Stakeholders

Think of a project you worked on that didn't go the way anyone planned. Now trace back the timeline: who didn't get consulted early enough? Whose support you assumed but never confirmed? Whose opposition arrived as a surprise in month three? Most project failures are not technical failures. They are stakeholder failures, a breakdown in the ongoing relationship between the people managing a project and the people it affects or depends upon.

Why it matters

R. Edward Freeman, whose 1984 book Strategic Management: A Stakeholder Approach is the foundational text of the field, defined a stakeholder as "any group or individual who can affect or is affected by the achievement of the organisation's objectives" (Freeman, 1984, p. 46). That definition is deliberately wide, because it has to be. In an Irish SME or a registered charity, your stakeholders are not limited to the funder who signs your grant agreement. They include your volunteers who give time they could spend elsewhere, the board members who carry fiduciary responsibility for the organisation, the service users who depend on your outcomes, the local authority whose planning decisions shape your operating context, and the neighbouring community whose goodwill you need. Ignoring any of them does not make them less powerful. It just means you encounter their power unexpectedly.

For the Project Management Institute, stakeholder engagement is not a side activity but a core knowledge area, running from initiation through to closure (PMI, 2021). The logic is simple: projects are authorised, resourced, and evaluated by people, not by plans. Keeping those people informed and aligned is not administrative overhead, it is the actual work.

Core concepts

The most durable analytical contribution to stakeholder theory is the salience model developed by Ronald Mitchell, Bradley Agle, and Donna Wood in their 1997 Academy of Management Review article. They argued that you can assess how much managerial attention any stakeholder deserves by measuring three attributes: power (can they influence the outcome?), legitimacy (is their claim valid under prevailing norms?), and urgency (does their claim demand immediate attention?) (Mitchell, Agle and Wood, 1997). A stakeholder with only one attribute, say, power but no legitimate claim, is dormant: potentially important, but not currently pressing. One with all three is definitive: whoever this is on your project, their needs must be embedded in your planning. Crucially, attributes can change. The quiet community group with no formal power becomes very powerful the month after they appear on local radio.

The practical tool that follows from this is the stakeholder register, a living document that lists each stakeholder, their interests, their influence level, and your current engagement approach. Most project managers also use a power-interest grid (plotting stakeholders on axes of high/low power and high/low interest) to decide how to allocate engagement effort: high power, high interest stakeholders need close management; high power, low interest ones need to be kept satisfied; low power, high interest ones need to be kept informed; low power, low interest ones need minimal monitoring. These tools are simple, but the discipline of maintaining them throughout a project is what separates organisations that get stakeholder management right from those that remember it too late.

PMI's PMBOK Guide identifies four levels of stakeholder engagement: unaware, resistant, neutral, supportive, and leading (PMI, 2021). Mapping your stakeholders against these levels, and deciding where each should ideally be, turns engagement from a vague aspiration into a concrete planning task. Not every stakeholder needs to be a champion of the project; some simply need to move from resistant to neutral.

The Irish context

For Irish charities and community organisations, stakeholder management has a structural dimension that many private-sector frameworks overlook. Volunteers are simultaneously stakeholders and operational resources. According to the CSO's Census 2022 Spotlight on Volunteering, more than 700,000 people in Ireland regularly engaged in voluntary activities, approximately 14% of the population (CSO, 2024). A separate Charities Regulator report estimated that volunteers contributed 94 million hours of time to Irish charities in 2022, with an economic value of at least €1 billion (Charities Regulator, 2023). Volunteers choose to be there. They can choose not to be. Their continued participation depends on feeling valued, informed, and meaningfully involved, all of which are stakeholder engagement outcomes.

The board of a charity or cooperative is simultaneously a governance body and a high-salience stakeholder group. Under the Charities Governance Code, trustees are personally accountable for the charity achieving its objectives, managing its finances, and behaving with integrity (Charities Regulator, 2018). A project team that treats its board as a rubber stamp rather than an engaged governance partner will eventually discover that the board has both legitimacy and power, often at a moment when the project most needs flexibility.

Funders, whether statutory bodies like Tusla, the HSE, or local authorities, or private philanthropic bodies, are almost always definitive stakeholders: high power (they control financial resources), high legitimacy (they have contractual authority), and often high urgency (reporting deadlines are real). But an important mistake is treating funders as the only high-salience stakeholders. A funded project that ignores its service users or fails to manage its relationship with partner organisations is unlikely to achieve the outcomes that attracted the funding in the first place.

Common pitfalls

Three patterns consistently undermine stakeholder management in small organisations. The first is late engagement: consulting stakeholders after key decisions have been made, then being surprised when they push back. Engagement is front-loaded in terms of value, the earlier a concern is raised, the cheaper it is to address. The second is forgetting internal stakeholders. Staff, volunteers, and line managers are among the most important stakeholders on any project, and they are often the least formally engaged. The third pitfall is static mapping. A stakeholder register drawn up at project kick-off and never updated is misleading by week eight. Stakeholder attributes shift as context changes, and a salience assessment needs to move with it.

Watch / Listen / Read

Watch, How to start a movement by Derek Sivers (TED2010, 3 min). A disarmingly short lesson in why leaders need followers, and what it actually takes to turn a single voice into a coalition. Essential viewing for anyone who thinks their project starts with a good idea rather than with the people they bring with them. Available at https://www.ted.com/talks/derek_sivers_how_to_start_a_movement.

Listen, Projectified® by PMI covers stakeholder engagement across multiple episodes. Search the archive at pmi.org/projectified-podcast for "stakeholder" to find relevant conversations with practitioners on managing complex stakeholder landscapes.

Read, Mitchell, R.K., Agle, B.R. and Wood, D.J. (1997) 'Toward a Theory of Stakeholder Identification and Salience: Defining the Principle of Who and What Really Counts', Academy of Management Review, 22(4), pp. 853–886. The power/legitimacy/urgency framework that gave stakeholder management its analytical spine.

Quick quiz

1. According to Freeman (1984), what is the broadest definition of a stakeholder?
2. Name the three attributes used in the Mitchell, Agle and Wood (1997) salience model.
3. What do you call a stakeholder who has all three attributes, power, legitimacy, and urgency?
4. Approximately how many people in Ireland regularly engaged in voluntary activities according to the 2022 Census?
5. What is the term for the tool that lists all stakeholders, their interests, and current engagement approach?

Answers: (1) Any group or individual who can affect or is affected by the achievement of the organisation's objectives. (2) Power, legitimacy, urgency. (3) A definitive stakeholder. (4) More than 700,000 (approximately 14% of population). (5) A stakeholder register.

References

Central Statistics Office (2024) Census of Population 2022 Spotlight Series: Volunteering in Ireland. Cork: CSO. Available at: link (Accessed: 27 April 2026).

Charities Regulator (2018) Charities Governance Code. Dublin: Charities Regulator. Available at: https://www.charitiesregulator.ie/en/information-for-charities/charities-governance-code (Accessed: 27 April 2026).

Charities Regulator (2023) Report on the Social and Economic Impact of Registered Charities in Ireland. Dublin: Charities Regulator/Amárach. Available at: link (Accessed: 27 April 2026).

Freeman, R.E. (1984) Strategic Management: A Stakeholder Approach. Boston, MA: Pitman.

Mitchell, R.K., Agle, B.R. and Wood, D.J. (1997) 'Toward a Theory of Stakeholder Identification and Salience: Defining the Principle of Who and What Really Counts', Academy of Management Review, 22(4), pp. 853–886.

Project Management Institute (2021) A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK® Guide) (7th edn). Newtown Square, PA: PMI.