Stakeholder Communication Plan

Purpose

Builds a communication plan for different stakeholders during a change.

Anchored in research

• LinkedIn Skills on the Rise 2026 — Executive & Stakeholder Communication
• Hiatt, Jeff / Prosci — the ADKAR model (Awareness, Desire, Knowledge, Ability, Reinforcement): communication objectives shift over the course of a change effort, and a message that's right for building Awareness is the wrong message for driving Reinforcement.
• Mendelow (1991) — the Power/Interest stakeholder grid, used to decide the intensity and directness of communication for each stakeholder segment.

Method

1. Segment stakeholders by power and interest (Mendelow) — this determines communication intensity and directness per group, not just who gets an email versus who gets a meeting.
2. Map each segment's current position on the ADKAR curve (Awareness → Desire → Knowledge → Ability → Reinforcement). A stakeholder who isn't yet aware of the change needs a different message than one who already knows about it but hasn't bought in.
3. Define, per segment: objective, key message, channel, cadence, and owner. The objective should be the specific ADKAR gap that segment is at (build awareness / build desire / build ability / etc.), not a generic "keep informed."
4. Sequence the messages against the change timeline — early messages build awareness and the case for change; messages closer to go-live shift toward ability and readiness; post-go-live messages reinforce the change and prevent backsliding.
5. Build in a feedback loop per segment — a way for the message to travel back (Q&A, a pulse survey, sponsor office hours), not just outward broadcast. A plan with no return channel can't detect resistance early.
6. Name a single owner per message-channel pair who is accountable for it actually going out — a plan nobody owns doesn't get executed.

What this skill does NOT do

• Doesn't make the final decision for you — it produces a structured draft to support a human decision.
• Doesn't confirm figures, market data, or competitor data from memory — it uses the inputs you provide, or marks an assumption clearly ([assumption — verify]).
• Doesn't execute the communication for you — it produces the plan and the message framework.

Refinement notes

Areas to keep deepening with real practice:

• your own rules of thumb and heuristics for this technique
• concrete templates (into ../../references/)
• reference cases / your own examples
• what this skill deliberately does not do (guardrails, common mistakes) — add to the list above

This is an internal working note, not a claim about the skill's current usability. Track depth privately via the maturity field in skills_index.json (see ../../../meta/maturity_levels.md). Don't add new fields to the frontmatter — name and description are the only ones allowed (see ../../../meta/frontmatter_schema.md).

Continue from here

• Next in this pack: ../workshop-and-facilitation-design/SKILL.md — Designs the structure of a cross-functional workshop or design-thinking session.
• Before this, for a single high-stakes decision-maker: ../stakeholder-pressure-and-information-gap-mapping/SKILL.md — this skill segments and sequences messaging across a change timeline; that skill closes the information gap with one specific decision-maker before a pitch or business case is written.
• A ready-made skill chain for this situation: see ../../../playbooks/
• This pack's shared guardrails: ../../CLAUDE.md

References

• ../../references/ — the pack's shared background material
• ../../CLAUDE.md — the pack's shared guardrails