How to choose the right communication channel for your project stakeholders
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There’s a stat that gets thrown around a lot in project management circles: project managers spend up to 90% of their time communicating. I’m not convinced that there was a lot of robust academic research behind that number, but the broader point still stands. Communication is the job. Everything else — planning, risk management, scheduling — supports it.
And yet, for all the time we spend communicating, we don’t always make deliberate choices about how we communicate. We default to email because that’s what we’ve always done. Or we stick to weekly status meetings because the project plan says so. Or we fire off a Teams message when what the situation really called for was a proper conversation.
Choosing the right channel matters. If you’ve ever tried to get hold of a stakeholder and missed them because they don’t monitor their Teams messages or whatever, then you’ll know what I mean. I have one project sponsor who is on WhatsApp every day, but wouldn’t take a call, because he’s out on the road. So you have to know your audience and what will work for them.
Channel choice isn’t a minor detail
According to PMI’s Pulse of the Profession research, 56% of project spend is at risk due to poor communication*. In other words, you could be wasting over half your project budget if you don’t get the comms right.
So is that ‘project managers aren’t communicating enough’? I don’t think so. In my experience, the more common problem isn’t volume. It’s mismatch — the right information going out through the wrong channel to the wrong person at the wrong moment.
If your information is not accessible (or interesting), then it won’t have the effect you were hoping for.
Your communication management plan should address all of this, but even if yours is fairly basic, making more intentional choices about channel selection will pay dividends.
When you’re building or updating your communications management plan, add a column for preferred channel. Ask people directly. It takes two minutes and it can save you significant rework when you discover, three months into a project, that the sponsor has been deleting your status emails unread because they assumed someone else was summarizing them.
The communication channels problem
One of the things the
The number of potential communication channels in a project is calculated as n(n-1)/2, where n is the number of stakeholders.
What this formula makes clear is how quickly communication complexity escalates. A single person added to a 10-person project team increases communication channels from 45 to 55. That’s a 22% increase in complexity for a 10% increase in team size. This is why communication management can’t be improvized on larger projects.
But structure doesn’t mean rigidity. It means knowing your options and making deliberate choices. And that’s even more important when you bring users and customers into the mix.
The main channels available to you
Most project managers have access to a fairly consistent set of communication channels, even if the specific tools vary. Here’s how I think about them.
| Channel | Pros | Cons |
| Creates a record Asynchronous so people reply at their convenience More formal | Easy to ignore | |
| Meetings | Allows you to pick up tone and handle questions Best for topics that require discussion | Time-consuming Difficult to manage with large groups |
| IM/Collaboration tools | Fast and conversational Best for 1:1 or small group discussion | Not suitable if you need a formal record Some stakeholders won’t be on top of their messages |
| SMS/Text | Fast Best for urgent action required | Some stakeholders won’t want to give you their phone number Risk of over use and getting ignored |
| Dashboards | Good for stakeholders who will self-serve Can be tailored to show what’s important to an individual or team Often real-time info | Need set up and maintenance Most stakeholders won’t seek out information proactively |
Email remains the workhorse of project communication, and for good reason. It creates a record, it allows people to read and respond at their own pace, and it’s universally accessible.
It’s particularly well suited to formal updates, decisions that need to be documented, and information that stakeholders will need to refer back to.
The downside is that it’s easy to ignore. An email can sit unread in a busy inbox for days. And in high-volume environments, important updates can get buried. If you’re sending status reports by email, think carefully about format and frequency. A long, poorly structured update is worse than no update at all, because it trains stakeholders to stop reading them.
Meetings
Meetings are high-bandwidth: you can pick up tone, handle questions in real time, and build relationships in a way that written communication doesn’t allow. They’re the right choice for anything that needs discussion, negotiation, or alignment. Status meetings, steering group sessions, workshops — these need to be in-person or video, not summarized in a document.
The pitfall is over-reliance on meetings. If everything becomes a meeting, people stop attending properly. Meetings should be reserved for communication that genuinely benefits from dialogue.
Instant messaging and collaboration tools
Teams, Slack, WhatsApp — whatever your organization uses — these are fast and conversational. They’re well suited to quick questions, informal updates, and day-to-day team coordination. They’re not well suited to formal communication that needs to be on record, or to reaching stakeholders who aren’t active on the platform.
One issue I see regularly is that important decisions get made in Teams chats and then lost. If something matters, move it to email or a document.
SMS and text messaging
Whether you favor WhatsApp, iMessage or ‘traditional’ SMS, these all get underused in project management, which is a shame, because they have a useful place. Open rates for text messages are significantly higher than for email, and texts tend to get read quickly. For time-sensitive alerts (a go/no-go decision, an urgent escalation, a reminder about a critical sign-off) SMS is more attention-getting than email.
If you’re running a project with external stakeholders who aren’t on your internal systems, or working with senior sponsors who are hard to reach by email, SMS is worth considering as part of your outreach toolkit.
Dashboards and status reports
For stakeholders who need a regular view of project progress but don’t want to be emailed about it, a self-serve dashboard or a structured status report distributed on a predictable schedule can work well.
These are ‘pull’ communication: the stakeholder chooses when to look. They work best for stakeholders who are engaged and know what to look for; they don’t work well as the primary channel for disengaged or hard-to-reach stakeholders.
In my experience, after a while, no one but the hardcore PMO team look at them. Sometimes they are just about providing confidence to senior stakeholders. Once they know that things are being tracked and that it’s all OK, they use their time for other, higher priority tasks than checking a dashboard, on the assumption that they’d hear about it if something was seriously wrong.
Combining channels: the case for a blended approach
For most projects, the right answer isn’t one channel, it’s a mix. You might use a regular email update to share the week’s key progress, WhatsApp or a Teams message to flag anything urgent, and a monthly steering group meeting for anything that needs a decision.
Case study
On a recent project, we needed to inform customers about the project and how the work we were doing would affect them. We chose a combination of email and text message. The email went out first, with the reminder text message shortly after.
Before choosing those channels, we checked the amount of email addresses and phone numbers that were on file for customers in the CRM system. There were more emails than phone numbers, and in the weeks leading up to the milestone on the project plan, staff on site who talked to customers used the opportunity to gather more data where we didn’t have it, so the communications would reach as many people as possible.
Overall, this ‘plan, gather data, communicate, communicate again’ approach seemed to land quite well.
It’s worth the effort to learn how to use email and SMS together for blended project communications. That resource is particularly written for a marketing context, but it translates well into thinking about stakeholder engagement, particularly around personalization, timing and avoiding channel fatigue. Whether you are communicating internally or externally, segment your audience, vary your channels and don’t rely too heavily on one medium.
Remember to lean into the expertise in your Marketing department if you are planning on messaging customers. Normally, project people wouldn’t reach out to customers directly as you’ll have a structure in place to do that, so make sure you’ve got a CRM expert on the project team (which is what we did – no one is letting me get my hands on the system to communicate to customers!).
Get the timing right
Channel and timing go together. Email sent at 11pm on a Friday will be buried by Monday morning. An urgent SMS sent at 7am will be seen immediately but might annoy. A monthly steering group update shared two days before the meeting gives people time to read it; shared the night before, it doesn’t.
Think about when your stakeholders are most receptive. Senior sponsors are often more engaged mid-week than on Mondays or Fridays, but that might be different in your organization.
Teams with operational responsibilities may not be checking project communications during busy periods, like month end, and they probably won’t show up to meetings (Finance colleagues, looking at you).
None of this needs to be complicated. A simple communication matrix to remind you what to do when or who needs what, that’s often enough to bring some discipline to what otherwise becomes ad hoc.
A quick note on documentation
Whatever channels you use, make sure that decisions and key information end up somewhere they can be retrieved. Instant messaging and informal conversations are great for getting things done quickly, but if the audit trail lives in someone’s deleted messages, you’ll regret it.
I’m happy to chat on Teams, but when we’ve made a decision or got some kind of output from that back-and-forth, it goes on an email to everyone, or is transferred to the action log, or something, so it exists somewhere that is not a conversation thread.
In summary
Communication channel selection isn’t a detail to figure out later. It belongs in your communications management plan, it should be revisited when your stakeholder landscape changes, and it should be driven by what your stakeholders actually need — not by habit or convenience.
The channel-per-stakeholder approach, combined with deliberate thinking about timing and frequency, is one of the more practical ways to improve stakeholder engagement without significantly increasing the time you spend communicating. Often you’re doing the same work, just routing it better.
If you’re looking to develop your stakeholder communication skills more broadly, you might find my book Engaging Stakeholders on Projects a useful complement to the tips above. And if communication planning is something you want to explore with a peer group, it’s a topic we return to regularly in the Project Management Rebels community.
* Project Management Institute. (2013a). Pulse of the profession® in-depth report: The high cost of low performance: The essential role of communications. Newtown Square, PA.
