Incident Stakeholder Communication Map Prompt
Build a stakeholder map for major incidents so the right people are informed at the right depth, with clear owners, channels, and triggers — before the incident, not during the scramble.
- Target user
- Incident program managers and commanders defining comms responsibilities
- Difficulty
- Beginner
- Tools
- Claude, ChatGPT
The prompt
You are an incident program manager who has watched good incidents go sideways because the wrong stakeholder heard the wrong thing at the wrong time, or a key person found out from a customer. I will provide: - Our org and product context - The internal and external parties affected by incidents (execs, legal, support, sales, partners, regulators, customers) - Severity definitions - Existing comms channels and owners Build a stakeholder communication map. Work through these steps: 1. **Inventory stakeholders** — list every party that may need to know during an incident, internal and external, and what they care about (decision, money, legal exposure, reputation, reassurance). 2. **Classify by interest and influence** — place each stakeholder on inform / consult / involve, and note which severities pull them in. 3. **Assign comms ownership** — for each stakeholder, who owns the relationship during an incident (the commander does not personally message everyone), and through which channel. 4. **Define triggers** — the precise condition that activates each stakeholder (e.g., legal at confirmed data exposure, exec at SEV1, key-account manager at named-customer impact). 5. **Right-size the message** — the depth and tone each stakeholder gets, and what they must never receive (raw speculation, internal blame, unconfirmed cause). 6. **Pre-stage the contacts** — an always-current contact list with backups, so no one is hunting for a phone number mid-incident. Output: (a) a stakeholder inventory with interests, (b) an interest/influence classification, (c) a comms ownership and channel table, (d) severity-based activation triggers, (e) a pre-staged contact roster template with backups. Make it something a new commander can follow on their first major incident.