Free tool · Public relations
Add every stakeholder relevant to your project, score their interest and influence, and find out which quadrant of the Mendelow matrix they fall into — with the right communication strategy for each. All in your browser, no sign-up needed.
Repeat the process for each stakeholder: customers, employees, press, government, investors, local community, suppliers...
Type a name for the stakeholder before adding it.
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High interest · High influence
Direct, constant dialogue. Involve them in decisions and flag any change before communicating it to everyone else.
Low interest · High influence
Inform them just enough, and carefully. They aren't paying attention today, but can be triggered if something affects them directly.
High interest · Low influence
Regular, transparent communication. They don't decide, but they can become allies or advocates for the project.
Low interest · Low influence
Minimal follow-up. Review periodically in case their interest or influence level changes over time.
How it works
Type the name of each stakeholder: customers, press, government, employees, investors, community...
From 1 to 10: how much what you do affects them (interest) and how much power they have to shape the outcome (influence).
Internal, external or institutional — so you can tell them apart at a glance on the map and in the list.
Each stakeholder falls into a quadrant with a recommended communication strategy. Export the result as PNG.
Quick guide
A stakeholder map — sometimes called an audience map or public map — is the tool public relations professionals use to bring order to something that usually lives, disorganised, inside someone's head: who really matters in a project, a crisis or a launch, and who doesn't. Instead of treating every stakeholder equally, the map places them on a two-axis matrix (interest and influence) to decide how much communication effort each one deserves.
The model behind this tool is the Mendelow matrix (Aubrey L. Mendelow, 1991), one of the most cited frameworks in stakeholder management and still today the reference standard in project management and corporate communications programmes. The core idea is simple: interest measures how much a stakeholder cares about what you're doing, and influence measures how much capacity that stakeholder has to shape the outcome, regardless of how much they care. A specialist journalist may have high interest and moderate influence; an investor may have decisive influence with interest that only activates at specific moments. Crossing both variables — not just one — is what avoids costly communication mistakes: ignoring someone who can stop a project, or spending resources on someone who was never going to move it.
Besides interest and influence, this tool classifies each stakeholder by its nature. Internal stakeholders (team, partners, leadership) usually require a different tone than external ones (customers, suppliers, community, press), and both are communicated with differently than institutional stakeholders (public administrations, professional bodies, sector regulators), where formal deadlines and official channels come into play. Seeing this at a glance on the same map — with a colour per type — helps avoid mixing communication registers that should stay separate.
This classification is especially useful when designing a public relations plan: most plans fail not from a lack of messaging, but from spending the same effort on every stakeholder instead of prioritising by quadrant. A well-built stakeholder map is, in fact, the first deliverable of any serious stakeholder mapping service: before writing a single message, you need to know exactly who it's for and how much priority it deserves.
It's useful when launching a product or service, preparing a communications campaign, managing a reputational crisis, going through internal change (mergers, restructuring), or simply as an annual strategic planning exercise. In every one of these cases, the result is the same: a prioritised list of who to talk to first, who to keep calm, who to simply inform, and who you can get away with just watching.
The whole process happens in your browser: the data you enter is never sent to a server or stored beyond your session. When you're done, you can export the map as a PNG with the site's branding and take it straight into your strategy document or share it with your team.
Source of the methodological framework: Mendelow, A. L. (1991), Stakeholder Mapping, presented at the 2nd International Conference on Information Systems, Cambridge, MA — a reference model widely documented in project management and public relations literature.
Frequently asked questions
It is a visual representation that places every person, group or organisation affecting or affected by your project according to two variables: how much interest they have in it and how much influence they can exert over its outcome. It is used in public relations, communications and strategic planning to decide who deserves your time and resources.
Interest measures how much that stakeholder cares about what you are doing, or how much the outcome affects them. Influence measures their real capacity to shape that outcome, regardless of whether they care or not. A specialist journalist may have high interest and moderate influence; an investor may have decisive influence with interest that only spikes at key moments.
Internal means part of the organisation (staff, partners, leadership). External means anyone who relates to it from the outside without being a regulatory body (customers, suppliers, community, press). Institutional groups public administrations, professional bodies, regulators or sector entities with rule-making or representative power.
Yes. The "Export PNG" button downloads an image of the map exactly as you built it, with the site's branding, ready to include in a communications plan or share with your team. The data you enter stays only in your browser: it is never sent to or stored on any server.
It works for both, and also for public relations, crisis management or general strategic planning: any situation where you need to decide which stakeholders deserve direct communication, which to keep satisfied, which to keep informed and which to simply monitor.
Next step
Book a free 30-minute session and we'll go through your stakeholder map, prioritise the critical quadrants, and turn it into a communications plan with concrete actions.