Identifying stakeholders: the complete guide for planning comms
Communication will make or break your new venture.
When done correctly, communication helps your startup
Hire the right people
Earn the goodwill of your local community
Get positive, free press and media coverage
Attract great-fit buyers and users
Avoid legal issues and bad press
Garner the interest of more investors… and maintain great relationships with the investors you have
What’s the difference between marketing, sales, and communication?
Marketing focuses on getting new leads in your pipeline (raising awareness and interest).
Sales focuses on getting those leads to purchase.
Communication creates great relationships with every other group vital to your company’s success.
Those groups vital to your success are called stakeholders (or audiences).
The goal of communicating with your stakeholders, besides keeping your company afloat and thriving, is to build sustainable relationships that create value for the company and the groups your company impacts.
Over the lifecycle of a startup, your company's stakeholder groups will change, grow, disagree with one another, and ultimately be the reason your venture fails or succeeds.
Because different groups have different goals, assumptions, and levels of interest or influence on your company, you have to treat them all uniquely.
Understanding that difference—and managing all those relationships so you can be successful—is the role of strategic communications.
Focusing exclusively on sales messaging will help you get customers, but potential customers must be communicated with differently from current or potential investors, regulators, potential and current employees, or business partners.
Ignore those other groups at your peril.
Many startup founders don't realize that poor communication is one of their core issues when facing failure.
Identifying Your Stakeholders
Knowing your audience
Who your stakeholders (or audiences) are will change over the life cycle of your business.
How do you know who your audiences are? It’s time to sit down and brainstorm. Grab a couple of trusted team members and make a list of every group whose support you need in order to meet your business goals in the next 12 months.
That’s your current stakeholder list. To get the ball rolling, here are some examples of stakeholders to consider in the earliest stages of business.
Seed Phase
Some examples of stakeholders in the seed phase are:
Potential investors
business accelerators and incubators
Startup scholarships and competitions
Media: local and topical/industry
Influencers in your industry or community
Potential customers
Potential employees
Your own friends and family
By the way!
Potential customers, while the target of marketing and sales communication, are still a key audience in communications.
Remember that definition of stakeholder groups? “Any group without whose support an organization would cease to exist.”
Your startup would definitely cease to exist pretty quickly without any customers, so they are included in stakeholder groups even though most messaging targeted to them will come from your sales and marketing teams, rather than communications.
But, it’s important to remember that potential customers will still see the messages you put out publicly for other groups (and occasionally messages you don’t intend to be public), so always consider their perspective in your messaging.
Startup Phase
All of the above, plus...
Current employees & their families
Regulators/government bodies
Trade organizations
Licensing bodies
Competitors
Potential suppliers and cooperative partners
Your legal team
Advisors and board members (potential and current)
Local community
Listing everyone out is the easy part. Next, we’ll prioritize who you need to spend the most time and energy communicating with.
Prioritizing Your Stakeholders
Understanding your audiences & who to focus on first
The Influence / Interest Matrix
Latents
Keep Satisfied
Aim is to move them to the right ->
Key Players
Manage closely, engage often
Maintain relationships
Apathetics
Monitor
Communicate generally to keep updated
Defenders
Keep informed
Make use of interest where possible
Power ^ Interest →
An effective strategy starts with prioritizing audiences and tailoring communication, not just knowing who they all are.
After you list all of the existing and potential stakeholders, we’re going to arrange them based on how they can affect your business (and how willing they are to do so).
Their level of interest in your project is your X axis, and the level of power or influence they have is your Y axis.
Start plotting the audiences you just listed on this graph. When you’re done, we’ll break the graph up into four quadrants, based on each group’s level of interest and influence.
Low interest, low influence: Apathetics—Monitor
Stakeholders in the lower left quadrant are not your first-priority audiences, but they’re still on the list. While they don’t need a ton of action and attention, it’s important to monitor their general attitudes towards your project. People in this group can often move to the high interest side of the matrix, for positive or negative reasons.
High interest, low influence: Defenders—Keep Informed
Stakeholders with a lot of interest, but not a lot of power, are often called defenders or ambassadors. This could include social media followers and members of the public who are excited about your idea or project, but aren’t necessarily your target buyers. Keeping them informed is a good strategy for building general public goodwill.
Low interest, high influence: Latents—Keep Satisfied
Stakeholders with low interest but high influence include people who are not yet interested in your project, but could be massively beneficial if interested (or detrimental if disappointed or angered). Members of this group could easily move directly to the top right quadrant if they become interested—and making sure they’re satisfied is part of your job. You want them to become interested for positive reasons, not negative, so it’s important to regularly survey them about their knowledge and expectations for your organization.
High interest, high influence: Promoters—Manage Closely, Engage Often
These are the stakeholders that are most likely to have a significant impact on your company. They require regular, tailored, high-quality communication, and need detailed expectations management.
A Common Mistake!
Founders often believe if they simply keep spewing “exciting news” at this group, it will keep them satisfied. That’s a great way for your company to make a big splash… and then fizzle right out.
Listening is key to communication in relationships—business or personal. Make sure to listen to this group, proactively and often. This includes your employees, your customers, and your gut. Make it a habit to connect with members of these groups each week (or at least each month). Again, these are people without whose support your company would cease to exist. Communicate with them.
No Perfect Quadrants
A final note: although we’re breaking your audiences into quadrants for ease and clarity, in reality, most groups will not fall perfectly into four clean categories. Your resources and time are finite, and you’ll have to prioritize one group over another in the same quadrant from time to time—and who you need to prioritize will change based on the year, funding cycle, and current projects.
Optimizing Your Communications
You've heard it before about sales language: Features fail, values sell.
However, you have to remember that each of the audiences, categories, and individuals we’ve identified will have different values, needs, and goals. For instance, at Brazen, we develop our clients’ messaging using a signature framework that includes each audience. This allows us to figure out what our clients need to say. After that, we can break it down on a per-stakeholder basis.
This, of course, always leads to the inevitable question: “Why not just ‘spray and pray’ -blasting all the audiences with the same message? There’s a bit of logic to this type of thinking, even if it is ultimately incorrect. I mean, if a message is comprehensive enough, it should contain everything each audience needs, right?
Wrong.
Communicating too much can be just as detrimental as not communicating enough to your audiences.
First, you'll confuse and overwhelm audiences who were not very interested in the first place. This can result in lost sales, soured investors, and bad relationships with the press.
Second, you'll frustrate stakeholders who are very interested in your work, as you aren’t giving them the VIP insight they crave and expect. This can potentially cause bad press or crises that could have been avoided with more consideration for your audiences.
Tailoring your messages to each group
Begin with the end in mind.
Now that you’ve identified your audiences, you know who you're talking to, and you probably know what your goal for each communication is.
A common mistake new teams make!
A lot of founders hire and pay communications teams based on output. They simply want to show that they’ve put out communications to each group, checking a box on a list, but disregarding whether that group really needed to hear from your company.
If you overcommunicate—without considering your audience’s time and attention a valuable, finite resource—you will annoy them. Then when you have something truly important to share, you no longer have their attention.
Attention is earned, not given. And it is easily lost.
But knowing what you want out of an interaction is not enough.
Before communicating, think about the audience’s current knowledge of your organization, the level of interest they have, and what their own desires and anxieties are. These desires and anxieties can relate to your organization, your product, or your industry as a whole.
Start your message development with the target group’s desires and anxieties, then work backwards to reach your goal. Sometimes, this takes several different communications over a planned period of time.
For example, if you’re starting with a potential employee who has no idea who you are, you don’t want to dive in with “You should come work for us! We need people like you!!” That’s your need, sure. But what are their desires and anxieties? They likely want to work for a company whose product or service they believe in (or at least respect). They may be concerned that an employer will woo them with remote work, then force them to come into an office after a few months. Start by addressing those desires and fears, then they’ll be curious enough to hear what you want from them.
Maintaining Great Relationships
Managing growth
At this point, you should have a categorized list of stakeholders and a good idea of how to craft communications for each one.
If you’re just starting out—or you’ve hit a roadblock and realized you need help moving forward—we can help you craft messaging to reach your audiences and your goals over the next year.
At Brazen, we take a detail-driven approach to managing clients’ do-or-die relationships with multiple audiences. That means you aren’t just “spraying and praying” your message.
Instead, you’re able to share strategically and build relationships that last—so your company lasts, too.
Want that kind of confidence for your organization’s communications?
