Increase Stakeholder Engagement & Drive Better Business Results
What is a stakeholder?
A stakeholder is a person, group, or individual with the power to influence or be impacted by your project. Stakeholders can be categorized into two groups internal and external.
Internal stakeholders example:
Employees
Owners
Your company's executive.
Other teams or colleagues.
External stakeholders examples:
Customers
Your vendors
Associations & Government groups
Financiers
Competitors
Your stakeholders include people you communicate with, report insight to, and participate in accomplishing tasks. Simply put, stakeholders have a "stake" in your project.
What is stakeholder mapping used for in a project?
Stakeholder maps are data visualization and project management tools that help teams build empathy for the people and groups who will help them across the finish line. They create stakeholder management strategies and identify essential relationships across a project.
A stakeholder map is a tool to help visualize different individuals and groups' relationships with a project, first by identifying key relationship points within diverse groups. Then, by gathering information about their goals and objectives for a project. Mapping these details allows a project team to make informed decisions regarding the best approach to implement the project plans.
What is the purpose of stakeholder mapping?
Build Rapport and strengthen relationships.
Shared data and insight to define the scope further.
Context that helps clarify goals and establish milestones.
Prioritize resources and identify resource / skills gaps early on.
Who benefits from stakeholder mapping?
Organization leaders: Anyone leading a team or project can use a stakeholder map to identify and prioritize the most important stakeholders for a given project and develop strategies to communicate with them more effectively.
Program Managers: Program managers can use stakeholder maps to identify critical priorities for each project phase and which stakeholders are most interested and affected.
Business Development: Salespeople can use stakeholder maps to understand their leads and how a decision can impact the different interests of their key targets. The goal is to enable more strategic decisions and potentially develop relationships with their target customers.
Crisis management: Crisis communication is beneficial to all project teams. Planning for a potential crisis includes knowing who your stakeholders are, what information they require and who is delivering the information.
Design Teams: Stakeholder maps are a tool for prioritizing resources and activities based on people's interests. They also effectively align each group's needs with the organization's goals.
Try Stakeholder Mapping in 3 Interactive Sessions
DesignACE promotes a three-step stakeholder mapping process: Brainstorming & Stakeholder mapping, Engagement Planning, and Mini-stakeholder interviews.
In brainstorming sessions, participants write down all the stakeholders they think could be involved and then identify the critical relationships among them. Relationship maps visualize how each stakeholder relates to the others.
Engagement Planning to align stakeholder communication ownership.
Mini-stakeholder interviews: validate what you know by engaging stakeholders for a 20-minute informal discussion.
Session #1.a. Stakeholder Brainstorming
Diverge & Converge
The brainstorming session should lead the team to understand your stakeholders better. To do this, you want to follow two steps:
Diverge: generate as many stakeholders as possible.
List all relevant stakeholders that could have an interest in the project.
Identify any related projects or initiatives with overlapping goals or the same stakeholders.
Converge: narrow down into the most impactful stakeholders.
Determine whom the project team should include and exclude. You want a healthy mix of core, direct, and indirect stakeholders.
Start to consider whether any of the stakeholders are potential influencers or blockers of the project.
Session #1.b. Stakeholder Mapping
Identifying stakeholders allows teams to gain new insights and bridge knowledge gaps by considering the project's broader ecosystem. This activity aims to organize the people and teams that will impact or feel the impact of the outcomes of your project. Below is our simple formula to categorize stakeholders in three ways:
Core Stakeholders: People you consider the project's most critical drivers, including your working team. They provide you with business problems to solve and influence design and decision-making.
Direct Stakeholders: Key influencers who support the project or team and have decision-making power. Some examples are sales, customer service channels, operational support teams, marketing, and training.
Indirect Stakeholders: Those with minimal impact or influence on the project belong to the outer edges. The finished project outcome is more important to these people and groups than the process of completing it.
Session #2. Engagement Planning
Now that you understand your stakeholders and their impact on your project, it is time to ensure you have communication coverage for your core and direct stakeholders. Map out a buddy plan for engaging and communicating with the stakeholders in your project to ensure you have coverage.
Prepare your stakeholder interview:
Step 1 - Interview Purpose and Goals: Decide the objectives of the interview.
Step 2 - Logistics like interviewee, locations, time, and materials.
Step 3 - Questions: Choose ~2 warm-up questions to break the ice and a more profound question that will help you better understand them, their motivations, and their work style.
Session #3: Mini-Stakeholder Interview
After stakeholder mapping, book 20-minute mini-interviews with the core and direct stakeholders you would like to know better. Mini-interviews are a great way to:
identify enablers
flag barriers to building momentum
drive results
A Strategic Planning Guide
A step-by-step guide to creating meaningful stakeholder interactions builds trust, strengthens relationships, and drives results—winning tactics for in-person, hybrid, and remote work models.
This interactive strategic planner guides all professionals who need a more thoughtful and engaging approach to strategic stakeholder management.
3X Interactive Modules:
Module 1 - Stakeholder Mapping
Module 2 - Stakeholder Engagement Planning
Module 3 - Stakeholder Interviews