Co-operative Assistance Network Limited

Deeper insights into and a shared understanding of stakeholders and their needs will result in better planning, more appropriate governance, systemic improvements, greater efficiency, an increased chance of survival and better outcomes.

An organisation will struggle or fail if it doesn’t operate in the interests of its key stakeholder group, balance the interests of all its stakeholder groups and involve stakeholder groups in governance appropriately. Therefore it’s crucial for an organisation to know and understand its stakeholder groups and their needs.

It is tempting to assume that an intuitive understanding of stakeholder groups will suffice – and indeed that may have got you this far – but deeper insights and a shared understanding that lead to improved stakeholder engagement will result in better planning, more appropriate governance, systemic improvements, greater efficiency, an increased chance of survival and better outcomes.

Carrying out an analysis of stakeholders may have some surprising results and may change perspectives. In any case, times change and it is important to keep up with stakeholders’ changing needs.

A stakeholder analysis report can provide evidence to funders and supporters and is a crucial component of any corporate feasibility study. It is necessary for social enterprises and community businesses in particular to have a detailed understanding of, and rich relationships with, their stakeholders.

Taking all the above into consideration, we can conclude that the best times to carry out a stakeholder analysis exercise are during the enterprise design phase and at regular intervals thereafter.

Why are we telling you this? Because – drawing on our extensive experience in this field – we’ve just upgraded, tried and tested the tool that we use for this exercise and would like to suggest that now would be a good time to engage us to carry out this analysis with you. Our report will include all the findings and recommendations, and a record of any agreed action plan against which progress can be monitored.

The tool we use is fully optimised and our consultants are experts in this field, so it may not take as long as you might imagine. This keeps costs right down so that it is affordable to smaller enterprises.

If this service might be of interest to you, please visit this page of our website for more details and an idea of how much (or little!) it might cost.

Photo by Mareks Mangūzis on Unsplash