The power of a good stakeholder analysis is its ability to enable you to prioritise who you engage with first, when you have limited time and resources. If you have time, you can use this tool to derive long, comprehensive lists of all the relevant groups who should in theory be interested in or could benefit from your research. In my experience, such lists just intimidate me, as I know I will never have time to reach out to everyone. Instead, use this tool to empower you to take strategic first steps towards engaging with the groups that are most important to you. Whether you have time to reach out to three or thirty contacts, you know that you contacted the most relevant people when you run out of time to contact anyone else.
If you only have time to reach out to the top three organisations or groups on your list, you can use this analysis to identify:
People who are likely to be very interested in your work, highly influential and likely to benefit significantly from your work. These are the kinds of organisations who are likely to lend you support, and help enable you to reach impacts that you would have been unable to achieve without their help.
It is equally important to prioritise more marginalised groups who have no influence, who may or may not be interested in your work, but who stand to gain or lose significantly from your work. Traditional “stakeholder analysis” tools tend to prioritise the first group at the expense of this second group, but if you want to take a more responsible and inclusive approach, it is essential that you understand how best to reach out to groups like this, and help them realise benefits from your work, or work with them to find ways of avoiding negative impacts.
Finally, you can use the analysis to identify knowledge brokers who can short-cut me to relationships with key people from across multiple social and professional networks.
You make the choice based on your own preferences, and use this to take a strategic approach to who you engage with first. If you have limited time and are being approached by many different organisations, you can use this approach to justify putting off engagement with certain groups, or sending them to your social media feeds or newsletter, so you have time to reach out to your priority groups, and don’t get side-tracked by constantly reacting to those who shout loudest.
Three questions to start your pathway to impact
There are three questions at the heart of this analysis, and I'll walk you through each, in the sections that follow. This will give you a sophisticated and holistic understanding of those you may want to engage with, and help you prioritise the limited time you have available for impact. There's no one right way to prioritise those you engage with - instead the tool empowers you to make that choice for your own, clear reasons (so you can explain why you haven't got to a particular group yet if asked). Most people focus on individuals, groups or organisations, but you can use the tool to think about future generations and non-human beneficiaries. If you have time and interest, you can do this analysis at two levels, asking additional questions that uncover deeper, often hidden dynamics that might be driving what you see on the surface of your analysis (Figure 1; Table 1).
Based on the three criteria of interest, influence and impact, it is possible to propose a typology of relevant parties you should try and engage with (Table 2). In traditional stakeholder analyses, those with low interest and low influence are termed “the crowd” and are often deprioritized or “crowded out” of subsequent engagement. However, this may exclude those who are not interested or influential, but who may be significantly impacted. Using the interest-influence-impact (or 3i) approach, it is only legitimate to deprioritize those who have limited interest, influence and impact; the “uninterested” category in Table 2.
To get started, go to this Google Sheets template (to make this your own, in the Google Sheets menu, go to File > Make a copy to save an editable version). You can use this individually now, or you can use it to structure a discussion with colleagues. I sometimes invite a few internal and/or external colleagues to discuss this with me in a workshop setting, transferring the template onto the walls of the room using flip-chart paper and marker pens (see the workshop plan below).
Figure 1: The 3i framework for stakeholder analysis, showing two levels at which the relevant interest, influence and impact of different groups relevant to your research may be considered (from Reed et al., under review).
Table 1: Questions to identify who is most relevant to engage with, based on the dimensions of interest, influence and impact, including questions to facilitate analysis at both the primary and secondary levels described in Figure 1 (from Reed et al., under review).
Dimension of the analysis | Primary level questions | Secondary level questions |
Interest | Which parties are already interested and what is the nature of their interest?
Who else would you like do you think should be interested?
|
|
Influence | Which parties have the power to facilitate development of positive or negative impacts in relation to this issue, intervention, project, process or decision?
Who has the power to block development of these impacts?
Who or what can they influence and at what geographical, social or other scale? |
|
Impact | Which parties might benefit most in the short-term from initial engagement with this issue, intervention, project, process or decision?
Which parties may be disadvantaged or harmed most in the short-term, from initial engagement with this issue, intervention, project, process or decision?
| Which parties might benefit most in the long-term as a result of the issue, intervention, project, process or decision as it plays out?
Which parties may be disadvantaged or harmed most in the long-term, as this issue, intervention, project, process or decision plays out?
|
Table 2: Typology of relevant parties that should be included in engagement processes (from Reed et al., under review).
Type of relevant party | Interest | Influence | Impact |
Uninterested | Low | Low | Low |
Uninterested and impacted | Low | Low | High |
Uninterested influencers | Low | High | Low |
Uninterested, influential and impacted | Low | High | High |
Only interested | High | Low | Low |
Interested and impacted | High | Low | High |
Interested influencers | High | High | Low |
Interested, influential and impacted | High | High | High |
Figure 2: 3i analysis template showing a worked example
Question 1: Who is interested in my research?
The first question you need to ask yourself is who might be interested in your research. They can just be a little bit interested, and they can be interested in just one aspect of your research (e.g. your method or theory, or one research finding versus another depending on the outcome of your work). In some cases, you may want to identify groups that you think are not (currently) interested in your research, who you would like to be interested, or who you think are important for other reasons (e.g. they may be particularly influential or impacted - see the following questions). Any organisation (or individual or group) may be interested in many different things - your task is simply to list those interest that coincide with your research interests.
Write the name of each group, organisation or person you think may be interested in the first column of the template (Figure 2), describing the nature of their interest in the second column. You will start to notice that different groups have quite different interests, and you will be able to use this later on to craft tailored messages to each one as you embark on your pathway to impact.
Question 2: How might they influence my ability to achieve impact (indirectly)?
Now you need to consider if there are any groups or organisations who might have the ability to influence your ability to achieve impact indirectly. Indirect influence over impact can work in two ways:
Those who have the ability to facilitate your impact - organisations or groups who want to achieve similar benefits for similar groups to you, who may provide you with important new opportunities or resources that could empower you to achieve greater impacts than would have been possible had you not connected with them. The earlier you connect, the more buy-in they will have and the more they are likely to help you (and vice versa).
Those who have the ability to block your impact - organisations whose interests are compromised or harmed by your work, whether in practical or ideological terms. They may have the power to prevent you from achieving impacts and it is important for both pragmatic and moral reasons to engage early with these groups to ensure you do not have negative unintended impacts, and/or you can bring round dissenting voices and find a way to work together (or work around them if necessary)
Consider how influential each of the interested groups might be, whether they might facilitate or block your impact, rating them high, medium or low. Again, the key is to understand the nature of their influence. The ratings are subjective but should stimulate you to think more deeply about the question. Describe how you think each group could influence your ability to generate impact in the third column.
Question 3: Who is impacted?
Finally, there is a question about the level and nature of impact for each group who engages with your work. You will often realise that the impact is implicit (rather than explicit) in your answers so far. In particular, it is important to consider if there may be a negative impact here, so you can ameliorate this if possible. Add information about the positive or negative impacts you think each group might get from engaging with your work in the fourth column. Your answers to this question may also help you refine the goals in your impact plan.
The final two columns give you space to write about anything else that you discover about the group as part of your analysis. In the worked example, I have noted that the organisation is a charity who are overstretched and will need to know the direct benefits to their operations, before they are likely to engage. Lastly, you will need to be able to contact each of the organisations you have identified. If you have researched them online and have found publicly available contact details, you can insert them. However, if you are doing this in a workshop with colleagues, you will need to write your colleagues’ names rather than the names and contact details of people in the organisation, as this is personal data. You can then follow up with the relevant colleague and ask to be introduced, if you decide to prioritise engaging with that organisation. You will also have the advantage of being more likely to be trusted, as a colleague of a known contact. You can do this yourself, but I tend to find that the process is more rewarding (and enjoyable) if you do it with colleagues. If possible, invite people who engage regularly with external groups, and maybe even invite two or three external colleagues into your workshop, if you have people you know well enough to ask for this kind of help.
3i analysis workshop plan
If you want to do the analysis in a workshop, you will need to print off the headings from Table Z and blow up the table onto flip chart paper, placing the printed headings at the top of the columns you draw on the flip chart paper (Figure 3).
Figure 3: Images from a 3i analysis conducted for the UK government's Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, February 2016
If you are doing this as a workshop with external participants, it is important to make sure you’ve got ethics approval from your University to do this, as this is a social science research method. You’ll need to provide everyone with a consent form, ensuring that they are fully aware of how you will use the data. Confidentiality is really important in any stakeholder analysis, as you will be sharing opinions about organisations and possibly individuals, which may or may not be flattering, and may cause embarrassment (or worse) if put into the public domain. Here’s my workshop plan:
1. Introductions, ethics and consent forms, emphasising need for confidentiality
2. Introduction to the analysis:
Introduce 3i analysis as a method and clarify the scope of the analysis by geographical scale, sector etc. (where will you draw the line between who is clearly in or out e.g. national or sectoral boundaries)
Explain headings and method by doing a worked example through discussion with the group with an organisation that most people know something about in row 1 of the table
Individually, get everyone to identify additional groups or organisations, trying to avoid creating duplicates, and work through the columns, discussing with colleagues where necessary (to save space and enable efficient working, either write directly on the sheets or use post-it notes with pens provided)
3. Checking:
All participants to check the work done by other participants, adding comments with post-it notes where there is disagree or don’t understand
Facilitated discussion of key points that people feel should be discussed as a group about organisations where there is particular disagreement or confusion and resolve these where possible (accepting differing views where it is not possible to resolve differences)
4. Next steps:
What happens with this analysis – emphasise anonymity and care around sharing drafts electronically etc
When can people expect to receive the write-up
Equipment list:
Post-its
Flip chart paper
Flip chart pens
Blutak
Consent forms
Pre-printed large text table headers for stakeholder analysis
Selotape and scissors for attaching table headers
Act now
Choose your top three organisations, groups or people, and make a plan to reach out to them. If someone is upset that you missed them out, then you can explain why you started where you did, and you will get to them when you have time. But you don't have time to reach out to everyone who might conceivably be interested in your research. So cut yourself some slack, and focus your energies. Use this tool to prioritise who you reach out to first, and do so intelligently.
There will be no more blanket emails now. Each of your top three organisations will get an email tailored to their interests and priorities, because you know what they're interested in and how your research might be able to help, based on this analysis. There's nothing disingenuous about this. You are opening a channel of empathy based on your analysis, identifying the things that you can most effectively help them with. The result is that you will get responses to your emails, and in most cases you will get a "yes" to the suggestion to meet up or discuss how you might be able to work together.
You have started your pathway to impact.
Further reading
To find out more about the 3i analysis approach, you will soon be able to read the full, peer-reviewed paper, which will be linked here once it is published.
About the Author
Mark Reed is Professor of Rural Entrepreneurship and Director of the Thriving Natural Capital Challenge Centre at Scotland’s Rural College (SRUC), and a Visiting Professor at Newcastle University, Birmingham City University and the University of Leeds. He has over 200 publications that have been cited more than 20,000 times, and has won awards for the non-academic impact of his research. He is author of The Research Impact Handbook, The Productive Researcher and Impact Culture and CEO of Fast Track Impact. He provides training and advice to Universities, research funders, NGOs and policy-makers internationally
Read his research on stakeholder analysis:
Reed MS, Graves A, Dandy N, Posthumus H, Hubacek K, Morris J, Prell C, Quinn CH, Stringer LC (2009) Who’s in and why? Stakeholder analysis as a prerequisite for sustainable natural resource management. Journal of Environmental Management 90: 1933–1949.
Reed MS, Curzon R (2015) Stakeholder mapping for the governance of biosecurity: a literature review. Journal of Integrative Environmental Sciences 12: 15–38.
