LEAD 6143 Module 2 Stakeholder Needs Assessment Example

Who Counts and What They Need: A Stakeholder Salience and Needs Assessment for a Regional Blood Center, From Hospital Blood Banks to Families Living With Sickle Cell Disease

Student Name

American College of Education

LEAD6143: Strategic Operations Planning and Innovation

Module 2 Assignment

Instructor Name

October 19, 2026

Introduction

Module 1 found that a composite regional blood center's operations serve its mission well on safety and overall supply and poorly on "every patient," especially patients with sickle cell disease who need closely matched blood. Before planning changes, a leader needs to know who has a stake in the center's operations, how much each group's claims weigh and what each actually needs. This paper identifies the center's stakeholders, classifies them by salience and reports their needs from four sources of evidence.

Method

Bryson (2004) described a range of practical techniques for identifying and analyzing stakeholders in public and nonprofit organizations, beginning with a basic analysis of who the stakeholders are, what criteria they use to judge the organization and how well it performs against those criteria, and moving to tools such as grids that plot stakeholders' power against their interest. Following that approach, I listed stakeholders with the senior team, then gathered needs through four channels during September: a survey of transfusion service managers at the 38 hospitals the center supplies, with 31 responses; a short survey of 600 randomly selected donors, with 214 responses; two focus groups with 16 collections staff; and interviews with six families of patients with sickle cell disease, arranged through the children's hospital's hematology clinic.

Who Was Missing From the First List

The senior team's first list named hospitals, regulators, donors and staff, the groups that appear in the center's reports. Freeman (2010), whose stakeholder approach to strategic management counts as a stakeholder any group whose actions can shape the organization's goals or whose fortunes those goals shape, offers a broader test, and applying it added three groups. Patients and their families are affected by every operational decision but never appear in the center's planning documents. Community organizations such as churches, sororities and health centers can affect the center's reach by hosting drives or declining to. And the region's transfusion medicine physicians, who decide when patients need antigen-matched units, shape demand in ways the collections team rarely discusses. Adding these groups changed the assessment's results more than any other step, because the needs that most clearly expose the mission gap belong to two of them.

Classifying Stakeholders by Salience

Mitchell et al. (1997) argued that how much attention a stakeholder group gets depends on three things it may or may not have: the power to make the organization act, a claim that society would call rightful and a claim pressing enough to demand attention now. A group holding all three is, in their terms, definitive; a group with legitimacy and urgency but little power is dependent on others to advance its claims. Applied to the center, the hospitals are definitive stakeholders: they buy the blood, hold contracts and press urgent orders. Regulators, chiefly the Food and Drug Administration, hold power and legitimacy. Donors hold legitimacy and considerable collective power, since the center cannot operate without them. Staff hold legitimacy and some power through their skills. Patients with sickle cell disease and their families have legitimate and urgent claims but almost no power over the center; they are dependent stakeholders, whose needs reach the center only through the hospitals that order on their behalf.

What Hospitals Need

Hospital transfusion managers rated reliability first: 28 of 31 named on-time delivery of routine orders as their top need, and 19 named faster supply of antigen-matched units for patients with special requirements. Several added comments about the delays of up to three days for matched units described in Module 1. Cost ranked third. The hospitals' needs therefore largely support the center's current focus on efficient routine supply, with one important exception that bears directly on the mission gap. Two of the smaller rural hospitals also asked for more notice when the center's shortages loom, since they hold fewer units and have less room to absorb a late delivery.

What Donors Need

Donors' top needs were convenient times and locations and shorter visits. The median donor reported a total visit of 62 minutes and said 45 would be acceptable. Donors from urban zip codes were twice as likely as suburban donors to say they would give more often if drives were held closer to home or on weekends, and 22% of donors over 65 said online-only appointment booking discouraged them. These findings echo the community partners' accounts in Module 1.

What Staff Need

In the focus groups, collections staff described two needs. The first was predictable schedules: crews are often reassigned on short notice to large drives, which disrupts their weeks and cancels smaller neighborhood drives. The second was recognition that smaller drives are harder work, not easier, because setup time is the same while units are fewer. Several staff said they would welcome a role in community drives if the scorecard did not penalize them for lower yields. Staff do not need to be persuaded that community drives matter; they need a system that stops punishing them for running one.

What Patients and Families Need

The six families described lives organized around transfusions. Children with sickle cell disease on chronic transfusion programs visit the clinic every three to five weeks, and parents described appointments postponed because matched units had not arrived. Two parents said they would gladly organize drives at their churches or workplaces if the center asked, and one mother said she had only just learned, from the clinic nurse, that donors of similar ancestry were more likely to be good matches for her son. Their needs are simple to state: matched blood on time, and a way to help.

Reading the Assessment

The salience classification and the needs data together reveal the center's planning problem. The stakeholders with the most power, hospitals and regulators, mostly need what the center already does well. The stakeholder with the most urgent need, families of sickle cell patients, has the least power and is invisible in the center's planning except through hospital orders. Donors and staff, with moderate power, need changes that would also serve the families: drives closer to home and a scorecard that values smaller drives. A strategic plan that listens only to definitive stakeholders will keep the mission gap in place.

Priorities for Planning

The assessment suggests three priorities for the strategic plan that later modules will build. The first is to give the dependent stakeholder a voice: a family representative and the children's hospital's hematology nurse should join the center's community advisory committee. The second is to treat donors' and staff members' needs as allies of the mission rather than as costs, since closer, weekend and phone-bookable drives would serve donors, staff and families at once. The third is to keep the definitive stakeholders' trust by protecting routine reliability, which hospitals ranked first, while the center changes how it collects.

Conclusion

Assessing stakeholder needs before planning changed how I see the center's options. The groups that would benefit from neighborhood and weekend drives, donors, staff and families, are more numerous than the scorecard suggests, and the most powerful stakeholders' needs do not conflict with serving them. Module 3 will map the drive process itself to find where time and capacity could be freed for that purpose.

References

Bryson, J. M. (2004). What to do when stakeholders matter: Stakeholder identification and analysis techniques. Public Management Review, 6(1), 21-53. https://doi.org/10.1080/14719030410001675722

Freeman, R. E. (2010). Strategic management: A stakeholder approach. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139192675

Mitchell, R. K., Agle, B. R., & Wood, D. J. (1997). Toward a theory of stakeholder identification and salience: Defining the principle of who and what really counts. Academy of Management Review, 22(4), 853-886. https://doi.org/10.2307/259247