Appendix 1: 3ie worksheet for stakeholder mapping and analysis1
We expect the study team to work jointly with the implementing agency on the stakeholder
mapping and analysis exercises listed below. However, we also recognise that an important
part of your mapping will be of the implementing agency. You could decide to work with the
agency or without them for this part of the exercise, in particular when you are mapping the
implementing agency itself.
Identifying your key stakeholders, their relationships with one another and their attitudes
towards the study is key to developing strategies for engagement and refining your evidence
uptake and use objectives.
Duration: These exercises may take up to four hours and require group work.
Resources required: Exercises 1, 2 and 3 require a flip chart, post-it notes and marker pens.
Exercise 2
Exercise 3
Who among
the listed is
influential and
who is not?
Among the
influential, what
is the alignmentinterest nexus?
Exercise 5
Exercise 1
Stakeholder
analysis based
on exercise 1,
2, 3 and 4
List your
objectives and
stakeholders
1
Exercise 4
Assessment of
stakeholder’s
expectations at
the start of the
study
These exercises have been adapted from the Global Mental Health Policy Influence Toolkit prepared by the Overseas
Development Institute and the Mental Health Innovation Network.
Exercise 1: Listing your objectives and stakeholders
(a) Listing evidence uptake and use objectives


In consultation with the implementing agency staff list out the main objectives for your
study around evidence uptake and use. We encourage you to try and limit the objectives
to not more than three.
Using a flipchart, write each objective on a separate sheet of paper and paste it on the
wall.
(b) Listing stakeholders for each objective



For each of the objectives, identify key stakeholders. Your key stakeholders will vary
based on an objective, but there may also be overlap.
Discussion around why a stakeholder is important and how s/he can contribute to
achieving the evidence uptake and use objective will help you come up with a listing. It is
important to consider how factors such as sex, age and other social and structural
determinants affect their roles
Please put the name of each stakeholder in a separate post-it and stick it onto the
objective that s/he will have a pivotal in achieving.
POINTS TO REMEMBER
 Stakeholders should be identified at the local, national and global level.
 Please disaggregate stakeholder entities as far as possible. For example, a community
can be broken down into mothers, fathers, in-laws, community leaders, religious leaders,
It is good to capture informal power when appropriate
 Your own network or known champions might not be the most important for this
evaluation.
 Please try to identify specific individuals whenever possible, or at a minimum,
organisations that might be most relevant to your study and for your evidence uptake
and use objectives.
 You may identify more than one individual stakeholder within an organisation, as
different people within an organisation may be predisposed differently to the objectives
of your study.
 You should avoid identifying broad categories and be specific, for e.g. don’t list ‘general
public’ (unless associated with specific media outreach plans) or ‘donors’.
Editorial notes
 For names of organisations, please provide the English equivalent for foreign names, as
well as spell out the full original name where possible.
 Please do not abbreviate or use the acronyms of the names of stakeholder
organisations unless you provide the full name at least once
Version 12 October
Page 2 of 8
Exercise 2: Mapping stakeholders on a continuum of influence
In this exercise, we ask you to map the stakeholders identified above on a continuum of
influence.
Less influential
More influential
DEFINITION of INFLUENCE
A stakeholder is seen to be influential if s/he has any of these attributes:
 Ability to influence attitudes, norms or behaviours
 Ability to influence policy or programme design and trigger change in line with study
findings (e.g. programme donors, government agencies, community leaders)
 Ability to affect (positively or negatively) successful implementation of the study (e.g.
implementing agency staff)
 Ability to affect (positively or negatively) successful implementation of the programme
(e.g. community members)
STEPS
 If the stakeholder fits any of the above criteria, paste the post-it with the stakeholder’s
name on the RIGHT of the diagram above: that is INFLUENTIAL.
 For stakeholders who do not fit any of the above criteria paste the post-it with the
stakeholder’s name on the LEFT that is LESS INFLUENTIAL.
POINTS TO REMEMBER
 Based on your evidence uptake and use objectives, different stakeholders are likely to
exercise different level of influence. For example, if your objective is to change
community laws and practices, then community leaders (formal and informal) would be a
key stakeholder. If your objective is to influence design of the programme being
evaluated, the implementing agency might (though not necessarily) be the most
influential stakeholder. On the contrary, if you want your study findings to inform design
of other similar programmes, other development agencies are likely to have greater
leverage.
 Keeping this in mind we recommend that you plot the continuum separately for each
evidence uptake and use objective identified in the SEEP. You may also go back and
add more stakeholders in exercise 1 since you might discover new stakeholders that you
didn’t think about earlier.
Version 12 October
Page 3 of 8
Exercise 3: Mapping influential stakeholders on an alignment and interest matrix
In this exercise we ask you to map the stakeholders identified above as “influential” on an
alignment and interest matrix.
HIGH
ALIGNMENT
WITH
RESEARCH
Low interest in the
Interested in issue
issue
AND highly aligned to
BUT highly aligned to
research
the research
HIGH
INTEREST
LOW
INTEREST
Not interested in the
Interested in issue
issue
AND not aligned to
research
LOW
ALIGNMENT
WITH
RESEARCH
BUT not aligned to
the research
DEFINITIONS
INTEREST aims to map the identified stakeholder’s interest and commitment to the issue being
investigated as demonstrated by his or her investment of resources to further work in that
particular sector, eagerness to bring about change and/or engaging in debates around the
issue. These may be stakeholders who are willing to commit time and money to the issue being
studied but may or may not be aligned with you.
ALIGNMENT aims to map the identified stakeholder’s level of alignment with the study
objectives. A highly-aligned stakeholder is someone who is interested in the study findings and
agrees with your approach to examining an issue. It is however possible that you may have
stakeholders who have an interest in the issue being studied but are antagonistic to the
research agenda and the idea of exploring answers to questions they hold strong positions
about. Their position on the issue may be influenced by a range of factors such as their own
experience, political expediency of the issue and so on.
Version 12 October
Page 4 of 8
Steps:
A. Mapping the stakeholders
1. Place the flip chart on a wall or somewhere accessible, and ask a team member
to draw the above matrix for each objective that you identified.
2. For each of the evidence uptake and use objective, get everyone in the group to
map the stakeholders identified as INFLUENTIAL (in exercise 2) onto this matrix.
Each person placing a post-it note onto the matrix should explain to the group
why they are placing the post-it in that particular quadrant.
3. Don’t be limited to a single post-it per organisation: if different teams or people
have different degrees of alignment or interest, separate them out. For e.g. if
different individuals within the same organisation have varying levels of interest
and alignment.
4. Once you have mapped all your stakeholders on individual matrices, encircle
the ones you have medium to high-levels of access.
B. Interpreting the quadrants
The section below explains what each quadrant means. This is important since it will inform
the engagement approaches that you will need to adopt to work with these stakeholders.
1. Stakeholders in the top right quadrant are the kinds of actors who could
become champions to advocate for your evaluation within government or in the
broader policy realm. They would also be an important set of people to leverage
on to reach out to people in other quadrants to get them interested in the issue or
more aligned to the research agenda. You could also share ideas, coordinate
information, co-organise events and swap readings or contacts with this group.
2. Those in the top left quadrant are the kind of stakeholders you might like to
energise or motivate. They agree with you but are simply not that motivated or
have other competing priorities. It would be important to engage with them on an
ongoing basis to establish the importance of the knowledge gap that the study is
trying to address, how that is an enduring policy question and the potential for
impact it holds once the findings are available. Doing one-on-one meetings,
inviting them to consultations and preparing briefs or knowledge products that
translate findings for your target audience could be potential ways of keeping the
group engaged.
3. Those in the bottom right quadrant are the kind of stakeholders you need to
convince of your viewpoint. They are very aware of the topic and may be
passionate, but they do not agree with evidence as the best method to resolve
issues that plague policymaking. It would be important to engage with this group
of sceptics on an ongoing basis to establish the need for research, explain how
the study is designed to robustly answer policy relevant questions and provide
findings that can inform policymaking for more effective programming.
4. Those in the lower left quadrant are the kind of stakeholders who are neither
interested in the issue that the study is trying to investigate nor do they
appreciate research. Given that time and resources are constrained, you should
not priortise engagement with this group unless it includes stakeholders who can
greatly undermine your research agenda and uptake of findings.
Version 12 October
Page 5 of 8
Exercise 4: Your assessment of stakeholder’s expectations at the start of the study
Now that you have mapped your stakeholders who are key for the uptake of your study findings
based on their level of influence, alignment, interest and access, please provide your objective
assessment on the their level of buy-in on the study design as well as their expectation from the
study findings. We understand your assessment is informed by your engagement with key
stakeholders during the proposal preparation phase. Based on the level of your engagement the
expectations may change during the course of the evaluation.
Stakeholder
Understanding of
the study design
1.
2.
3.
4.
Strong
Sufficient
Weak
Don’t know
Expectation from the study findings
1. Yes
2. No
3. Don’t know
Useful
findings
Supports
status quo
Supports the
change that the
stakeholder wants
to see
Version 12 October
Page 6 of 8
Exercise 5: Stakeholder analysis
The exercises above will give you a good sense of where you need to be focussing your efforts
to build greater ownership, understanding of and potential for using your study findings. For
each of the stakeholders that you identify, please provide the requested information in the table
below, adding rows where required. This exercise will help you think through how you may
engage with those you identified. Especially with stakeholders to whom you have low access or
who are highly interested, or who are not interested but broadly share the same objectives as
what your evaluation is trying to achieve, please try to identify how you may leverage on your
existing network to reach out to them.
For example, if you have listed community leaders as a key stakeholder, then please elaborate
on how you will engage and communicate with them. Similarly, if you have media as a key
stakeholder, please elaborate on how you plan to engage the media and if you have a media
plan in place. Based on the context within which you are working, how will you engage with
government officials, policymakers and officials in institutions that are in a position to make key
decisions and policy-level changes? How do you plan to communicate with key actors within
the communities when?
Notes:
In the box below, you may wish to consider the following ways to fill out the section on ways to
improve your level of engagement with these stakeholders to inform or contribute to change:
 Developing, joining or contributing expertise and evidence to a network(s)
 Building or strengthening partnerships
 Working with the media (online, print, audio, visual)
 Academic research communication (journals and conferences)
 Digital communication (blogs, emails, social media)
 Publications (briefs, briefing papers, opinion pieces)
 Events (public and private meetings or other activities with stakeholders)
Version 12 October
Page 7 of 8
Box 1: Stakeholder analysis
Stakeholder name
Why is this stakeholder
Explain your reasons for stakeholder’s high interest
(person/organisation)
important?
in research question and why are they highly aligned
to the research
Interested in issue AND
highly aligned to
research
Stakeholder name
Why is this stakeholder
Will you be working to get
(person/organisation)
important?
them aligned to your
If yes, how?
research agenda?
Interested in issue BUT
If no, why not?
not aligned to the
research
Stakeholder name
Why is this stakeholder
Will you work to increase
(person/organisation)
important?
their interest in the
If yes, how?
research?
Highly aligned to the
If no, why not?
research BUT low
interest in issue
Stakeholder name
Why is this stakeholder
Please suggest strategies to engage with this type of
(person/organisation)
important?
of stakeholder if they can seriously undermine the
research study and uptake of findings if they become
Not interested in issue
interested. We understand that strategies to engage
AND not aligned to
with this group might evolve overtime (during the
research
course of the study) when you have a better
understanding of the context and relationships
between stakeholders.
Version 12 October
Page 8 of 8