No matter where you are in your communications planning process one of the key principles that you must consider throughout is with whom you want to communicate. Being able to map the specifics of your stakeholders will make your planning, execution, and measurement success. Here’s a starting point for this mapping process.

Creating a detailed map of your audience landscape allows you to form strategies that will drive the maximum benefit to your organization while mitigating the potential negatives that may come from stakeholders who wish to do you harm, or whose neutrality means your business cannot flourish. It’s important that leaders understand the stakeholders outside their direct area of management – so that cross-functional needs and risks are considered as decisions are made. This is where your leadership team’s dialog begins and ends.

What’s the difference between a stakeholder and an audience? One simple definition of a stakeholder is that they have an active financial or values-based interest in the operation of an organization, whereas an audience is a mostly passive receiver of information. Yet stakeholders can also be exceedingly passive, until they are not, and audiences can sometimes be more active than we’d like - especially on social media.

If we don’t know whether we are communicating with a stakeholder or an audience, our framing and risk assessments can be completely at odds with expectations. Knowing whether you are primarily communicating with an audience, or a stakeholder frames the content and style of your delivery in quite fundamental ways and there might be legal implications around what you disclose and when, especially if you are a listed company. Ensuring the right people become spokespersons and advocates for an organization is a fundamental requirement of good stakeholder and audience management.

Let’s dig into which entities stakeholders can be. The term stakeholder is bandied about a lot. Traditionally business stakeholders have been those interest groups directly in the orbit of a company such as employees, customers, suppliers, and investors. These groups stand to directly benefit or lose based on the actions of the organization, either financially or reputationally - or perhaps both. But the range of groups who can be regarded as stakeholders has increased as business and the context in which it operates has evolved.

As social factors impact organizations, more stakeholder satellite groups are added as they drive forward with changes in their business models and practices, and as society and regulation takes a keener interest in the impact of the business on wider social and environmental needs. These additional categories often flip between stakeholder and audience depending on the companies and its associated industry’s behaviors. Many organizations were caught out in 2020 when they had to respond to a global pandemic to their nearest stakeholders but were also judged by wider audiences on just how they were responding.

Customers seems a very straightforward stakeholder category, but they may not be the same as users and often the folks paying the bills may have different needs from the users of the product or service. To focus on the bill-payer exclusively is to miss the opportunities of talking to the user, but direct dialog with users can introduce additional risk elements - especially if they are children or other vulnerable groups. 

In the software industry there’s long been a tension between what tools developers want to use, and what the IT or procurement department will approve. Often software tools are priced to fly under the IT radar – we see you Slack!

Employees have a major stakeholder relationship, potentially acting as primary advocates while simultaneously holding a primary financial interest in the company, and their power has increased greatly in the last few years. 

Investors and shareholders are also groups with different needs, outlooks, and involvements depending on the kind of investor they are, and the maturity stage of the organization.

Suppliers clearly have a stakeholder interest through normal repeat trade, through supplier contracts or even from supply chain investment arrangements where a pre-payment ensures future supply of goods as a cashflow agreement. 

Government - Additionally, we can see local, regional, and national government as stakeholders as taxation and regulation policy directly affects the other. Together with this group comes community interests, special interest groups, and activists whose relationship with the business can shift between benign and aggressive engagement depending on factors that directly impact them. For many industries, proactive involvement with these groups can head off a more serious confrontation down the line.

Other stakeholder groups to consider may be influencers on a broader scale like industry associations or trade unions, (interest in unionization has seen a huge resurgence in the last few years as the relationship between employer and employee changes and a new demographic of employees grows up). It all depends on your operating environment.

We haven’t forgotten two other major stakeholder groups – the media and analysts. These intermediary groups influence the perception of the organization. Analysts through the paid relationship they have with buyers, and the overall market, and the media focused on every other group listed here. There will be sub-groups within these two groups and a need for specialist communications plans for each cluster. 

Audiences can be regarded as a superset of stakeholders as many of the stakeholder groups were formerly passive observers until they engaged through financial, moral, environmental, or social encroachment. The goal in any communication is to ensure you don’t move an audience to a stakeholder role unexpectedly or negatively and that is best avoided through a good risk assessment plan and a well-crafted communications strategy where everyone knows their role.