Stakeholder Management. Stakeholders are all the individuals or groups interest in the progress and results of your project. Stakeholders could be your donors, members of the public, the group of young people you are working with, the wider community, the media and also political authorities working in the youth sector. Make a list of all your stakeholders and arrange them into groups.
For instance, Group 1: Donors, Group 2: City Authorities, Group 3: Youth Organisations and Youth Councils, Group 4: Media, Group 5: Youth in your community (including those participating), Group 6: the wider community, Group 7 (if existing): Partner Organisations. You should develop different strategies to communicate with the different stakeholders.
For instance, you could inform the donors about the development of the project by sending monthly reports and inviting them to assist to a special event or one of your activities. City authorities, if not directly involved in the planning of the project, will not need to be informed monthly. Rather, they need to be informed about the outputs of the project and its outcomes. The media will be contacted at the beginning of the project (launch event) and at the end to disseminate the results of the project.
The community should be informed by organising a gathering in which participants could share their stories and discuss the impact of the project not only in their lives but also in the life of the community.
Risk Assessment is the process of assessing the risks that the project is willing to take. Risk Assessment starts by reviewing all the phases and activities of the project to understand what could go wrong. It is an exercise of scenario planning, which needs to be done by all the members of the organisation together. Considering that each member has different skills and knowledge, it is important to conduct risk assessment in plenary sessions. The main goal of Risk Assessment is to write a Risk Register and a Risk Control Diary.
Risk Register is the list of risks you can foresee. For instance, the most common risk when planning a project involving young people is their unpredictable level of commitment. If the project aims to train at least 20 young and unemployed people, consider that few of those signing up will not show up and few will stop attending classes. This is not because your training project is not valuable but because there are several other variables to take into consideration. Young people might be asked to help at home or they might find temporary occupations (like seasonal jobs), which could distract them from the training course. You should know what risks you are taking in relation to what you know about your community and previous meetings with the young people you are working with.
Risk Control Diary is the list of potential strategies you might need to adopt to mitigate a risk. For instance, what could we do to make dropout trainees go back to their course? If a trainee is abandoning the course because she/he was offered a temporary job, could we imagine a way to provide a paid internship to the trainees so that they will be more likely to complete the course even if other temporary jobs are offered to them? It is also important to name a person who will intervene when a planned risk happens to mitigate its effects on the project at large.
