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26. February, 2026

Step 3 toward strategic overview: Stakeholder Analysis

In this article, you will find concrete methods for stakeholder analysis—a tool for working more systematically with relationships and navigating your external environment strategically.

This article is based on the practical tool stakeholder analysis, which helps you gain an overview of the people, organizations, and institutions that you influence—and that influence you.

By working more consciously, purposefully, and long-term with your relationships, you can strengthen sustainable collaborations and build stronger connections with the outside world. This can increase the value of your artistic work for others—and help you better identify the value of relationships for you.

The article is developed by UP based on experiences from smaller, artist-led companies and groups that have used the tool in connection with their participation in the Performing Arts Strategy Lab.

Start here: Three steps toward strategic overview

We recommend working with the tools in the following order:

  • The Strategy House – creates overview and shared direction
  • Core Narrative – articulates your identity and story
  • Stakeholder Analysis – maps your most important relationships

The stakeholder analysis builds directly on your work with purpose, vision, role, goals, and core narrative—and translates them into concrete relational strategies. See the other tools here.

What is a stakeholder analysis?

A stakeholder analysis aims to ensure that you know which people and organisations in your external environment have an interest in your work—and how these interests affect your projects, your organisation, and your long-term development.

Some stakeholders will support your projects, while others may be sceptical or have opposing interests. Therefore, stakeholder analysis is about creating overview, securing support, and minimizing resistance—as well as designing your decision-making processes and forms of collaboration to achieve the greatest possible impact.

Why is stakeholder analysis important?

A systematic stakeholder analysis helps you to:

  • Gain an overview of your external environment
  • Manage relationships more strategically
  • Secure support for your projects, minimize resistance, and reduce conflicts
  • Integrate stakeholders’ needs into your work
Using it in practice

The tool is about mapping and analysing your external environment:
Which relationships are important? What do they mean for your work—and what do you mean to them?

Using the tool in practice means:

  • Shifting from random networking to strategic relationships
  • Focusing on fewer, but deeper partnerships
  • Prioritising collaborations more clearly
  • Building “ambassadors” for your project

Participants from the Performing Arts Strategy Lab experienced stakeholder work as a strategic engine for their development. When it works, they experience:

  • Greater clarity about who to invest in
  • Stronger collaborations
  • Better communication
  • Increased organisational and financial stability
  • Greater long-term sustainability

How to work with stakeholder analysis

1. Map out your surroundings
Start broadly: who are your most important players locally, nationally, and internationally?
2. Place stakeholders in layers
Assess who has the most influence – and who will be most affected.
3. Ask the right questions
Who owns the project? Who makes the decisions? Who pays? Who is affected? For whom does the project create a new reality?
4. Plan your relationships
How should each stakeholder be involved: steering group, project group, sparring, dialogue, partnership?
5. Update regularly
Reality is changing – and so should your stakeholder analysis

The three layers of stakeholders

1. Close partners
The first layer are the partners you work directly with in development, production or presentation. These may be co-producers, venue partners, festivals, artistic collaborators, producers or tour organisers. These are the critical stakeholders.
2. Stakeholders who influence the opportunities for your work
The second layer involves stakeholders who are not necessarily direct partners in a project, but who are highly significant in terms of the framework surrounding the work. These may include foundations, public support schemes, industry organisations, networks, advisors or strategic partners.
3. broader surroundings
The third layer is the broader surroundings that your work is part of or affects. This could be the audience, local communities, the press, educational institutions, or other relevant parts of the cultural sector.

Conclusion: Relationships are also a strategy

Strategy is not only about plans and structures, but about people. The companies that stand strongest are those that work consciously, long-term, and relationally with their external environment.

About the article
This article was developed by the Danish Performing Arts Development Platform (Udviklingsplatformen for Scenekunst, UP) based on a professional collaboration with Karen Lorenzen (Operate) and on experiences and evaluations from participants in UP’s initiative The Performing Arts Strategy Lab, which is supported by the Bikuben Foundation. The article was produced through an editorial process in which UP used ChatGPT for structuring, wording, and summarising the content.