Stakeholder Analysis for New Zealand Community Sports Clubs

The president who tried to do everything

Karen became president of a netball club in Tauranga last March. By June she'd committed to repainting the court shelter before the regional sports trust inspection, drafting a child protection policy for Netball New Zealand, meeting the intermediate school about a shared-use agreement, writing a sponsorship proposal for a local building firm, responding to a neighbour's complaint about Saturday morning noise, and organising a club stall at the neighbourhood gala.

By September she was doing fifteen hours a week. Unpaid. None of those things were finished. The shelter had one coat of paint. The child protection policy sat in a Google Doc with two comments. The school had gone quiet. The neighbour was writing to the council.

Karen wasn't disorganised. She was drowning - saying yes to every request because she had no framework for sorting them. A one-hour exercise at a committee meeting would have changed everything. That exercise is called a stakeholder analysis.

Who actually has an interest in your club?

Ask a committee "who do we serve?" and the answer is "our members." True, but incomplete. A New Zealand club sits inside a layered web of relationships - local, regional, and national - that's more complex than most committees realise. Here's the full picture.

Financial members

Playing members, social members, life members, honorary members. They pay their subs, turn up on Saturdays, vote at the AGM. But they're not one group. A premier-grade player wants competitive fixtures. A social member wants a beer after the game. A life member wants respect for the club's history. Don't treat them as a single block.

Parents and guardians

In junior sections, parents are their own constituency. They care about safety, fairness, cost, and communication. They're also your volunteer pipeline - the parent on the sideline at Year 5 netball is either your next coach or your loudest critic. Which one depends on whether anyone's spoken to them.

Coaches and team managers

Deeply invested but often not on the committee. They need equipment, pitch or court time, and autonomy. Micromanage a coach and they'll leave. Abandon them and they'll leave faster.

Volunteers

The invisible labour force. The person who marks the field, washes the shirts, runs the sausage sizzle, opens the clubrooms at 7am. They burn out quietly and don't come back. You won't notice until prizegiving when nobody's set up the trestle tables.

Sponsors and local businesses

They're not charities. They expect brand visibility, community association, or networking access. Take the cheque in March and don't contact them until October, and they'll fund the rugby club next year.

Your territorial authority (city or district council)

This is where New Zealand clubs have a critical relationship most committees underestimate. If your ground is on council reserve land - and many clubs' grounds are - the council controls your lease, your access, and your ability to make changes. Want to extend the clubrooms? Install floodlights? Put up a storage container? The council is involved, either directly through the reserves management plan or through the resource consent process.

Most councils also run community grants - the Tauranga City Council's Community Investment Fund, Hamilton City's Community Grants, Wellington's Our City Grants. These go undersubscribed because clubs don't know they exist or assume they won't qualify. One application could fund your new equipment shed or defibrillator.

Your regional sports trust

Regional sports trusts are one of the most under-used resources in New Zealand grassroots sport. Every region has one - Sport Bay of Plenty, Sport Waikato, Sport Wellington, Sport Canterbury, Sport Otago, and so on. They're funded partly by Sport New Zealand and partly by local gaming trusts. Their staff exist to help clubs grow. They run governance workshops, volunteer training, club health checks, and connect clubs to funding.

Most clubs have never spoken to theirs. If you Google "your region] regional sports trust" and don't recognise the name, you're leaving resources on the table.

Your national sports organisation's community sport advisor

New Zealand Rugby, New Zealand Cricket, Netball New Zealand, Hockey New Zealand, Football New Zealand - every NSO has community sport staff whose job is to support affiliated clubs. They have budgets for facility improvements, coaching development, and participation programmes. They also influence governance requirements. If you don't know your regional development person's name, find it this week.

Local schools

Your pipeline for junior members. The Kiwisport programme, delivered through Sport NZ, provides funding for schools to offer sport experiences - and many schools are actively looking for club partnerships. A conversation with the school's sports coordinator is often all it takes. Boards of trustees are worth knowing too - they approve facility-sharing agreements and after-school programmes.

Neighbouring residents

They hear the whistle on Saturday mornings. They see cars parked on the berm. They notice floodlights through bedroom curtains. Happy neighbours are invisible. Unhappy ones write to the council, object to resource consents, and leave one-star Google reviews. One letterbox drop before the season prevents most friction.

Sport New Zealand

If your club is planning a significant facility project, Sport NZ's Community Resilience Fund or other funding rounds may be relevant. But they fund clubs that already have relationships with local structures. Being known to your regional sports trust and territorial authority makes you visible when funding rounds open.

Other clubs sharing your facilities

Football and cricket sharing a ground is the classic New Zealand example. Pitch schedules, changing room allocation, and storage access are perennial friction points. A bad co-tenancy relationship poisons every committee meeting.

The power-interest matrix

You've now got a list of maybe twelve to fifteen groups. You cannot give equal attention to all of them - that's how you get a Karen situation. What you need is a framework for deciding who gets what kind of attention.

The power-interest matrix has been used in project management since the 1990s. It works just as well for a netball club as it does for a construction project. Draw a 2x2 grid. The vertical axis is power - how much influence does this group have over your club's ability to operate? The horizontal axis is interest - how actively engaged is this group in what your club does day to day?

High power, high interest - Manage closely

Financial members (especially AGM voters), your committee, coaches, and your NSO's regional team. They can directly affect the club's direction and they're paying attention. If your national body sends a governance checklist, it's not optional - the NSO sits here because compliance affects affiliation.

High power, low interest - Keep satisfied

The territorial authority. Your major sponsor. They have significant power - the council might own your ground, the sponsor might fund half your junior programme - but they're not thinking about you daily. Make sure the impression is positive when they do. Respond to council requests promptly. Deliver on sponsorship commitments. Attend the relevant community board meeting once a year.

Low power, high interest - Keep informed

Parents of junior players are the textbook example. They care enormously but lack formal power unless they join the committee. They need clear communication about draws, fees, and selections. Neighbours who've raised concerns with the council sit here too - they can't vote at your AGM, but they can influence the bodies that have power over you.

Low power, low interest - Monitor

Lapsed members. The broader community. Clubs you don't share facilities with. You don't need active engagement, but keep an ear to the ground.

How to run the exercise

You don't need a consultant or an away day. You need a whiteboard, a committee meeting, and about an hour.

Before the meeting: Draw the 2x2 matrix on a whiteboard. Label the axes. Write each group on a sticky note.

Step 1 (15 minutes): Go through the groups above and add any specific to your club. The local MP who turns up to prizegiving. The charitable trust that owns your clubrooms. Get them all on the board.

Step 2 (20 minutes): Place each group in a quadrant. The disagreements are the point - they force the committee to articulate why a group matters and how.

Step 3 (15 minutes): For each high-power group, write: what do they need from us, and what do we need from them? Be concrete. "The council needs us to maintain the clubrooms to the lease standard. We need them to approve the floodlight resource consent."

Step 4 (10 minutes): Assign a contact person for each high-power group. Not the president for everything. Spread the load deliberately.

Revisit the map each season. Groups shift. A school that was low interest might have a new sports coordinator. The map is a living document.

The groups you're probably forgetting

Every club has blind spots. Here are the ones we see most often in New Zealand clubs.

Neighbours. Invisible until a complaint arrives at the council. One letterbox drop before the season - key dates, contact number - prevents most problems. Some clubs invite immediate neighbours to opening day. Costs nothing. Changes the dynamic entirely.

Your regional sports trust. Most clubs have never heard of their regional sports trust. A single phone call can be worth thousands in grants and support over the next few years.

Gaming trusts. In New Zealand, gaming trusts like the Lion Foundation, Pub Charity, NZCT, and the Southern Trust fund millions of dollars in community sport each year. Many clubs never apply because the forms look daunting. Your regional sports trust can often help with the application.

Lapsed members. They left for a reason. A five-question survey can surface problems the current committee doesn't see - and sometimes brings people back.

Your NSO's community sport advisor. This person has a budget and a brief to grow participation. Most clubs in their patch have never rung them.

How TidyHQ helps you manage these relationships

Once you've mapped your groups, you need a way to communicate with them differently. That's where your contact database matters. In TidyHQ, every contact - whether they're a financial member, a parent, a sponsor, a council officer, or a school sports coordinator - lives in one system. You can segment them with custom fields and groups, so when you need to send a sponsor update, email parents of Year 7 players, or write to your council contact, it's a two-minute job instead of a dig through three spreadsheets and someone's personal inbox.

Our contact management tools let you track the relationships that matter - not just membership status, but who your council parks officer is, who the NSO development person is, which school teacher you met at the gala. When your committee turns over (and in most NZ clubs, the average committee tenure is under three years), that knowledge stays in the system instead of leaving with the retiring secretary.

Frequently asked questions

How often should we redo the mapping exercise?

Once a year is the minimum - ideally at the start of the season or at a planning meeting in the off-season. But you should also revisit it when something significant changes: new councillors elected, a sponsor pulling out, a school merger, or a change in your NSO's affiliation requirements. The initial exercise takes about 60 minutes. An annual update takes about 20.

What if our committee disagrees on where a group sits in the matrix?

That's exactly what should happen. The disagreement is the most productive part of the exercise. If half the committee thinks the regional sports trust is high power and the other half has never heard of it, that tells you something important - your club hasn't been using the resources available to it. Let the debate run. It surfaces assumptions that have never been examined.

Does this apply to small clubs with only 40 or 50 members?

Especially to small clubs. A club with 50 members and a committee of four or five cannot spread its energy across every group equally. The matrix helps a small committee focus its limited hours where they'll have the most impact. If anything, the exercise is more valuable for small clubs than large ones, because the cost of getting priorities wrong is higher when you've got fewer people to fix the mistakes.

For a deeper framework on club governance and managing these relationships over time, Geoff Wilson's book on leading grassroots sports clubs is the best practical guide we've seen. We reviewed it in detail - [read the full review here](/blog/leading-grassroots-sports-club-geoff-wilson-book-review). The UK version of this guide is also available at [/blog/stakeholder-analysis-uk-sports-clubs](/blog/stakeholder-analysis-uk-sports-clubs), and the Australian version at [/blog/stakeholder-analysis-australian-sports-clubs](/blog/stakeholder-analysis-australian-sports-clubs) - useful if your club has cross-Tasman connections or you want to see how the framework applies in different governance structures.

References

• Sport New Zealand - Community sport strategy, club development resources, and Kiwisport programme guidance
• Regional Sports Trusts - Club health checks, governance workshops, and volunteer training
• Charities Services - Governance obligations for incorporated societies and charitable trusts in New Zealand
• Geoff Wilson - Stakeholder mapping frameworks for grassroots sports club governance
• Harvard Business Review - Power-interest matrix and stakeholder analysis research