Mapping Stakeholders

Identifying the people you need on board to move your idea forward.

stake·hold·er

/ˈstākˌhōldər/

noun

1. a person with an interest or concern in something, especially a business

Understanding how to map stakeholders is about understanding the people that surround your idea — who they are, why they care and how they play a role. A stakeholder, as the definition above so simply says, is any person or organization who has an interest — or a ‘stake’ — in what you’re doing. This could range from personal interest to professional interest to financial interest, and anything in between.

There are different ways to categorize stakeholders based on their interest, and identifying the different categories they fall under will help you understand how to interact with them and where you might be able to leverage their interest to move your idea forward.

The first thing to know are the different types of stakeholders that exist. When we’re mapping our stakeholders at SoJo, we generally break them down into the following groups:

• Potential Beneficiaries
• Potential Customers
• Supporters
• Influencers
• Gatekeepers

Beneficiaries are stakeholders who will directly benefit from your idea. Customers are stakeholders who will purchase your product or service. Supporters are stakeholders who can provide resources or connections to help move your idea forward, such as funders. Influencers are stakeholders who can directly or indirectly support your idea through their reputation or connections, such as thought leaders. And gatekeepers are stakeholders who have control over something that can determine whether your idea can move forward, such as government regulators.

Mapping stakeholders can sound a lot more complicated than it is, so let me tell you about how we did it at SoJo when we were just starting out…

Like you, when we first started out we had a pretty clear idea of the problem we wanted to solve (young people with ideas for social change were struggling to turn them into action) and knew the beneficiaries we wanted to help (young people with ideas for social change), but weren’t sure of much else. We had a vision for creating a series of tools and resources to help teach people the skills of social entrepreneurship, but knew that the people we wanted to serve probably weren’t the people who would be able to pay for our services. We had to take a step back and ask ourselves, “who else has an interest in solving this problem? who else might be interested in this solution?”

We grabbed some blank paper and started writing out all of the different groups we could think of and why they would care. What we came up with was:

• government — the more people engaged in solving social problems, the less the burden is on them to solve every problem
• community groups and nonprofits — they want to come up with more innovative solutions to social problems
• corporations, specifically the corporate social responsibility departments — they want to engage their employees who care about creating social impact
• secondary schools — they want to teach students entrepreneurship skills
• post-secondary schools — they want to teach students entrepreneurship skills

Since we already knew who our beneficiaries were, we asked ourselves what kind of stakeholders each of these groups might be. We figured government could be a supporter who might be interested in funding our work. Nonprofits could be both influencers and potential customers — though we weren’t sure whether enough of them would be able to pay for our services. Corporations might be interested in paying for our services and could be potential customers, however we weren’t sure the problem we were solving was a big enough priority for them to be reliable customers.

But schools — particularly those who had identified entrepreneurship as a priority teaching area — seemed like the most obvious potential customers. Not only did they have a very real need for our solution, they also had a budget to pay for these kinds of services. On top of that, they served the very young people we were trying to target as our beneficiary group.

By mapping our stakeholders, we were able to determine the key players who had an interest in our solution, think beyond our immediate beneficiary group, and identify a customer market that we could sell our services to. And as we gathered these insights into our stakeholder ecosystem, our social business model began to take shape.