Related guide: Community engagement planning: from the decision to a working plan
Stakeholder mapping is identifying everyone who is affected by, or can affect, a decision. Stakeholder analysis is the next step: assessing each group's stake (how they are affected), their influence and what they need in order to take part, so you can decide how to engage them. Mapping tells you who; analysis tells you what to do about them. In community engagement, a good analysis ends in written commitments: which groups you will reach, by what methods, and how you will remove the barriers that keep them out.
This guide walks through how to do stakeholder analysis step by step, explains the power/interest grid most teams start with, shows where that grid falls short for public decisions, and works through a hypothetical stakeholder map example you can adapt.
What is the difference between stakeholder mapping and stakeholder analysis?
The two terms are often used interchangeably, and most real exercises do both in one sitting. It still helps to separate them, because teams that stop at mapping end up with a long list and no plan.
Stakeholder mapping answers "who is out there?" It produces a broad list of people, groups and organizations connected to the decision, often drawn as a diagram, a grid or a network.
Stakeholder analysis answers "so what?" For each group, it records how they are affected, how much influence they have, what has shaped their views, what stops them participating and what engagement they need.
In practice, the map is the raw material and the analysis is where the judgment happens. The output that matters is not the diagram. It is the set of engagement commitments that follow from it.
How to do stakeholder analysis, step by step
The steps below work for anything from a playground upgrade to a regional transport strategy. Scale the depth to the decision, not the other way around.
Start from the decision and what is open to influence. Write down the decision being made, who makes it, and which parts the community can genuinely shape. Note the constraints (budget, legislation, technical limits, decisions already made). This is the step most teams skip, and it is the reason many stakeholder maps send good outreach in the wrong direction.
List stakeholders broadly. Brainstorm everyone affected by, interested in or able to influence the decision. Include residents, businesses, community organizations, service users, people who travel through the area, elected members, internal teams, other agencies, Indigenous groups and rights holders where relevant, and people who are hard to reach or rarely heard. Ask who would be surprised or upset to learn the decision was made without them.
Refine and group. Turn vague categories into groups you could actually find and contact. "Residents" becomes "renters within a few blocks of the site". "Youth" becomes "students at the two local high schools". Group stakeholders who share a stake and can be reached the same way, and split groups whose interests differ.
Assess stake and influence. For each group, describe how the decision affects them (daily life, livelihood, access, safety, cost, cultural values) and how much influence they have over the project, formally or informally. Write a sentence, not just a score. The reasoning is what your colleagues will need later.
Identify barriers to taking part. For each group, ask what would stop them participating: time, language, disability, caregiving, shift work, distrust from past processes, digital access, transport, or simply not knowing the project exists. These barriers drive your method choices more than any other factor.
Decide the engagement approach and commitments per group. Set the level of participation on offer (inform, consult, involve, collaborate), the methods that address each group's barriers, who will lead the relationship, and any partner organizations who can help you reach people. Record what you are committing to, so it can be resourced and checked.
Review coverage. Step back and look at the whole map. Who is missing? Which highly affected groups have weak engagement plans? Are you relying on the same organized voices that always turn up? Test the map with someone outside the project team, ideally a community partner.
Keep it updated. Power and interest shift once engagement starts. New groups emerge, quiet groups get organized, and some concerns are resolved. Revisit the map at each phase and after each major round of engagement, and track who you actually reached against who you committed to reach.
A useful precision test for every row: is this specific enough for someone on the team to find, contact and engage these people next week? If not, refine it further.
Turn stakeholder mapping into a structured engagement commitment.
Get the one-page field reference and use it in your next engagement project.
What is a power/interest grid?
The power/interest grid (also called the power/interest matrix) is the most widely used stakeholder mapping tool. It places each stakeholder on two axes: how much power they have to influence the project, and how much interest they have in it. The tool is widely attributed to management researcher Aubrey Mendelow, which is why it is often called Mendelow's matrix. The grid looks like this:
Each quadrant suggests a default way of engaging:
Manage closely (high power, high interest). Key players who can shape or stop the project and care about the outcome: decision makers, major landowners, key partner agencies, organized advocacy groups. Engage them early and often, and involve them in shaping options where that is genuinely open.
Keep satisfied (high power, low interest). People with authority or resources who are not paying much attention: senior executives, regulators, funding bodies, some elected members. Keep them briefed at key moments so they are not surprised, without overloading them.
Keep informed (low power, high interest). People who care a great deal but have little formal influence: residents, local groups, service users. Keep them updated, give them clear ways to have their say, and report back on what changed.
Monitor (low power, low interest). Everyone else. Provide general information and watch for changes, because a group in this quadrant can move quickly once a project becomes visible.
The grid is quick, easy to explain and good at surfacing who can derail a project. That is exactly why it was designed: to help organizations manage stakeholders around a project's success. Public decisions ask a different question.
Where does the power/interest grid fall short in community engagement?
Used on its own, the grid tends to point engagement effort at the people who need it least. Four problems come up again and again.
Interest is not the same as being affected
Interest measures attention. Many people who will live with the consequences of a decision have no idea it is being made, or have no time to follow it. A renter facing a rent increase from a rezoning may show low interest on the grid simply because nobody told them. Plotting them as low interest records the gap in your outreach, not their stake in the outcome.
Quiet and under-represented groups land in "monitor"
Groups with low formal power and low visible interest drift to the bottom left: people with limited English, shift workers, young people, people with disability, households under financial stress, communities who have stopped trusting your organization. The grid's advice for that quadrant is to watch and inform. For a public decision, these are often the people you most need to hear from.
It measures influence on the project, not who the decision affects
The grid was built for project and organizational risk. Its power axis asks who can help or harm the project. Community engagement starts from a different obligation: hearing from the people affected by a public decision, in proportion to how they are affected. A grid that ranks by influence will consistently favor the organized, the resourced and the already connected.
It says nothing about barriers
Knowing a group is important does not tell you how to reach them. The grid has no column for language, access, timing or trust, which are the things that decide whether people actually take part.
A better map: stake, influence and barriers
The fix is not to throw the grid away but to change its first axis and add a third question. Map stake (how much and in what ways the decision affects each group) against influence, then record the barriers each group faces. Treat high-stake, low-influence groups as the priority for deliberate outreach, not the group to monitor. High-influence groups will usually find you; your engagement budget should go to the people who will not otherwise be heard.
This changes what the map means. Naming a group as highly affected and under-represented is not a description. It is a commitment to put real resources (time, translated materials, partner support, different methods) into reaching them. It also means being honest that you will not actively pursue every group on the list. A stakeholder map is a decision about how to spend limited effort fairly.
A stakeholder map example
Here is a stakeholder map example for a hypothetical project: a council plans to change on-street parking and redesign the streetscape on a two-block town center main street, adding wider sidewalks, seating and a protected bike lane. Open for influence: the layout of the street, loading zones, the mix of parking types and the construction staging. Not open: whether the project proceeds, which council has already funded.
Stakeholder group | Stake (how affected) | Influence | Barriers to taking part | Engagement approach |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Main street business owners | High: customer access, deliveries, trading during construction | High: organized through a business association, direct line to elected members | Cannot leave the shop during trading hours | Involve: walk-the-street sessions before opening, one-on-one visits, a business reference group on staging and loading |
Residents living above or behind the shops | High: parking for their own cars, noise, access during works | Low to medium | Not visible to the project; many are renters who assume they have no say | Consult: doorknock and letterbox drop, short survey on parking needs, evening drop-in session |
Older people and people with disability who use the main street | High: accessible parking, crossing safety, seating, footpath surfaces | Low | Mobility, digital access, venue accessibility | Involve: accessible site walk with a disability advocacy partner, sessions at the seniors center and library, large-print and phone options |
Shift workers and employees of main street businesses | Medium: where they park, safety walking at night | Low | Irregular hours, not reached by resident or business channels | Consult: survey distributed through employers, QR codes in staff areas, short intercept conversations at shift change |
People who cycle or would cycle if it felt safe | Medium: route safety and connections | Medium: active advocacy group | Low for the advocacy group; high for people who do not cycle yet and are not organized | Consult: online survey and map, intercept surveys at the school and station, a briefing with the cycling group |
Shoppers and visitors from surrounding suburbs | Medium: ease of parking and access | Low individually | Not local, unlikely to see project notices | Inform and consult: on-street signage, short survey promoted through business channels and social media |
Delivery and freight operators | Medium: loading zone location and times | Medium | Hard to identify individual operators | Consult: contact through the businesses they serve and any industry association, targeted questions on loading |
Elected members and internal teams (traffic, parks, emergency services) | Low personal stake; responsible for the decision or affected operations | High | Competing priorities | Keep satisfied and involve where relevant: briefings at milestones, technical workshop on emergency access |
Notice what a pure power/interest grid would have done here. Business owners and elected members would sit in "manage closely". Residents above the shops, shift workers and older people with mobility needs would have been somewhere between "keep informed" and "monitor". The stake-and-barriers view moves them to the center of the plan and tells you exactly how to reach them.
Two practice notes. First, keep the raw map internal. Placements are judgments made in context, and a published grid that ranks a community group as "low influence" can do real damage. Publish the commitments instead: who you have committed to hear from and how. Second, record the partners you will rely on and agree their role in writing (who they will reach, about what, by when). Partner relationships without a clear brief tend to become symbolic.
Stakeholder mapping tools and templates
You do not need specialist software to do good stakeholder analysis. Most teams use one of these:
A spreadsheet or table. One row per group, with columns for stake, influence, barriers, engagement approach, lead and status. It is the most practical format because it can be sorted, shared and updated as the project moves.
A whiteboard or sticky-note workshop. Good for the brainstorming and grouping steps, and for getting a project team to argue productively about who matters. Photograph it, then move the results into a table.
The power/interest grid. Useful as a quick visual, especially for internal stakeholders and project risk. Pair it with a stake column and a barriers column so it does not become the whole analysis.
Network or relationship maps. Helpful when you need to understand who influences whom, or which community organizations can connect you to groups you cannot reach directly.
If you want a structured starting point, try our free stakeholder mapping tool, which walks you through identifying groups, assessing stake and influence and capturing barriers. To turn the result into a document, our stakeholder engagement plan template sets out the sections that carry the analysis into a plan.
From analysis to engagement commitments
Stakeholder analysis is only worth doing if it changes what happens next. Each row of the map should lead directly into the rest of your community engagement plan:
Methods. Choose methods to address each group's barriers, not out of habit. If shift workers cannot attend evening sessions, a well-run workshop will not reach them.
Content. Ask each group about the decisions they can actually influence, in language that makes sense to them.
Resources. Budget for the outreach your priority groups need: interpreters, partner payments, accessible venues, extra time.
Reach targets. Set out who you expect to hear from, then compare it with who actually took part. Gaps tell you where to adjust while there is still time.
Reporting back. Close the loop with each group, including the ones who did not come to anything, on what you heard and what changed.
This sequence matters. A common pattern: a team runs a stakeholder mapping workshop in the first week, invests heavily in outreach, and only later admits that the option residents cared most about was never on the table. The outreach was good; the order was wrong. Map stakeholders after you are clear on the decision, the constraints and the level of influence on offer. Our guide to community engagement planning sets out that full process.
On infrastructure, the map also changes by phase. Landowners and affected residents may be the focus in planning and approvals, while businesses on detour routes and the contractor's own community liaison become central during construction. Our guide to community engagement for construction and infrastructure projects covers how stakeholders and engagement levels shift through the project lifecycle.
Making the map part of the project
The most common failure in stakeholder analysis is not a bad map. It is a good map that sits in a workshop folder while the project moves on. Keep it short enough to use, specific enough to act on, and current enough to trust. Revisit it whenever the decision, the timeline or the people involved change.
In CE Canvas, the stakeholder map lives in the project record, so the groups, stakes and barriers you identify carry straight through to method choices, reach tracking and the report back to the community. See how it works.
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between stakeholder mapping and stakeholder analysis?
Stakeholder mapping identifies who is affected by, or can affect, a decision. Stakeholder analysis assesses each group's stake, influence and barriers to taking part, and uses that to decide how to engage them. Mapping produces the list; analysis produces the engagement commitments.
What is a power interest grid?
A power interest grid (also called a power/interest matrix or Mendelow's matrix) plots stakeholders by their power to influence a project and their interest in it. The four quadrants suggest how to engage each group: manage closely, keep satisfied, keep informed or monitor. In community engagement, pair it with a measure of how affected each group is and the barriers they face, so quiet but highly affected groups are not overlooked.
Who should be included in a stakeholder analysis?
Include everyone who is affected by the decision or can influence it: residents, businesses, community organizations, service users, people who travel through or use the area, Indigenous groups and rights holders where relevant, elected members, internal teams and other agencies. Pay particular attention to people who are highly affected but rarely heard, such as renters, young people, people with disability and people with limited English.
How often should a stakeholder map be updated?
Review it at each project phase and after each major round of engagement, and whenever the decision, timeline or scope changes. Stakeholders' interest and influence shift once engagement begins, and new groups often emerge. Compare who you actually reached with who you committed to reach, and adjust.
What is a stakeholder map example?
A simple example is a table with one row per stakeholder group and columns for stake (how they are affected), influence, barriers to taking part and the engagement approach. For a hypothetical main street parking and streetscape change, rows might include business owners, residents living above the shops, older people and people with disability, shift workers, people who cycle, visitors, delivery operators and internal teams.
Is the public a stakeholder?
Yes, but "the public" is too broad to plan around. Break it into specific groups defined by how they are affected and how you can reach them, such as renters near the site, parents at a local school or business owners on a detour route. Each group will need a different approach.