Stakeholder interviews are one of the most powerful ways to gather fresh insights about your organization when planning for the future.
Whether you’re aiming to grow, pursuing new opportunities, or dealing with unexpected setbacks, stakeholder interviews help ensure your strategy is informed by what’s actually happening in your organization, field, and community (versus what you think is happening).
Let’s take a look at why stakeholder interviews are so valuable and how to ensure you’re asking the right questions.
What Is a Stakeholder Interview?
A stakeholder interview is designed to gather targeted feedback from an individual who has an established connection to a project, program, or organization. Stakeholder interviews focus on gathering insights from a diverse range of stakeholders who are not decision-makers when it comes to the topic being discussed.
For a nonprofit organization, stakeholders often include staff, volunteers, partners, donors, clients, and community members.
These stakeholders bring unique perspectives: They aren’t decision-makers within your organization, but they do care deeply about your work and will be affected by your choices.
Stakeholder interviews are frequently included as part of a strategic planning process to help leaders see beyond their own perspectives and identify challenges or opportunities they might otherwise miss. Interviews may also be supplemented with surveys or focus groups.
Planning Stakeholder Interviews: Consider these Questions
As part of our strategic planning work with nonprofits and government agencies, Funding for Good helps organizations plan for how to gather the most useful stakeholder input for their needs.
When planning stakeholder interviews, we recommend working with a consultant to consider:
- How many stakeholders will be interviewed? (There may be budgetary factors to consider, as interviews do take time to schedule, conduct, and analyze.)
- Which stakeholders should be interviewed?
- How will interviews supplement or complement other tools, like stakeholder surveys?
- What questions should be asked in interviews, and should the questions be different based on the type of stakeholder?
- Who will conduct the interviews? (Ideally, your consultant or an experienced facilitator should conduct the interviews.)
Elements of an Effective Stakeholder Interview
As noted above, we strongly recommend partnering with a consultant who will advise on and conduct your stakeholder interviews. This is because it’s very common for stakeholders to not provide fully honest feedback when you or your team are the ones doing the interviews.
While each consultant may have their own approach to stakeholder interviews, there are several key elements that distinguish effective interviews:
- A Space that Allows for Honesty: Perhaps the most vital element of an effective stakeholder interview is ensuring that the interviewee feels comfortable being honest. If you truly want to create a strong plan, you need to know what people’s actual experiences with your organization are, rather than what people think you want to hear. Interviewers generally let people know up front that feedback will be anonymized, but interviewers’ mannerisms and listening ability can also affect participants’ comfort being honest.
- Customized Questions: Stakeholder interview questions should be customized to your individual organization. That means no printing off lists from the internet. In designing questions, you’ll want to start by thinking about how you intend to use the data and insights gathered. For example, are you perplexed about which opportunities you should pursue, and which you shouldn’t? Or are you concerned that your management culture is not as strong as you’d like? Targeting some questions to your specific concerns can ensure you get the information you need to make decisions about your strategic plan.
- Openings for Unexpected Insights: On the flip side, you’ll want to be sure that more open-ended questions are also included. This gives interviewees the space to say what’s on their mind, including reflections that may not be on your radar yet. Your interviewer should be prepared to ask follow-up questions when a stakeholder provides new or unexpected feedback.
Getting the Most Out of Stakeholder Interviews
Conducting any planning process—but especially strategic planning—requires that you be open to considering the full scope of challenges and opportunities for your organization. That means understanding what’s working and what isn’t. That’s where stakeholders come in.
Stakeholder interviews should be designed to provide your organization’s leadership team with new insights. Yes, some of what stakeholders say will sound familiar. But much of it may be new and unexpected. That’s the point.
Stakeholder interviews help you construct a three-dimensional model that reflects the many different ways people interact with and perceive your organization.
With this model in hand, you’ll be ready to undertake a planning process that is filled with insight, builds alignment, and sets your organization up for success.
