1.2 Who should attend?

Gathering all relevant stakeholders together ensures that there will be many ideas, because a wide variety of perspectives will be heard. People are more likely to engage with the ideas emerging from the Creative Workshop because they have been involved in forming them. Resistance is also likely to be lower because there will be no surprises.

Identifying relevant stakeholders requires careful thought. You need to have representatives from all stakeholder groups, both internal and external, and to think about the balance between them. This may be the first time diverse stakeholder representatives have come together, for example, from government, non-governmental organisations, donors and user groups, and you will need to manage all their expectations. This can be a challenge!

One way to ensure you have a workable and effective balance of people is to differentiate stakeholders into primary and secondary stakeholders, where primary stakeholders are those directly affected by the focus of the Creative Workshop, and secondary stakeholders are indirectly affected. You could use the People & Connections Map from page 68 of the DIY Toolkit [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)]   to help this process.