executive Officer to the consumers.

Types Of Stakeholders

There are two categories of stakeholders: internal and external. To roll out a product, they both have varying degrees of involvement, and a clear line needs to be drawn to better understand how you approach them.

The internal stakeholders include CEOs, designers, developers, project managers, and every other unit actively functioning within an organization. These individuals, to varying degrees, are actively involved in the process.

External stakeholders do not actively participate in the whole production process, yet they are at the very core of whatever project you want to initiate. They include your customers, old or new, shareholders, the government, suppliers, and society.

It is, however, important not to confuse shareholders with stakeholders. Shareholders own a portion or share of the company but do not necessarily play an active role in the entire production process.

How To Create A Stakeholder Map?

There are four main steps to creating a standard stakeholder map:

Gather Information On Your Potential Stakeholders

Here, you need to carry out intensive research and figure out your potential stakeholders — from the highest levels of management to every other internal stakeholder involved in the production cycle. Of course, you need to figure out who your clients or customers are, and have a proper breakdown of the external stakeholders and other key players.

You should record the research results by using a visual tool like Microsoft Powerpoint. There are premade and editable stakeholder mapping templates available for you. Download one and input your results for a visual presentation.

Categorize Your Key Players

Instead of having the whole visual board filled with different titular representations of each stakeholder in your organization, you should distribute them into well-defined categories. Here is a better way to categorize your list:

• Financial institutions: shareholders, banks, and investors
• Business consultants: Pr agencies, marketers, and financial analytics
• Management: Board of directors and product manager
• Suppliers, clients or customers, and others
• Define A Priority Level For Each Stakeholder

You can define the level of priority of each stakeholder by using the four-quadrant method. By properly leveraging the influence and interest of these individuals, developing the right approach for more effective communication becomes easy.

The quadrant method demonstrates the interest and influence level of your stakeholders.

• High interest and influence (Close Management)
• High interest but low influence (Prioritize Information)
• Low interest but high influence (Prioritize Satisfaction)
• Low interest and influence (Keep a Watch)

Communicate

Once you are done prioritizing your stakeholders, creating a communication plan becomes essential. You need to devise different methods of communication for each priority level to facilitate flexible and efficient results.

Stakeholders with high interest and influence should receive first-hand information. Close management is very important to keep them involved. Share essential information with this group of people and ensure they are always updated.

High-interest but low-influence stakeholders should also be followed up with important information. For stakeholders with low interest but high influence, you should place more priority on satisfaction. You can ask a first-level buy-in stakeholder to convince people of this category.

Why Does Your Company Need Stakeholder Mapping?

A visual presentation of all the key players in your organization plays a critical role in several ways.

• Helps To Categorize Your Stakeholder List

It can be very challenging to visualize the entire sea of people who impact your product without putting them into a specific category. A stakeholder map gives a clearer view of your stakeholders by dividing them into flexible categories.

• Helps To Identify The Key Stakeholders

Every stakeholder has some level of influence on your product. You can use the four-quadrant method to identify the influence level of your stakeholders and gauge their interest in your product also. The result is very essential for allocating resources and assigning priority levels.

• Pinpoint Those Impacted by Your Product or Service(s)

The “know your customer” strategy involves figuring out who your customers are and their needs. Stakeholder mapping aids in assessing the impact of your product or service on society and those who are most impacted to develop an ideal business plan.

• Assists In The Development Of A Perfect Business Strategy

A perfect business strategy defines how your company will execute the project at hand. It includes all the necessary steps and decisions that should be made at each touchpoint. Furthermore, having a perfect overview of the important objectives can help you avoid unnecessary conflicts of interest with your stakeholders.

Conclusion

Stakeholder mapping has a variety of advantages. A larger percentage of successful projects out there are backed by in-depth knowledge of the stakeholders involved, actively or passively. By creating a map, you can generate a more seamless workflow through the efficient allocation of resources and time to the key players.

By following the steps outlined above, you can access some of the premium editable PowerPoint templates or create your stakeholder map from scratch.