The Stakeholder Salience Model is a strategy tool for segmenting stakeholders. By ranking and evaluating all stakeholders based on three attributes: Power, Legitimacy, and Urgency, an overview and prioritization of all stakeholders who have a claim or interest in the problem and a potential solution is created.
Stakeholder mapping and segmentation
Students can use the stakeholder salience tool to get an overview of the most important stakeholders in their social impact endeavour.
Students. At least one person with a strategic role in the project (e.g. student project leader) and one person with an operational role (e.g. student researcher) should work on the Stakeholder Salience Model.
Excel
1 Identify the stakeholders of your project and think about their role in the project (e.g. project leader, partners, competitors, suppliers, target group, etc.). Enter this information in a table.
| Stakeholder | Role | Power | Legitimacy | Urgency |
|---|---|---|---|---|
2
Think about which of the following three attributes you would attribute to stakeholders:
a. Power: The ability of stakeholders to influence the performance, activities, operations, and outcomes of a project, i.e., one stakeholder A can make another stakeholder B do something that B would not have done otherwise.
b. Legitimacy: the authority to make claims. Look for stakeholders who are entitled to make claims that are considered legitimate.
c. Urgency: the degree to which stakeholder claims require immediate attention. How important it is to respond quickly to stakeholder expectations and demands?
3 Stakeholders who possess only one of the three attributes are referred to as latent stakeholders. They are therefore given the least attention in relation to the others. The second most important group is represented by the expectant stakeholders, who are assigned two attributes. The greatest attention, on the other hand, is given to the definitive stakeholders, who have all three attributes.
4 Derive clear responsibilities for dealing with the (external) project stakeholders from the corresponding roles and attributes.
