Stakeholder Analysis
Definition
Stakeholder analysis names every actor who can affect or is affected by the campaign, scores them on power, interest, and position, and turns the resulting map into an engagement plan with owners, messages, and review dates.
The discipline distinguishes primary stakeholders (those directly affected by the issue — workers facing a wage cut, tenants facing a rent rise) from secondary stakeholders (those who can affect the outcome — regulators, the press, allied organisations) and tertiary stakeholders (those whose position must be tracked even if they do not act — investors, board members, families of decision-makers).
Practitioner guides (Community Tool Box, the standard campaign-planning curriculum) treat the power/interest/position scoring as the active ingredient — a stakeholder list without scoring is a phone book, not a strategic document.
Full page: [[stakeholder-analysis]]. [source: stakeholder-analysis] [source: community-tool-box]
FAQ
What is stakeholder analysis?
Stakeholder analysis is the campaign’s directory of relevant actors — every actor who can affect or is affected by the campaign — scored on power, interest, and position, and turned into an engagement plan with owners, messages, and review dates. The full-page version of this definition lives on [[stakeholder-analysis]].
What are the three categories of stakeholders?
The discipline distinguishes primary stakeholders (those directly affected by the issue — workers facing a wage cut, tenants facing a rent rise) from secondary stakeholders (those who can affect the outcome — regulators, the press, allied organisations) and tertiary stakeholders (those whose position must be tracked even if they do not act — investors, board members, families of decision-makers). The three-tier distinction is what gives the analysis its reach.
What does the scoring do?
Practitioner guides (Community Tool Box, the standard campaign-planning curriculum) treat the power/interest/position scoring as the active ingredient — a stakeholder list without scoring is a phone book, not a strategic document. The scoring is what converts the directory into a map that can drive an engagement plan.
What does the stakeholder map produce?
The stakeholder map produces an engagement plan: for each stakeholder, the team records the current position, the desired position, the owner responsible for the relationship, the communication channel, and the review date. Without the engagement plan, the map is decoration.