Campaigning Wiki

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Summary

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.

Body

A stakeholder analysis is the campaign’s directory of relevant actors — who can influence the outcome, who is affected by the issue, and what the campaign’s relationship strategy is for each group. The Community Tool Box lists “engaging stakeholders” as one of the core organising tools alongside assessing community needs and action planning, and treats stakeholder mapping as the bridge between analysis and intervention [source: community-tool-box]. The People Power Manual covers the same step under “Allies, constituents and targets” and publishes a dedicated “Power mapping” process guide and a “Spectrum of allies” handout — both of which are stakeholder analyses with different scoring dimensions [source: people-power-manual].

A useful stakeholder map names every relevant category of actor rather than only obvious allies: decision-makers, intermediate targets, affected communities, implementers, funders, media, and opposing coalitions. The Alliance for Justice’s Coalition Checklist — one of its Bolder Advocacy toolkits — makes the same point for coalitions specifically: the most common coalition failure is omitting a category of stakeholder whose opposition materialises only after launch [source: alliance-for-justice]. The Commons Library’s organising modules run stakeholder identification as a structured exercise with categories written on cards and placed on a wall, so missing groups are visible [source: commons-library].

The scoring step sorts actors along three axes — power (can they move the outcome?), interest (how much does the outcome matter to them?), position (are they for, against or undecided?). The People Power Manual’s “Allies, constituents and targets” chapter treats position as the variable that shifts during the campaign, which is why the map must be revised: a passive ally this month may be an active opponent next month [source: people-power-manual]. The Commons Library adds a fourth axis — legitimacy — adapted from Mitchell, Agle and Wood’s salience model, which distinguishes actors the campaign is obliged to engage from actors it merely could [source: commons-library].

The most common failure mode is to stop at identification. The Community Tool Box warns that a stakeholder list without an engagement plan (named owner, message, frequency, format) becomes a stale spreadsheet [source: community-tool-box]. The People Power Manual pairs the “Spectrum of allies” handout with a “Creating a tactical timeline” exercise precisely so each stakeholder category triggers a defined sequence of moves [source: people-power-manual].

Stakeholder analysis overlaps heavily with power-mapping and spectrum-of-allies but is broader: the power map focuses on the chain of influence around one target, the spectrum orders actors on one political axis, and stakeholder analysis is the full directory — including funders, media, internal team and other actors who never appear on either map. The Commons Library treats the three as nested, with stakeholder analysis as the outer ring [source: commons-library].

Use it for

Kick-off alignment on who matters; designing an engagement plan (per stakeholder: owner, message, cadence); deciding where to spend scarce relational time; coalition mapping; refresh after a major campaign event.

Open Questions

None yet.

Sources & verification

  • sources/people-power-manual — grounding: secondary — RAW (7977 chars)
  • sources/commons-library — grounding: secondary — RAW (5257 chars)
  • sources/alliance-for-justice — grounding: secondary — RAW (3917 chars)
  • sources/community-tool-box — grounding: secondary — RAW (833 chars)

Verified 2026-06-23 by llm-qc.

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