Your stakeholders are all persons, companies or organizations who in one way or another have, or could have, an interest – both positive and negative – in your project. Whether you have to launch a new product, deal with a crisis or raise funds.

You can do a stakeholder analysis in connection with any project that requires communication. However, the stakeholder analysis is most often used for external communication tasks.

That's why you need to do a stakeholder analysis

• If you do the analysis early in your project, you have the opportunity to use the opinions/advice of your most powerful stakeholders to shape your project. This not only makes them more likely to support your project, but their ideas can also improve the quality of your project.
• If powerful stakeholders support your project, you get more resources, which makes your project more likely to succeed.
• By communicating early in your project and frequently with your stakeholders, you can ensure that they understand what you are doing and that they can see the benefits of your project. Bonus is that they can actively support you if needed.
• When you know your stakeholders, you can predict their reactions to your project and build the reactions that can win their support into your plan.

The analysis consists of six points

1. Identify your stakeholders
2. Prioritize your stakeholders
3. Get to know the stakeholders
4. How will you engage your stakeholders?
5. Measure effectiveness
6. Where and how will you communicate?
7. Execute your plan

1. Identify your stakeholders

Who is actually interested in your project, who is affected by it, who can influence the project? Here it is important to consider stakeholders both inside and outside your company.

Identification can e.g. carried out by means of a brainstorm. Consider who will be affected by the project, who has power or influence over it, and who might have an interest in its success or failure.

The list below shows some of the people who may be interested in your project:

Remember that even if your stakeholders are both organizations and people, you are always communicating with people. Therefore, make sure to identify the right stakeholder in your stakeholder companies.

2. Prioritize your stakeholders

Now you have to find out what influence, interests and attitudes the stakeholders have in relation to your project. Also find out what importance and strength they have. By importance and strength is meant how strongly the stakeholders can influence the project. Can they stop it, or can they help it along?

Here, the matrix below can help to prioritize the stakeholders. Involve your stakeholders in relation to how much power they have over your project and the degree of their interest in the project.

Eg. it is likely that your boss has a lot of power, influence and interest in your project. While your family probably has a lot of interest in, but little influence over, the project.

The person's location in the network shows you what actions to take in relation to them.

Great Power, Little Interest:
Put enough effort into your work with them to keep them satisfied, but not so much that your message bores them.

Small power, big interest:
Keep these people appropriately informed. Interact with them to ensure that no major problems arise. These people can often be very helpful with the details of your project.

Little power, little interest:
Monitor them, but don't bore them with excessive information.

Great Power, Great Interest:
These are the people you need to engage fully and spend the most effort to please.

3. Get to know the stakeholders

You now know who your stakeholders are and know their potential for influence and their interest in your project. You now need to get to know them better. You need to find out what their attitude is to your project. Are they positive, negative or neutral? Furthermore, you need to know how to get them engaged in your project and how best to communicate with them.

Here are some important questions you should ask your stakeholders:

• What financial or emotional interest do they have in the outcome of your project? Is it positive or negative?
• What motivates them the most?
• What information do they want/need from you?
• How do they want to receive this information? How can you best convey your message?
• Who influences their attitudes, in general? And who influences their opinion of you? And does that make these influential people stakeholders in your project?
• If the stakeholder is not immediately positive, how can you get them to support your project?
• If you can't convince them, how will you manage/control their resistance?
• Who can they influence with their attitudes? Do these people now also become your stakeholders?

A good way to get the answers to these questions is to contact your stakeholders directly. Quite often, people are willing to talk about their position. This can also be the first step towards building a successful relationship.

To get an overview of your stakeholders, you can insert them into the table above. Then you quickly get an overview of who is blocking and who is supporting the project. You can do this by color coding the stakeholders: Green for support, red for blocker and orange for neutral.

4. How will you engage your stakeholders?

How can you and your project effectively engage the stakeholders? How often and how do you ensure that it is continuously updated? There is basically only one way to engage the stakeholders and that is through communication. So your stakeholder engagement plan is also your communication plan. Here, of course, you use the information you collected in step 3.

5. Where and how will you communicate?

The range of possible forms of communication is large and your communication will be in sharp competition with a number of other communicators. This can quickly lead to an overload of the communication channels, which can mean that your communication does not have the intended effect. The communication plan must therefore contain detailed consideration of a number of factors for each individual stakeholder or group of stakeholders. These factors are:

• Content of the communication – what do we want to say?
• Form of communication – how?
• Communication channel – through which media?
• Communication frequency – how often?

6. Execute your plan

Once you have made your communication plan, you must of course start executing the plan. This can become quite an extensive task, which will require resources with specialized skills that are not necessarily present in the traditional project organization. Even the simplest projects will have at least four different 'formal' stakeholders.

• The project participants
• The sponsor (the project owner / the one who pays)
• The users of the project's product
• Those who benefit from the project product.

In addition, there are presumably a number of informal stakeholders who, for various reasons, can see advantages or disadvantages in the project itself or its deliverables.

7. Measure the effectiveness

The project must communicate in order to influence the stakeholders in a given direction. A direction that will increase the project's chances of being able to deliver the benefits that are expected. It is therefore necessary to measure the effect of the communication given to the various stakeholders. In this way, you can find out whether the communication is received at all, whether it is understood and whether it has the desired effect.