Harnessing the Policy Power of Stakeholder Mapping (Part 2 of 2)
Read Part 1: Bringing Design to the Public Policy Cycle
How to lead a workshop for stakeholder mapping
January 21, 2021 – By Hayley Pontia
In a perfect world, policymakers and designers work together to better understand the services they create. Working in a cross-functional team in government shouldn’t be a rarity but it’s still new to many. This blog describes how to pair policymakers and designers to use their skills to understand stakeholders so governments can design services specifically to meet stakeholder needs.
If you work in policy analysis or policymaking, you’re used to examining who holds a stake in the policy space and what they might support. Hopefully, you’ve looked at the users of a certain policy you’re implementing, too. But you might not be so sure where to begin or who your most important user is. It can be daunting to define the interconnected audiences, but it’s a necessary step to take before continuing your policy process.
Service designers use stakeholder maps to create visual representations of all the possible actors who can influence a particular project. Product teams in the business and financial sectors use stakeholder maps as tools to ensure projects are successful.
It’s not hard to start thinking about stakeholder mapping. As a policy analyst, you may have a list of stakeholders that appear in order of priority or power in the problem space, but you may not have a visual map of stakeholders. In the policy world, any person or organization can present obstacles or be powerful allies. A stakeholder map is an easy tool that has the potential to bring the user to the center of focus. At the same time, it helps policy projects and processes be more successful by clearly defining key players across teams.
If you’re a designer on a policy implementation team, you probably already create some version of a stakeholder map to identify your core users. But you might not think about the power that each of the stakeholders hold.
One simple visualization can give a cross-functional team a clearer understanding of the relationships of different actors who have a stake in the problem your team is trying to solve. They can begin seeing the dependencies among stakeholders. Through mapping this way, you can anticipate second-order effects by examining the impact not only on the core user but on all stakeholders in the map.
This is where the policy stakeholder workshop comes in.
Whether you’re a policy analyst, a design researcher, or someone else practicing user-centered policy design, the best practice is to collaborate. A workshop, which you can do in person or remotely, is a great place to start.
The Delivering Better Outcomes Working Group, led by the Beeck Center for Social Impact + Innovation designed an easy, step-by-step guide directed at policy makers and public servants. The goal is to help them better understand how their projects impact different actors and organizations in a policy ecosystem. Here’s an example of what an early first draft of a stakeholder map might look like.
The stakeholder mapping workshop can help public service teams focus on the people the policy is serving. This works through an adaptable template and simple steps for identifying and prioritizing people and organizations that care about a proposed policy. For the workshop, the guide includes scripted instructions about how to map the stakeholders in your problem space with a team. By looking at a visualization of various stakeholders, teams can create a shared understanding of the work they are doing. After mapping stakeholders, participants will have a clearer understanding of how a policy affects the core users.
Workshop Outline
The workshop is divided into two sessions of 50 minutes, and includes these activities:
Session 1 – 50 minutes
- Goal Setting (5 minutes)
- List all stakeholders (10 minutes)
- Identify the core user (5 minutes)
- Place and cluster (10-15 minutes)
- Categorize (10-15 minutes)
Session 2 – 30 minutes
- Catch-up (5 minutes)
- Political Analysis (15-20 minutes)
- Setting Actions (10 minutes)
A more detailed stakeholder mapping workshop template is available here.
Hayley Pontia was a 2020 Student Analyst at the Beeck Center for Social Impact + Innovation and graduated with a Master of Arts in Communication, Culture, and Technology from Georgetown University. Follow her at https://www.linkedin.com/in/hayleypontia/.