Your favorite resources for stakeholder mapping and analysis
September 5, 2016 2:18 AM Subscribe
I work in the NGO/NFP space across a few organizations and am interested in your favorite and most useful tools/books/software/processes for mapping and analysing relationships for collaboration and fundraising purposes.
Your suggested resources might be step-by-step guides, tools to fill in (on paper or web), useful software for drawing or recording findings, types of diagrams, books, processes, planning templates, workshop outlines, blogs, etc. that will help with the following:
1) mapping and analyzing an organization's experience in delivering programs and the past/current relationships with stakeholders
2) mapping stakeholders/actors within a specific domain (e.g. seeing the relationships between key players and who are the important nodes, being able to see that nobody is working on x area within y domain)
3) joining the above two together to understand where the best opportunities for new work, expanded work, collaborations, funding (or other support) may lie
I realize that might sound like a lot as a whole, but any resources for dealing with just one little piece of those activities would be welcomed. Very happy to borrow tools or resources from other domains if you think they are relevant or generic. I don't really want services to find grants (already have some) or for tracking grants.
Typical questions I might be trying to answer are "What experience and relationships does our organization/group have in country A and what would be the best approach for seeking to expand our work/funding there?", or "Who is working in the health sector in country B and in partnership with who/which speciality area, who are the health funders in B, are there any niche areas for us to work in?".
I have my own scrawly ways of doing this work, but would like approaches that I can more easily share with others or can be replicated by others, and that produce outputs that are clear and succinct.
Your suggested resources might be step-by-step guides, tools to fill in (on paper or web), useful software for drawing or recording findings, types of diagrams, books, processes, planning templates, workshop outlines, blogs, etc. that will help with the following:
1) mapping and analyzing an organization's experience in delivering programs and the past/current relationships with stakeholders
2) mapping stakeholders/actors within a specific domain (e.g. seeing the relationships between key players and who are the important nodes, being able to see that nobody is working on x area within y domain)
3) joining the above two together to understand where the best opportunities for new work, expanded work, collaborations, funding (or other support) may lie
I realize that might sound like a lot as a whole, but any resources for dealing with just one little piece of those activities would be welcomed. Very happy to borrow tools or resources from other domains if you think they are relevant or generic. I don't really want services to find grants (already have some) or for tracking grants.
Typical questions I might be trying to answer are "What experience and relationships does our organization/group have in country A and what would be the best approach for seeking to expand our work/funding there?", or "Who is working in the health sector in country B and in partnership with who/which speciality area, who are the health funders in B, are there any niche areas for us to work in?".
I have my own scrawly ways of doing this work, but would like approaches that I can more easily share with others or can be replicated by others, and that produce outputs that are clear and succinct.
It sounds like you want to make a comprehensive database of NGO activity and funding within specific verticals pertaining to your organization, is that right?
I would start with Guidestar to build a list of orgs, and start researching their major projects. You can use the Foundation Center, which I'm sure you are familiar with, to cross-reference funders. Tag everything with keywords and attach all funders to the relevant project so you can see what sectors are getting the most / least engagement.
Depending on your skills, budget, and inclinations, you can either hire someone to build a custom database, or repurpose something like Pipedrive (which is free but might take some work to get it to do what you want) to hold your data so you can run reports.
posted by ananci at 1:47 PM on September 5, 2016
I would start with Guidestar to build a list of orgs, and start researching their major projects. You can use the Foundation Center, which I'm sure you are familiar with, to cross-reference funders. Tag everything with keywords and attach all funders to the relevant project so you can see what sectors are getting the most / least engagement.
Depending on your skills, budget, and inclinations, you can either hire someone to build a custom database, or repurpose something like Pipedrive (which is free but might take some work to get it to do what you want) to hold your data so you can run reports.
posted by ananci at 1:47 PM on September 5, 2016
Best answer: If you are interested in mapping social media connections check out NodeXL
posted by KateViolet at 2:31 PM on September 5, 2016
posted by KateViolet at 2:31 PM on September 5, 2016
This thread is closed to new comments.
posted by signal at 5:06 AM on September 5, 2016