Speaker 1: Identifying Your Stakeholders As you begin your strategic planning process or you jump in, you may be thinking, wait a second, there's lots of voices that we need to hear. And chances are those voices are from your stakeholders. So who are your stakeholders? How do we identify them? The first thing that we need to understand is what or who is a stakeholder. A stakeholder, by definition, is anyone who has interest or concern in your business or organization. So it might be someone at the board level. It might be the staff, volunteer, client, or community partner level. Maybe it's local government. Essentially, anyone who has a concern or interest in the work you do can be considered a stakeholder. Now that could look different for every single organization. If you partner closely with city or county government or state government, then those are definitely stakeholders that you want to connect with and work with during your strategic planning process. When I work with nonprofits across the country, I like to ask them who has the power to impact in a positive or negative way the work you're going to be doing over the next three to five years during your strategic planning process. Or it might be a little bit further out. A lot of times we vision and we think ahead 10, 15, 20 years. It depends on the scope of your organization. At the end of the day, the time period that you're working on should be a focus, but who has the power to impact in a negative or positive way our mission, our vision, the work we're going to be doing in the coming years? And answering that question is going to allow you to identify the stakeholders that you really need to hear their voices before you start. So for example, if you plan on building a cultural heritage center or an activity place at the local park system, then a stakeholder you need to hear from is your parks and recreation department because maybe the city just completed a strategic planning process and they need to prioritize those spaces for athletics and they're not as interested in working on the cultural aspect as they had mentioned several years before. So understanding where your stakeholder, who they are and where they are now is an important part of the process. So who has the power to influence in a negative or positive way? And sometimes it, you know, it might be asking what do clients that we serve, the people we serve expect or need from us? That's the second question I like to ask. What do the clients that we serve expect and need from us moving forward? So two different questions, different groups of people, but these should be helpful ways to identify the stakeholders that could impact your strategic planning process.