The Complete Guide to Creating a Stakeholder Profile
In stakeholder engagement, consultation, and project management, you’ll hear a lot about the importance of analyzing and mapping your stakeholders. But one (often overlooked) aspect of these processes is profiling.
In this guide, we break down what stakeholder profiles are, why they’re worth creating, the key components to include in a profile, and when to undertake stakeholder profiling.
What is a Stakeholder Profile?
A stakeholder profile is a simplified, written overview of one of your key stakeholders and their relevant characteristics. It could be:
- Based on a real individual you’re already engaging with — and what you already know about them
- Based on an imagined stakeholder you haven’t yet engaged with, or that you don’t know much about
- Developed to represent the shared/common characteristics of a group of stakeholders
Stakeholder profiles look a little like the personas you might come across in sales and marketing. The biggest difference is that they focus on characteristics and behaviors that are most likely to impact the organization or project — and how you can best engage or consult with them.
These profiles are commonly used in the stakeholder assessment process. As you identify each stakeholder (people, groups, and organizations that may have an influence on, an interest in, or be impacted by your work), it can be helpful to create stakeholder profiles that help you deepen your understanding of these stakeholders. But as you’ll see in the next section, stakeholder profiles can allow you to tap into many other benefits at each stage of the consultation and engagement process.
Importance of Stakeholder Profiles
Once you incorporate stakeholder profiles into your consultation process and organization’s workflows, you won’t look back. They offer numerous benefits that help you more effectively analyze stakeholders, run engagements, and successfully undertake projects. Stakeholder profiles can help to:
Enhance Communication
Profiles can be an invaluable tool for better stakeholder communication, with insights that help you tailor your communication style, frequency, and content to the needs and preferences of each stakeholder. And by having an easy reference point into each stakeholders’ goals and interests, you can tailor your messages to resonate with individuals, increasing the likelihood that they’ll pay attention to your communications and respond.
Improve Decision-Making
Make better-informed decisions with clear data and insights in front of you in an easy-to-access format. Refer to your stakeholder profiles to consider how decisions might impact specific stakeholders or groups, while anticipating their reactions and concerns so that you can proactively address them.
Identify Knowledge Gaps
By filling out profiles for key stakeholders, you will quickly identify gaps in your knowledge so you can conduct targeted research to complete your profiles. For example, you might discover that you know very little about the relationships or interactions of several very influential stakeholders. Or you might find a general lack of information about the communication preferences of stakeholders — and plan to tackle this with several questions in an upcoming survey.
Reveal Stakeholder Needs and Influence
A large part of the stakeholder profile is focused on the needs and influence of stakeholders, including the people and groups they’re more likely to influence via their relationships and interactions. Stakeholder profiling can help you identify influential stakeholders — that is, those who have a higher chance of impacting project success or failure — so that you can prioritize your engagement efforts.
Develop Strategies for Engagement
Finally, you can use your stakeholder profiles as a tool for developing targeted engagement strategies specific to stakeholder characteristics, influence, impact, risk, and more. With a clear overview of stakeholder interests, goals, and priorities, you can take a more strategic engagement approach that maximizes resource utilization and increases stakeholder participation at key points throughout the project and consultation period.
Key Components of a Stakeholder Profile
What goes into a stakeholder profile? Generally speaking, each profile should include a mixture of demographics and psychographics, giving you a clear understanding of the stakeholder and how they might respond to your engagement, consultation, or project. Here, we’ll break down some of the common components to include when stakeholder profiling.
Identifying Information
If your profile is based on a real stakeholder, start by including the identifying information you have, such as:
- Name
- Position/role
- Organization
- Contact information
If your profile is based on an imagined stakeholder you haven’t yet engaged with, it may still be helpful to fill in a name, position, and organization for someone you could potentially engage with in your project.
Communication Preferences
In this section, add details about the types of communications your stakeholder may want or need to receive, including:
- Types of messages, information, or updates about the project
- How they’d like to be contacted or stay in touch, such as via email, email newsletters, phone call, SMS, event attendance, face-to-face meetings, or social media
- How often they’d expect to hear from you (which may vary depending on the stage of the project)
Most stakeholders will expect to hear different types of messages across different channels, at different frequencies. For example, SMS messages are typically for urgent issues or reminders, and they may expect a general project update via a weekly, fortnightly, or monthly email newsletter.
Level of Influence
Influence is one of the key criteria used in stakeholder mapping — but you can also note a stakeholder’s level of influence on their profile, with scores ranging from very low to very high. A stakeholder with low influence is less likely to impact the project decisions or outcomes. However, a stakeholder with high influence is likely in a position to make decisions, able to sway key decision makers, or has the ability to influence a larger group of stakeholders.
Alignment With Goals
On your stakeholder profile, make note of any goals your stakeholder has or is likely to have, based on their role, position, and interests. It may be helpful to break these into:
- Aligned goals – Goals that benefit the stakeholder and organization/project, help to build better relationships, or create opportunities for mutual success
- Neutral goals – Goals that don’t significantly impact the project, organization, or project (although they may become relevant later)
- Conflicting goals – Goals that may be problematic for the relationship, organization, or project, and require careful management or even compromise
Notable Interactions and Relationships
Based on your engagement so far, or what you know about your stakeholder’s role or position, note down any key relationships or interactions they’re likely to have. These may be people that your stakeholder can influence — or that have an influence over your stakeholder.
Potential Risks and Challenges
Note down any potential risks and challenges that may arise during the project or engagement based on what you already know about your stakeholder, including their influence, relationships, and goals. For example, you might note any competing priorities, previous negative experiences, likelihood of opposition, and/or willingness to participate in the engagement process. These notes will help inform your engagement strategies and make plans to manage stakeholder risk early on.
Example Stakeholder Profile
To help you create your first stakeholder profile, we’ve filled out an example below for a large developer planning a new land development. One of their key stakeholders is a community organization leader with a high level of influence, plenty of relevant relationships, and a mixture of aligned, neutral, and competing goals.
When to Use a Stakeholder Profile
Although stakeholder profiles are always helpful (at any stage of your consultation or engagement), they become more critical at certain parts in the process and more valuable in certain situations. You should ensure you reference your stakeholder profiles closely when:
- Analyzing Stakeholders – Especially when a more in-depth, structured, or detailed understanding of key stakeholders is required for your engagement.
- Undertaking Long-Term Engagements – In order to maintain consistency across all stakeholder interactions, even when staff come and go.
- Engaging on a Global Level – Capture local context, language, time zones, communication needs, and nuances for different regions.
- Working to Personalize Communications – Hone in on stakeholder needs, preferences, and channels in order to tailor message content, tone, and approach for each group or individual.
The more complex or high-stakes your engagement, the more you can benefit from knowing specific details about your stakeholders.
How to Create a Stakeholder Profile in 5 Steps
Let’s break down five key steps involved in creating a stakeholder profile similar to the example we shared previously.
Step 1: Identify Stakeholders
Start by identifying your stakeholders — the people and groups that are impacted by, have an influence on, or an interest in your organization, project, or work. Get the basics on what a stakeholder is here.
Then you’ll need to hone in on your key stakeholders. With many organizations having hundreds (and even thousands) of individual stakeholders, it’s unrealistic to create a stakeholder profile for everyone. By identifying key stakeholders, you’ll know you’re focusing your efforts on the right stakeholders, ensuring that the insights in your profiles add real value to your engagement.
Step 2: Gather Data
In order to fill out your stakeholder profiles, you’ll need data on your stakeholders. Common methods of gathering stakeholder data include:
- Surveys – Use online questionnaires or in-person paper surveys to gather information on your stakeholder demographics, concerns, priorities, attitudes, and preferences.
- Interviews – Use one-on-one structured interviews or semi-structured conversations to explore topics and preferences with key stakeholders and leaders.
- Research – Explore any available sources that may provide insights into your stakeholders, such as reports, public records, social media insights, historical project documentation, media coverage, statements, demographics, socioeconomic data, and more.
The more methods you can employ to gather stakeholder data, the more confidence you can have in your findings. That said, it’s okay to work with what you’ve got, especially in the beginning. You’ll be able to review and update your stakeholder profiles down the track as you learn more about your stakeholders.
Step 3: Analyze and Categorize Information
Once you’ve gathered your data, you’ll need to analyze it and categorize it. This will help you determine what information is most salient for the project or engagement and therefore, belongs in your stakeholder profiles.
Popular stakeholder analysis methods such as stakeholder mapping, relationship mapping, sentiment analysis, and issues tagging can help you sort through the information and summarize your findings.
Step 4: Develop Detailed Profiles
Now it’s time to actually create your stakeholder profiles with the sections we touched upon previously. Standard sections include identifying information, communication preferences, interests/influence, goals, interactions/relationships, and risks/challenges. However, you may choose to customize your profiles with different characteristics that better fit your engagement approach and project.
Step 5: Regularly Review and Update
Lastly, it’s important to revisit your stakeholder profiles regularly to make sure they are up to date and still relevant to your organization or project. This can involve retiring the profiles of stakeholders that are no longer involved, creating new profiles for new key stakeholders, and updating the characteristics and preferences of your stakeholders as they evolve — or as you learn more.
Build Comprehensive Stakeholder Profiles With Simply Stakeholders
It’s clear that stakeholder profiles can be an important tool for effectively planning and engaging with stakeholders — well worth the time and effort required to develop and update them. Fortunately, it’s easier to create, use, and update your profiles with the right tools and technology.
With Simply Stakeholders, you can build a dynamic stakeholder register that’s always up-to-date. Click into individual stakeholder profiles to see key information like demographics, influence, interests, preferences, and any other data you like, thanks to custom field capabilities. Plus, see a complete history of your interaction with that stakeholder. Then zoom out to see the big picture, analyze your stakeholders, generate stakeholder maps, track your engagement, develop reports, and so much more.
Want to know more? Check out the full list of features or book a demo to see Simply Stakeholders in action!
