Stakeholder mapping is the exercise of identifying every audience a crisis touches — employees, customers, investors, regulators, partners, media, community — and prioritizing who must hear from the organization, in what order, and through which channel. Employees before the press; regulators before rumor. Mapping stakeholders before and during a crisis prevents the classic failure of a key audience learning bad news from the outside, and orders a response so the right people hear the right message first.