Who Matters to You?: Mapping Your Stakeholders

This improved tool will help you visualize relationships with key stakeholders.

Collaborating—one of the three pillars of the USAID collaborating, learning, and adapting (CLA) approach— is a critical aspect of development work. Effective collaboration ensures that the Agency establishes and leverages relationships with key stakeholders, identifies areas of shared interest and potential cooperation, avoids duplicating efforts, shares knowledge about what works and what needs adjustment, and develops new, innovative ideas to address shared development challenges.

A collaboration map is one approach, developed by the USAID/Rwanda Mission, to graphically depict USAID’s relationships with its key stakeholders. The mission first applied collaboration mapping in 2012 to guide their thinking during the development of their Country Development Cooperation Strategy (CDCS). In particular, it helped technical staff to identify what organizations would influence, support, or otherwise affect achieving the objectives of the strategy.

As a learning tool, collaboration mapping helps a mission or bureau create a shared understanding of who its key stakeholders are, what their levels of interaction and influence are with USAID, and based on these findings, where USAID should strategically place time and effort cultivating relationships. This tool, however, is not USAID-specific, and could be equally relevant to USAID’s implementing partners or other development actors.

Regular Learning Lab or ProgramNet users may already be familiar with collaborating mapping as it has been featured on USAID’s platforms before. If you haven’t yet watched the webinar presented by Preston Sharp (USAID/Rwanda), I encourage you to do so, but if you are more of a hands-on learner like me, you may prefer trying collaboration mapping for yourself or, even better, with your team.

Expanding on previous Agency work by Preston Sharp and Zan Larsen, LEARN—a mechanism funded by USAID’s Learning, Evaluation and Research (LER) Office in the Bureau of Policy, Planning and Learning (PPL)—has developed a new Excel-based collaborating mapping tool that can automatically generate digital collaboration maps. Along with this interactive Collaboration Mapping Excel Worksheet, Learning Lab also features a new Collaboration Mapping Facilitation Guide that will walk you through the steps of conducting a collaboration mapping exercise with your team, whether you use the tool or draw your map by hand.

We welcome your feedback and input as you use this to create your own collaboration maps so that we can improve the instructions based on field experience. You can provide your feedback by posting comments on the resource page on Learning Lab or by contacting a member of the PPL/LER Strategic Learning team at [email protected]. We also welcome sharing of collaboration maps after they have been created so that others may use them as models.