Antony Bennett , Public Affairs Diploma

I was already very familiar with some aspects of public affairs practice such as stakeholder analysis, but the course taught me to look at this in a very different way.

In my assignment, I used the Salience Model of stakeholders, looking at their power from two different perspectives. What I’d never really thought about before, in my work, was the salience of stakeholders in terms of their power and how this manifests itself. So, for example what type of stakeholder are they, dominant, discretionary etc. and why is that the case? Identifying this is crucial to understanding how to effectively engage with each type of stakeholder on a policy issue and develop an influential public affairs campaign to achieve that. Thinking about stakeholders in this way has been really useful in my current role, and will also be in the future.