Who to involve

You may be keen to get a range of people involved in improving your organisation, but deciding exactly who to involve is a key question. The clearer you can be about this, the easier it will be to choose an effective approach to involving them.

Your organisation affects many types of people in all sorts of ways - and is affected by them in turn.

Anybody with an interest in your organisation is a stakeholder

Your stakeholders

Anybody with an interest in your organisation is a stakeholder. This will include the people both inside and outside your organisation, from staff, volunteers and trustees, to users, supporters, and other organisations in your field. You could also consider those who are not connected to you now, but could or should be in the future, such as potential users or possible future donors.

Deciding who to involve

If you want to involve people in helping your organisation improve in some way, it's important to consider all your stakeholders and then select the right people to approach. Involving everyone isn't necessarily a good idea.

It's helpful to create a stakeholder map to identify all the possible players. You can then carry out a stakeholder analysis to consider questions such as their importance to you, their level of interest in and influence over you, as well as their expectations.

This information will help you to weigh up how important and appropriate it might be to involve each group in your work, as well as considering the degree of involvement you want your stakeholders to have.

But your starting point should be the needs of your organisation. Are you clear about your reasons for involving people?