People can just as easily grease a project's wheels as stop it in its tracks. Knowing who our stakeholders are and anticipating their needs helps projects get better results. Knowing how to manage stakeholders is key to successful development projects and an essential step of any development, humanitarian, relief or advocacy effort. It's a vital step, too, towards project planning.

Stakeholder Analysis is the technique used to identify all persons, groups and institutions who may have an interest in a project - the key people we have to win over to achieve development results. Stakeholder Management is where we take steps to manage their interests and expectations so that the project runs as smoothly as possible.

The benefits of using a stakeholder-based approach are that:

• You can use the opinions of the most influential and powerful stakeholders to shape your projects in the early stages.
• Support from influential stakeholders helps your project to be more successful.

By communicating with stakeholders early and frequently, you can ensure that they fully understand what you are doing and understand the benefits of your project. As a result, they can support you actively when needed. You can anticipate people's reactions to your project and build the actions that will win people's support into your plan.

In the five videos, I will walk you through the steps of:

• Identifying and understanding your stakeholders
• Identifying win-win outcomes
• Developing a stakeholder communication plan
  
• Choosing the most effective approaches to engaging with your stakeholders

Best of luck