Best practices for facilitating stakeholder mapping sessions and workshops.
Take your time. You can save and return at any point. Many teams work on it across multiple sessions or divide it up by stakeholder category.
Yes — you can and should update your stakeholder map later. Stakeholder landscapes are dynamic. Revisit the map whenever there are significant changes to your project or context.
Stakeholder mapping should be done at the site level — that is, for each village, jurisdiction, or defined local area where your project is being implemented. This ensures that the relationships, risks, and opportunities you identify are grounded in the lived realities of each place.
As your project evolves, you may add more sites over time. Mapping at the site level supports locally informed decision-making and allows the Theory of Change to be co-created at the grassroots level.
The platform will then aggregate your responses, so you can generate both site-level reports and an overall project-level report — supporting both detailed community engagement and high-level accountability.
It’s mostly forward-looking. But reflecting on past relationships or decisions can help identify risks or gaps in your current approach.
Yes. If a stakeholder is relevant to more than one site, you should include them in each site-level stakeholder map. Their role, influence, risks, and benefits may vary from one site to another — and mapping them separately helps you capture those differences.
This also ensures that when reports are aggregated at the project level, you have a complete and context-sensitive view of each stakeholder's involvement across the project.