What is the Purpose of a Stakeholder Analysis in Strategic Planning?
Sometimes reviewing your stakeholders can feel redundant, but by providing a stakeholder analysis, you can open your understanding to each group’s role within your organization and ensure you maximize opportunities with each group. Until you completely understand the role each group plays, you cannot maximize the efforts of each. This is a great time to seek out redundancies, opportunities, and gaps within your operations.
To start, let’s look at how we measure each group, starting with the locus of control and intensity of the stakeholder in an effort to bolster nonprofit strategy.
Locus of Control
The locus of control looks at whether your stakeholders are internal or external and allows your organization to understand their needs and interests based upon that control.
Intensity
Intensity looks at whether someone has a high or a low influence upon the organization, typically employees and board members have a high influence on an organization whereas a landlord likely does not have a high influence on how an organization operates.
The image above shows a graphic of how these groups are broken down for a client of NMBL’s.
Now let’s take a look at each grouping and how we should think through them, it is also important to remember that the same group may not appear in the same box for every organization. For example, if you run a nonprofit, and it is 100% volunteer-run vs a nonprofit with staff/employees you may view volunteers differently. Similarly, you may need to get specific with understanding groups because some groups could fall into two different categories, for example in the 100% volunteer-run nonprofit you may find that there are two groups of volunteers one that runs the nonprofit and one that comes in from time to time to run an event. Understanding these groups, their roles, responsibilities, and obligations, and what impact they have on the organization is critical. One other piece to keep in mind, it’s unlikely you should get too molecular here, don’t identify every employee or every board member individually, if you need to pull one or two out for a specific reason you can do that, but otherwise there will be a lot of redundancy and unnecessary effort if you pull each individually.
Before looking at each section of the grid, let’s make sure that we understand the value of this exercise:
To identify an organization’s most important stakeholders
To assess the importance of each stakeholder
To assess the influence of each stakeholder
To ensure that each stakeholder is identified and understood
Internal/High Intensity
Typically your staff or board is the most invested group in your organization. These people make the organization function and hurt if someone leaves. Understanding this group is critical to ensuring that your organization is functioning.
External/High Intensity
These are groups making a significant impact on your organization despite not being internal, these would be closely held partners (like a joint venture or public-private partnership) or closely engaged consultants/contractors (like an outsourced CFO or a strategic planning consultant from NMBL Strategies). These groups hold considerable sway over the future of your organization but are not internal, their reach can and should only go so far. Similar to the internal group, these people usually hurt a bit if they leave, although typically not as much as the Internal/High-Intensity group.
Internal/Low Intensity
This group would cover investors or donors, people that are important to the organization but don’t really have a say over the operations or vision. An especially useful tactic here is to develop characteristics or personas in an effort to identify how to expand this group as they can provide needed funding in the future.
External/Low Intensity
Volunteers, vendors, customers, and visitors, this group is often overlooked but critically important. Similar to the Internal/Low-Intensity group we find developing characteristics and personas an extremely valuable exercise here as it allows your organization to plan (our next topic by the way). By developing the characteristics of this group, you will be able to understand where this group seeks information, their demographics, and if you are reaching them in the right way. Similarly, if you are trying to grow this group it’s a great opportunity to understand where and how to grow.
Find our whole “Purpose of” series here:
You can also download our sample/template Strategic Plan Request for Proposal for free here, no sign up or anything necessary: Strategic Plan Request for Proposal Template
This grid breaks down the stakeholders that interact with your organization in a simple, easy-to-understand way. It also provides a basis for our next section (planning) by understanding each and every group inside and outside of your organization. For help in understanding how groups interact with your organization and your overall strategic planning process contact NMBL Strategies today.
