Stakeholder mapping and how to use it in your Public Affairs efforts

It is always important to remember that every decision in the world is made by people - individuals with different levels of influence and importance. And if you want to raise awareness of your agenda or sway a decision in a certain direction, you need to know the mindset of these people and compare them to each other. This is where stakeholder mapping comes in as a simple but proven tool for Public Affairs professionals that creates a comprehensive overview of mindset which is also understandable for other people in your organization.

Identify your stakeholders

First of all you will need to identify the most important stakeholders for your issue. The most common stakeholders are politicians, but it is important to think in much broader terms than parliamentarians, when identifying stakeholders. Other potential stakeholders are officials, journalists, industry experts, think tanks, and so on. Your mapping must always capture these types of gatekeepers and people with indirect influence as well. 

The result of this broad view is that there are many stakeholders to choose from when you first get started. Therefore - contrary to a lot of people’s first impression of this task - the most difficult part is often to limit the amount of stakeholders. More often, there are around 20-25 true key stakeholders on an agenda - not 200. But no matter the number, this task is time consuming and requires extensive research and continuous monitoring of the active stakeholders, as well as their attitude and influence. And we promise you that the task will be worth it. 

Note that we are talking about mapping stakeholders on a given issue or agenda. Any given stakeholder might be an ally on one issue, but an adversary in another. So Public Affairs teams should always work with individual maps for each of their core issues.  

Plotting stakeholders into your map

When you have identified your stakeholders and categorized them on your issues, you are ready to begin the mapping process.

Mapping your stakeholders allows you to get a look in: How does the ‘outside world’ perceive the issues and areas you are working with? The stakeholder map is therefore a good starting point for your future stakeholder management as well as the framing of your issues.

As mentioned, the idea behind a stakeholder map is to create a simple and understandable overview of the stakeholders’ mindset. Therefore, stakeholder maps can have very different graphical outputs, but the most classical one (and the one we use in the Ulobby platform) is a XY matrix. What you measure on the axes are a choice individual to organisations, but the traditional stakeholder map has ‘influence’ on one axis, placing your stakeholders based on their influence on the given issue: Can they - directly or indirectly - influence decisions made on the area? On the other axis we have ‘attitude’, placing your stakeholders based on whether they are for or against your cause on the issue. Are they working to further or counter your efforts?

Mapping the stakeholders you have identified for the issue in this way, gives you an overview of the stakeholder landscape you are facing. This can help you identify the stakeholders you should target with your Public Affairs efforts, and which ones might be a waste of time due lack of influence or positive attitude towards your agenda. 

It can often be more fruitful to target the undecided instead of those who either have a clear positive or negative attitude. You don’t need to sway the positives and the negatives might pose too resource-heavy a task to persuade. 

Taking action

Any seasoned Public Affairs professional will know that stakeholder mapping is not purely an academic exercise or done just for fun. In order to get value from your work, you need to let the stakeholder mapping guide your actions. 

Of course, sometimes the goal of the stakeholder mapping can be to make stakeholders internally in your organisation aware of the broader picture or it can be relevant to get management on board your strategy or visualise your value.

But the real value comes when you take action, as different strategies should be applied, depending on where on the map a stakeholder is placed. In general terms, action can be guided by which of the four squares in the matrix, the stakeholders is placed in:

• Stakeholders with high influence and a positive attitude: Maintain position
  
  • Stakeholders in this group are key in achieving your goals. Make sure to maintain a good connection and encourage. Support them where possible - for instance with knowledge and arguments - and do what you can to help them keep their position.
• Stakeholders with high influence and a negative attitude: Change attitude
  
  • Often stakeholders in this group are too influential to ignore. So attempting to change their attitude can be a first, necessary step. However, for some stakeholders, this is not possible, in which case you could try to contain or isolate them instead.
• Stakeholders with low influence and a positive attitude: Increase influence
  
  • These stakeholders are already more or less on your side, so helping with knowledge and arguments is - again - a good approach, but more importantly try to encourage them and do what you can to increase their influence and help them step forward.
• Stakeholders with low influence and a negative attitude: Keep passive
  
  • These stakeholders are negative towards your cause and goals. The best strategy is to keep them passive the best you can. Often it won’t be possible to change their position, and as they do not hold a large influence on the area, it is rarely worth it to attempt. Rather, contain or isolate them from the other stakeholders if possible.

It is often a challenge to handle important stakeholders who are completely opposed to your cause. Generally, it rarely pays off to spend too much time and energy here, but there are still some things you can and should do. One of these is to familiarize yourself with their arguments and critiques and monitor any changes and developments in these. Furthermore, you should not ignore them completely; make sure to both build up a relationship - mutual respect and a good relation can co-exist with fundamental disagreements - and, maybe most importantly, make sure to find the right counter-arguments to provide to stakeholders around them, so their views do not spread.

As the last thing to mention here, we encourage you to revisit your stakeholder maps with a fixed interval, to make sure your efforts always reflect the current stakeholder landscape. The political reality is ever changing and moving faster than ever, and your map is not a portrait, but a constantly altering picture, so make sure you keep it up to date to get the maximum value from it. 

Get your stakeholder mapping digitized

At Ulobby, our clients are no strangers to stakeholder mapping. But in order to take their Public Affairs work to a strategic level, they know that it's not enough to look at a map in a power point presentation a couple of times a year. Transparency internally in the organization is key as is revisiting the maps often enough to keep them up to date with reality. This calls for one centralized but also dynamic database.

Public Affairs software is often the obvious choice for stakeholder mapping, as the extensive stakeholder database makes it easy to find and add the relevant stakeholders to a map. Likewise, political monitoring can help you identify the stakeholders relevant to your key issues - avoiding blind spots or relying too heavily on path dependency. 

Keeping your stakeholder map in a centralized software system also gives you the opportunity to store contact information, past meetings and notes, relationship history, and stakeholder mapping in one place. Creating full transparency within the organisation and keeping everyone aligned; making sure that all stakeholder outreach and other activities are in line with the overall strategy.

You can see how mapping works in Ulobby in the video below. Want to know more about Ulobby's stakeholder mapping and other stakeholder management functionality? Contact us today to hear more. 

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