Any discussion of impact means thinking about who you are having (or would like to have) impact for. The best way to do this is as a team, with a variety of people who are likely to understand your stakeholders from different perspectives. Adding this diversity to the group will strengthen your outcomes.
About the exercise
Who is involved? Team work
⏳ Time: 1.5 hours
📄 Resources needed: print outs (A3 or bigger recommended) of the empathy map canvas; prepared digital canvas for online workshops; pens, post
✅ Outputs: full and prioritised list of stakeholders; empathy maps for your prioritised stakeholders
Step 1: stakeholder mapping
Write down (in a list, on post-its, or on your digital whiteboard) who you think the direct beneficiaries of your work are. Then you might think about who the indirect beneficiaries of your work are.
For example, it might look like this - this is a list for a hypothetical local heritage digitisation project with schools.
Direct stakeholders (beneficiaries)
School teachers
Pupils
Indirect stakeholders (beneficiaries)
Parents, guardians, family of pupils involved
Funders
Local community
You might notice that you have a very long list, and that there are differences over who you think directly or indirectly benefits from your activities or for whom you are doing the activity for. Make sure that you allow enough time for discussion.
Step 2: prioritise your stakeholders
Spending time in a discussion can really help to clarify - for everyone involved - who you really want to create change for. Knowing this will make a better project and a better impact assessment. You now need to prioritise your stakeholders to help you agree your focus. If you have many suggestions, start to cluster (bring together suggested stakeholders) who are similar. You could also:
Make a matrix where one axis is important-unimportant and the other is direct-indirect
Let your colleagues vote for the most important stakeholder
You should end up with one or a shortlist of prioritised stakeholders. Now it’s time to test what you know about them.
Step 3: empathy mapping
Divide your group into smaller groups and assign each one one of the prioritised stakeholders from your list. Use the empathy map to think about, organise and record what you think you know about stakeholders.
Take some time for this and feed back to the plenary group. If you have all taken different stakeholders, you can now discuss if everyone has the same perspective.
Ask each group:
Do we know enough about this stakeholder?
How might we find out more about this stakeholder?
Could we involve them in impact design (either for a project or impact assessment)?
Tip: Make sure the groups do not get too specific and spend too much time imagining what the stakeholder likes and doesn't like. Your primary job is to find out what this stakeholder experiences as pains and how your work can help relieve that pain (gains).
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