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Stakeholders’ mappings

I wanted to talk today about a simple idea I use.

One thing I realize when I read evaluation ToRs or reports is how few of them have a nice Stakeholders Mapping, that really helps you understand who is involved in the program in an easy-to-absorb way.

In some cases, they describe the actors involved in the intervention in one/some paragraphs; best case scenario, they add a simple table with the name of the stakeholder on the left column and their role in the program on the right, but rarely something more sophisticated.

However, as usual, Data Visualization offers us easy-to-use ideas to display the similar information but, at the same time, providing with extra information embedded in a more visual format.

So, what I am doing in my reports lately, (both in the methodology report and the evaluation report, but it could also be used in ToRs too), is to represent them using this type of matrix:

Each stakeholder is represented in a box, and they are placed according to some criteria, such as if they are “internal” to the organization (an actor within the same larger organization – in this case, this was done for a national society of a larger network of organizations) or external to the network, and at the same time, whether they operate at international, national or local level (or several of them).
In this other example, instead of classing them between internal or external, I wanted to highlight if they were part of the government institutions or if they belonged to the private / civil society. I also used the backgroung color of the box to represent which ones where central (more direct partners), and which ones were less directly involved. Finally, because this was for deciding the sample of people to be consulted, I used the last row to depict all groups in the population we needed to take into account:

Additionally, we could use the size of the box (such as in a bubble chart) or the color or hue to depict their relevance… or any other interesting variables.

As you can see, these are pretty simple ideas that can be done quite easily (these were all done in Powerpoint), that may bring some additional clarity for those who are not familiar with the program and the actors involved in it – but also sometimes to the ones that are.

Hope it is somehow useful. Thanks for stopping by! 🙂

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