Planting new seeds in a charity’s mind
Impact and Stakeholder Mapping - Wayward Plan
“Kate introduced us to a useful way of mapping the different relationships around our work and thinking about what we can offer to different stakeholders. For an organisation like ours, where activities span reuse, design, community engagement and the circular economy, having a framework to unpack those different offers was a helpful exercise and sparked lots of ideas.”
Heather Ring, Co-director, Wayward Plants
Background
Wayward Plants is an emerging charity based in London, which rescues and rehomes unwanted plants, trees and landscape materials to support communities and schools that want to green their local spaces but lack the resources to do so. This innovative organisation is at a point of major growth, including forming a charity. It was a finalist at the 2025 Stephen Lloyd Awards, where Action Planning consultants were offering pro bono support. Its founder and co-director Heather Ring took up the offer gladly.
“What we are doing is highly complex and ambitious, so support is something we never turn down, on many different fronts.”
Brief
Heather had been advised by an Action Planning consultant at the Stephen Lloyd Awards that corporate sponsorship would be their best fundraising target. As part of the pro bono support available through the Awards, Action Planning Associate Kate Griffiths subsequently worked with Heather on communicating impact and stakeholder mapping, helping Wayward Plants consider how different audiences and potential supporters might engage with the organisation.
Process
Kate held two free Teams calls with Heather. In the first Heather explained her organisation, plans and the breadth of the work, which can make it challenging to communicate succinctly everything Wayward Plants and partner design practice Wayward do. In the second Kate walked her through a stakeholder mapping tool, which Heather could take away and work with.
The tool looks at all your potential users and the services you can offer, breaking it all down into categories, which you can filter. The output is a clear analysis of the different services you have to offer to specific stakeholders; for example, a developer. This then enables you to strengthen your pitch to that stakeholder group.
Heather saw a connection with separate pro bono support Wayward Plants had received from ReLondon.
“One of the useful points ReLondon made was that a developer or local authority is unlikely to be actively looking for something called a ‘plant reuse service’. But they might be interested in several different things we can offer, from reuse and circular economy services to community engagement, meanwhile activations or creative engagement. We need to be able to show the different ways we could work together. The stakeholder mapping exercise was useful in thinking through those different relationships and offers.”
“Another component was looking at outcomes and impact. Kate gave me definitions of what these were and surprised me that the things we were calling impact were more like outputs. For example, when we say we’ve rescued over 100,000 plants and trees, she said that’s an output. Impact is how you show the social or environmental change.”
Outcome
While the support was limited by time, the conversations brought up things to think about.
“We’re unusual in that we’re very established – eg partnerships with the Barbican and the RHS – but we’re also just forming our charity and there’s a million pieces of work to do, and we’re a small team with limited capacity, so we’re doing them incrementally. Now we’re getting closer to a stage where we can take what we do and tailor offers to specific users.”
“It’s helped us to think about how to build offers and look at the wider scope of how we tailor pitches to these groups and the various ways we work with them. It’s also helped us to clarify what we do. We have such a variety of things, it’s always been a challenge to explain this to people.”
Consultant’s insight
It was a pleasure to volunteer my time to support Heather through the Action Planning programme for the Stephen Lloyd Awards finalists. Wayward Plants is an inspiring charity at an exciting stage of growth. Although we only had two hours together, we explored several key principles that helped Heather consider new approaches to communicating the charity’s impact and value more effectively. It was especially rewarding to see the progress made afterwards, with Heather returning to speak at the Action Planning Away Day and sharing the significant developments and achievements the charity had delivered in such a short space of time.