A stakeholder is any individual, group, or organisation with an interest in a plan or policy. 

Stakeholder mapping is an essential part of planning for any project that will affect a large number of people, or require “buy-in” from external individuals and organisations. For government and public bodies, it is particularly useful. 

From statutory consultations to local plans to the broad policy-making process, stakeholder mapping as an analytical tool is essential to assessing the key participants in your consultation. 

What Is Stakeholder Mapping? 

Stakeholder mapping is the process of identifying key stakeholders and categorising them according to their relationship to the project. It is often done ahead of an engagement activity, such as a public consultation or stakeholder workshop.

Once you identify stakeholders, they are usually ‘mapped’ according to where they fall on a matrix (in this case, a matrix is a grid where this information is logged). 

The most common stakeholder matrices evaluate stakeholders based on their: 

  • Power: The extent to which a stakeholder can influence the outcome of a particular project. They may control certain resources, hold political authority, or otherwise have the power to significantly impact the project’s success or failure.
  • Interest: The degree to which the stakeholder is personally impacted by the project. This may include local representatives such as councillors or members of a campaigning group.
  • Position: Whether the stakeholder is positively, negatively or neutrally inclined towards the project.

Once these categories are identified, they are then mapped. This provides a visual representation of how key stakeholders relate to the policy, plan or project and provides an insight into managing stakeholder expectations.. It is also useful for tracking changes in stakeholder interest over time.

The Benefits of Stakeholder Mapping

Stakeholder mapping offers a great deal of benefits to those who anticipate needing a great deal of interaction with internal or external stakeholders. 

The potential uses include:

  • Ensuring stakeholders reflect the true diversity of viewpoints: Mapping stakeholders allows all relevant parties – including those from underrepresented groups – to be identified. Having a broad and representative range of stakeholders ensures consultations reflect multiple perspectives. This leads to more balanced and effective policy outcomes.
  • Anticipating issues and concerns ahead of time: Stakeholder mapping can help to identify how stakeholders will be affected by a particular project or policy. Understanding the potential concerns of specific stakeholders allows facilitators to anticipate challenges and address them early in the planning or policy-making process.
  • Communicating effectively with different stakeholder groups: Every stakeholder group is different, and different types of stakeholder will require a different level of engagement. Mapping helps tailor communications to each stakeholder type, which makes those communications more effective.
  • Allowing resources to be used efficiently: Mapping can help to prioritise efforts. It  ensures time and resources are focused on those with influence or interest. Mapping can also help to identify potential supporters who may offer resources.

A good example of a stakeholder mapping use case is a public consultation. Stakeholder mapping allows better decision-making by ensuring plans and policies are developed using the viewpoints of all relevant stakeholders.

 Engaging those stakeholders early allows a consultation to build trust with different stakeholder groups and the general public. This strengthens existing relationships and helps develop new ones.

Using a Stakeholder Engagement Matrix 

Key stakeholders are typically those with the resources or decision-making authority to influence its success. These resources may be material, such as owning critical infrastructure. Or they may be somewhat less tangible, like community support or political influence. 

Stakeholders can play a crucial role by offering their views, their resources, or support. However, they can also influence outcomes through their opposition.

A stakeholder engagement matrix allows those running engagement activities such as public consultations or stakeholder workshops to sort participants according to their relationship to the activity.

Understanding the different types of stakeholders involved with a particular activity is often vital to the activities success and effective stakeholder management. It allows facilitators to personalise engagement methods and frequency  of communication according to stakeholder need. Where resources are limited, a stakeholder engagement map can be used to identify key contacts and determine how to prioritise engagement between primary and secondary stakeholders

Stakeholder Engagement Matrix: Types

A stakeholder engagement matrix can be anything that plots stakeholder infromation in order to sort them into targetable groups. The kind of matrix required will depend on the engagement activity. 

The two most common types of stakeholder matrix are:

  • Power-Interest Matrix
  • Position-Influence Matrix

When used by public bodies for activities like public consultations, policy-making or community engagement, it is often beneficial to use both types of matrices. This can give a more comprehensive view of stakeholder relationships.

Power-Interest Matrix

This plots the power a given stakeholder has over the project or policy against the interest they have in it. Although these are both somewhat subjective and sometimes fluid metrics, it is useful to broadly define each stakeholder according to where they fall:

  • High Power, High Interest: These are key decision makers. They could include local government officials, affected landowners, developers, and influential community leaders.
  • High Power, Low Interest: Influential stakeholders that may be less invested in the project. These could include national government departments, some regulatory bodies, and large businesses.
  • Low Power, High Interest: These are people who have little power over a given project but are personally affected by it or otherwise invested. This could include local residents, small business owners and residents associations.
  • Low Power, Low Interest: These are neither influential over the project nor strongly engaged with it. This often includes the general public, especially those not directly impacted.

Position-Influence Matrix

The position-influence matrix maps a stakeholder’s views against their influence on a project. This matrix is generally useful for tracking stakeholder relationships to specific policies or plans, where one can expect there to be both support and opposition.

‘Influence’ here is used similarly to power, meaning their ability to influence the outcome of a policy, plan or activity. Position is used to denote whether they are likely to have a positive, negative or neutral view of the project.

How to Create a Stakeholder Engagement Matrix

Once you have decided what kind of stakeholder analysis and mapping is most useful, it is time to create a stakeholder matrix. To create one specific to your purpose:

Identify and Categorise your Stakeholders

The first step in producing a stakeholder engagement matrix is conducting an analysis. Start by identifying all relevant stakeholders, including everyone affected by the policy or plan, or with the ability to affect it. Then, categorise your stakeholders according to their influence over, interest in and predicted position on the project. 

This step poses some difficulties. It is not always possible to predict the position of an individual, company or body ahead of time. For example, a regulatory body may pose unexpected issues where it was expected that a project would meet their guidelines. 

The power someone has to influence a project is also not perfectly predictable. A community group may not previously have had an organised presence in public meetings, but may unexpectedly become influential over public support.

The best way to conduct this phase is to take advantage of all available resources, particularly knowledge of key organisations and individuals. 

Score Your Stakeholders

Categorising stakeholders simply as ‘high or low’ power or interest may not always provide data that is granular enough for a comprehensive stakeholder engagement strategy. As such, it is sometimes useful to take a more quantitative approach to plotting your stakeholder engagement map. 

Assigning each party a score according to their level of influence, interest and position can create a clearer picture of your key, primary stakeholders. Facilitators with a good understanding of relevant stakeholders should be asked to rate their predicted interest, influence, and position on a numbered scale. 

If there are enough people involved who are qualified to estimate these categories, then multiple scorers should be used. The average scores for each category can then be used as coordinates for placing stakeholders on the map.

Examples of Stakeholder Scoring

In this case power/influence is ranked 1-5 with 1 being the least influential; Interest is ranked 1-5 with 1 being the least interested and engaged; position is ranked 1-5 with 1 meaning they have a very negative view:

  • A local councillor who is well liked in his community and unenthusiastic about the proposed policy. Power/Influence: 4, Interest: 4, Position: 2.
  •  A medium-sized business that will benefit financially from the proposal. Power/Influence: 3, Interest: 4, Position: 5
  • A regulatory body that does not foresee the proposal breaking any current regulations. Power/Influence: 5, Interest: 2, Position: 3


Developing A Stakeholder Engagement Plan

Different types of stakeholders require different levels of engagement. Effective stakeholder mapping creates a strong foundation to develop a stakeholder engagement plan. 

Your stakeholder engagement map can help facilitators easily visualise how to engage with different groups. 

Using the Power/Interest Matrix:

  • Those who are ‘High Interest’ will require lots of updates and a high level of engagement. As they are already affected by the project, keeping them interested is not difficult. Those who are also high power may have a great deal of influence on a project, and it is vital to keep them engaged. Those who are low power will still want to be kept in the loop.
  • Those who are ‘Low Interest’ are less engaged and may only need occasional information. However, those who are high power should still receive some information due to their potential influence. Ideally, even those who are low interest and low power should receive basic information occasionally.

Using a Position/Influence Matrix:

  • Those who have a positive position should be engaged, particularly where they may have resources that are useful to the planning or policy-making process.
  • Those who have a negative position should also be engaged, as the process of engagement may help to persuade. It may also help to make the process fit a wider range of stakeholder needs.
  • Those who are neutral may need less engagement, but should still be kept in the loop.

Engaging different stakeholders does not need to be an overly complicated process, but it is a necessary part of so many activities and processes conducted by public bodies. 

Learn more about crafting the perfect stakeholder engagement plan here. 

Citizen Space is the go-to platform for connecting governments, developers, and citizens. If you’d like to learn more about how our software streamlines public engagement and provides planners with enriched geospatial data, book a free demo and we’ll walk you through it.

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