All small, medium, or large businesses have multiple incumbents participating in different levels of involvement and engagement. Stakeholders may be investors, donors, contractors, professionals, owners, and workers having unique interests in the business's success. But, how do these stakeholders work together, collaborate, and relate to each other to enhance the achievements of the company? This is what Stakeholder Mapping tries to elucidate. So, if you are asking why stakeholder mapping is important, this is the article you need to read!

Stakeholder mapping is the practice of analyzing what stakeholders participate in a specific company and what is their degree of influence. The result is a stakeholder map that visualizes the connection between stakeholders and the organization, defining their level of responsibility for decision-making.

When it comes to new brands, businesses, or projects, there are individuals who play a significant role in shaping and achieving the predetermined goals. The specific people involved may vary depending on the company, product, or service. It is important to identify these participants at every level in order to understand the hierarchy and  the decision-making process.

Stakeholders may be individuals, groups, or other companies putting efforts or resources into developing the brand or a specific product. Moreover, performing a stakeholder map will give you a proper tool for a better understanding and managing involved people.

With proper mapping, you can also understand how stakeholders participate in the different stages of the design process. This way, you can clarify points, ask for results and organize meetings to solve common issues. 

Benefits of Stakeholder Mapping

Stakeholder mapping brings multiple benefits to the project’s success. It establishes a previous and more precise map of how interveners relate to the project and each other. Other additional benefits are the following:  

• It allows you to identify key stakeholders and their influence. Sometimes, projects have dozens of stakeholders, and it’s tough to know who has the biggest impact on the decisions. For instance, it could be a project manager or CEO.

• It makes you focus on stakeholders who will be most beneficial to you. When addressing various stakeholders, either clients or consumers, who benefit from the end product, you must focus on their needs and market them for sales.

• It allows you to see who has more valuable resources for the project. When understanding stakeholder relationships, you can notice who allocates more resources to the project and who has restraints. This is also important to put the right people in product teams.

• It provides you with an overall perspective of the project. When kicking off a product, you must understand who you're trying to satisfy. This allows you to identify and prioritize the features that will meet their specific needs and preferences.  

Stakeholder management requires you to understand that there are different types of brand or project stakeholders, whether you’re building a company or kicking off a specific product. Each situation has unique involved participants; thus, remarking on differences between stakeholder groups is essential to establish priorities and set clear goals regarding them. 

In a nutshell, identifying key stakeholders is essential to organize interactions between parties better. In this regard, there are two types of potential stakeholders; internal and external stakeholders.    

• Internal stakeholders. These correspond to people directly involved in your company or developing a specific product. Individuals engaged in this stakeholder ecosystem have different levels of engagement and responsibility within the project, but all have influence and a degree of decision-making. Those can be:

  • CEO or C-level executives;

  • Product owners;

  • Project managers;

  • Designers;

  • Developers;

  • Delivers.

• External stakeholders. The project or product impacts these stakeholders, although they do not straightforwardly participate in the creation or development. The impact also has different degrees of intensity. External stakeholders are:

  • Clients and customers;

  • Organizations and partner companies;

  • End users;

  • Workers of third-party companies. 

  • Suppliers.

  • Community groups.

Besides, you can prioritize stakeholders depending on their level of stakeholder engagement, which means how close they are to the project. As the stakeholder matrix shows, stakeholders may have four levels of empowerment. Understanding this is also relevant when dealing with a lot of involved ones. 

• Actively Engaged or Primary Stakeholders. Highly interested people with high power of decision-making and close management.

• Keep Satisfied or Secondary Stakeholders. Less interested people, although with high power of decision making. 

• Keep Informed or Tertiary Stakeholders. Highly interested people but with lower power in decision-making.

• Monitor, or Quaternary Stakeholders. Less interested people with lower power in decision-making.

There are three ways in which you can organize your own stakeholder map. The three allow you to quickly identify critical players for further analysis and understanding of how they are involved and work together. Let’s analyze each of them.

Network Diagram

This basic map showcases direct relationships between stakeholders at different levels of incumbency and hierarchy. With this map, you can manage interactions between stakeholders to easily plan strategies. This will help you engage them effectively and understand the links between them. Besides, with this map, you can address groups for departments and isolate effects and programs.  

Grid Stakeholder Map

This grid map divides all your stakeholders into four categories depending on levels of influence and interest. Monitor, Keep Informed, Keep Satisfied, and Actively Engaged are four categories. Grid mapping allows you to efficiently allocate as many stakeholders as you identify in the correct quadrant, facilitating the visual identification process. 

Radar Chart

We have previously touched upon this mapping type, but it's worth highlighting its benefits. It provides a straightforward way to visualize the proximity of stakeholders to the project, as well as their relationships. By using lines and arrows, it shows how stakeholders interact and make business decisions.

Creating a map of these characteristics is easy if you know the key features you need to include in the graph. Moreover, every new project should contain a predefined mapping to understand which people are involved in the product. It will provide you with different perspectives about the same object. Now let’s check this brief step-by-step guide. 

• Brainstorm to identify potential stakeholders. The first step when creating your stakeholder map is remembering all the individuals and groups interested in your organization or project. To do this, brainstorm with your team all possible implicated ones and how they are involved in every project phase.  

• Determine the level of involvement according to evaluation criteria. The stakeholder mapping process requires you to categorize all the stakeholders you’ve identified in the previous step. It means knowing their level of involvement at different stages of product development. Ask yourself which stakeholder can be put into this or another category. The most common approach to determine the level of involvement is using a radar chart, as the following.

• Identify key stakeholders’ goals and interests. You need to ask the following: what do stakeholders stand to gain from the project? What are their objectives in the short and long term? How can the product and team help them to reach their goals? Identifying goals will help you to understand them and plan strategies to engage them better. 

• Define the relationships that exist between stakeholders. Stakeholder ecosystem maps are structured based on the level of involvement and relations between participants. This lets you prioritize critical stakeholders boasting a crucial role in the project.

• Create an engagement plan. This plan is the overall strategy of engaging with each stakeholder during the project's development. Knowing the profile of each stakeholder will allow you to understand what approaches they prefer, what channels to use, and what type of information they share. Larger organizations pay special attention to their relations with key participants.

All templates we share below are easily editable in classic Microsoft Office applications such as Microsoft Word, Excel, or PowerPoint. These will help you to map stakeholders and properly allocate them in corresponding areas.

For a reliable version of the Microsoft suite, we recommend you acquire a copy of Microsoft Office 2021 Professional Plus Key Retail Global for just €5,65. Moreover, with Microsoft apps, you can create a stakeholder engagement strategy to boost participation and level of involvement.

Basic Grid Stakeholder Mapping Template

Download it from Smartsheet.

This corresponds to a free stakeholder map you can use to understand stakeholders' level of involvement and influence easily. With a clear separation between different interested parties, project management becomes easier since you can define strategies to engage stakeholders by area of influence. This grid presents a visual representation that is quick to understand to facilitate the engagement strategy. 

Stakeholder Map Template for Excel

Download it from Projectmanager.

This grid stakeholder map is similar to the previous one since it considers levels of influence and interest to organize stakeholders in four quadrants. Something different about this template is that it sets keys to identify stakeholders in the map without inserting their names in the graphic. Besides, it includes a color key categorization to analyze stakeholders and whether they contribute to the project. 

Stakeholder Analysis Template

Download it from Templatelab.

This template is more for analyzing than organizing stakeholders since it contains specific cells describing their level of support for issues, potential benefits, possible strategies, and risks. Indeed, this document is unsuitable for visualizing straightforward relations between parts, but still, it’s a good record for further analysis or checking stakeholder interests. Think of this document as a precious executive summary for the following specific project that significantly impacts internal and external stakeholders.

Controlling a project’s direction requires you, teams, and stakeholders to work together to achieve the best possible product or project. In this sense, identifying all the key stakeholders intervening in the project may result in a challenge when there are many of them, and you do not know their genuine relationship with the company. 

A document like the one we’ve addressed in this article will help you to map stakeholders, engage, and encourage them to participate in different stages of the project effectively. It will also help you prioritize resources, goals, and objectives and fulfill stakeholder expectations.