Stakeholder are groups of people who have interest in an organization and have the potential to impact or influence or to be impacted on, or to be influenced by the event. As good engagement with stakeholders is critical to successful event planning and delivery, therefore we should handle stakeholders and their needs carefully. If this crisis is poorly handled, it might create a wide impact on the event or even the event organization’s reputation. Therefore, it is very important to analyse each stakeholder, both individual and group, and then decide on the appropriate approach for each of them to keep them involved and supportive.
In general, there are two types of stakeholder who can create impact to an organization or project which is internal stakeholder and external stakeholder.
Internal stakeholders are people within the organization, for example employee, owner and shareholder. Therefore they can affect the hierarchy status using the formal power such as authority and senior position. They can also create influence to the organization culture with their leadership style or personal charisma. In addition, they can take control of strategic resources with their responsibility for strategic products. They also own the possession of knowledge and skills as they might own the expert knowledge to operate the project. For example, the balloonists in the hotair balloon event own the knowledge to fly the balloon. Other than that, internal stakeholder can control the environment due to their network relationships to external stakeholders. For example, the event planner of a company is the one who interact with the clients, so if he/she leaves the company, the clients might follow him/her too. Last but not the least is that they have involvement in strategy implementation, internal stakeholder have the decision power to do changes for example changing the supplier, suggesting other venue and so on.
External stakeholders are