Stakeholder Identification

Last Updated: November, 2021

A key step to engaging the humans in human-centered design is identifying your stakeholders. This framework can help you think beyond well-represented and well-resourced groups, guiding you to place special value on the lived experience of those impacted by an issue.

Stakeholder ID is a tool we use on many of our community engagement projects here at CivicMakers, and is most commonly applied in the Discover phase.

Usage Tips

Recommended Roles: 1 Facilitator & 2-5 Participants 

• Conduct this activity with your project team. This can be done as a group, or compiled asynchronously.

Design & Facilitation Tips:

• Invite your project team or key stakeholders to help identify individuals, groups, or organizations that could be impacted by or have an interest in the outcome of a process or decision.
• Be sure to spend most of the time filling the two largest circles, emphasizing the importance of those with lived experience who are often the last to be consulted.
• Feel free to take this out into the real world! These circles can easily be drawn on a poster board, whiteboard, or simply grouped with post-its.

Next Steps: After identifying the range of stakeholders, use this framework to develop an engagement plan and Communications & Messaging Guidelines.

Acknowledgments 

This tool was developed by our team members Cristelle Blackford, Judi Brown, and Lawrence Grodeska.

Licensing

This work by CivicMakers, LLC is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

This license allows reusers to distribute, remix, adapt, and build upon the material in any medium or format for noncommercial purposes only, and only so long as attribution is given to the creator.