Collaborate with the team in order to choose the ones you need to involve in the project and put their names (or portraits, see the Personas tool) on a map where you can arrange them referring to specific attributes. In this map, they are organized as “core target group/staff, direct stakeholders and indirect stakeholders”.
You could organize them also in many different ways:

• You can distinguish according to profession, role or working style;
• You can distinguish according to the place they live, work or have impact;
• You can map according to impact areas, sectors, private or public stakeholders;
• You can map on the basis of expectations, level of engagement or value offering to the project (space usage, network, interest in your topic etc.).

When mapping your potential community, it is important to pay particular attention to potential users. In doing so, it could be useful to further cluster potential users e.g. into sectors that you want to engage or approach, key individuals or secondary users. To better understand the different kind of users you want to address your project to, you may use this Target group tool for each user’s cluster.

Finally, don’t forget to debrief! With your team, look at the map and ask yourselves:

•  what is already present in the community?
•  what does the community need?
•  what interconnections do you already see?
•  who is missing?

Understanding your community is the first step to be able to engage them and enable a shared sense of ownership. This is why, you can later redo this process also involving a little group of stakeholders and users you want to get onboard as the very first engaged team (see point 3 | A of this chapter). You will get essential feedbacks and maybe find out some categories that are missing.

After completing the contextual research and the visualization of your main stakeholders, it’s time to validate all the information and insights you got asking for advice to the ones you intend to involve. You can engage your community while exploring the relevance and truthfulness of what you have discovered.
In order to do so, we suggest you to approach this task using the so-called U-Process, a methodology used to investigate problems, discover opportunities and challenges around you and create deep involvement of people participating in the Sensing Journey activity.
This activity will guide you through interactions and in depth interviews with key stakeholders, in order to understand their own personal vision, goals and challenges as well as the contexts vision, characteristics and opportunities.
Take the occasion of these interviews also to nurture relationships with the stakeholders involved and to open relation channels you will use to keep in touch and to inform them about your next initiatives.

After the interviews you will need a dedicated moment with your team to collectively analyze and cluster the research outcomes. Use these results to improve the first stakeholders map and to set an engagement strategy for the next steps.

If you are looking for other ways to get your community engaged, look at this set of tools to engage stakeholders.

Another important feedback you need to get from your collaborators is related to the first draft of Vision you defined with your team.

“A community is crafted around an idea. Being clear and coherent with the approach and the beliefs/ statements is a fundamental principle for the well-being of the community.”

Organize a co-creation session with your core stakeholders and start sharing your idea, the Vision you have, the impact you are trying to achieve and the ways how you will do it. You can follow this guide (page 22) for planning the kick-off meeting with stakeholders.
During the meeting, share hopes, fears, and expectations. Ask participants to share thoughts, concerns and any kind of feedback. Make it clear that every contribution is not only valuable, but essential for the success of the project. This practical tool may help you discuss and prioritize values with your stakeholders.

This is a fundamental moment: together you are putting the very first building block, having a clear and shared intention on what you are building. This moment will not only define the direction, but it will also generate a strong sense of belonging and energy around the idea, also arising empathy and reciprocity between participants.