Communications Management Plan — Version 1.2

Lighthouse Financial Services Company — This plan governs how the Beacon Index Advantage product development program communicates: who needs to know what, when they need to know it, through which channel, and who is accountable for saying it. In a stage-gate program the communications problem is distinctive. The audiences are not waiting on a single go-live; they are waiting on five separate decisions, each of which can stop the program, send it backward, or let it proceed — and each of which reshapes what every other audience needs to hear next. This plan is built around that rhythm rather than around a delivery date.

1. Communications Objectives & Principles

The purpose of communications on this program is not to keep people generally informed. It is to ensure that every gate decision is made by people who have the information that decision requires, at the time it is required, and that the consequences of each decision reach the audiences it affects before those audiences learn of it some other way. Everything below serves that purpose.

1.1 Objectives

• Decision-readiness. No member of the Gate Review Board should arrive at a gate without having seen the gate package with enough lead time to interrogate it. The standard is five business days — the same standard the governance model sets for package distribution.
• No surprises upward. The Chief Financial Officer should never learn of a capital-strain movement from the gate deck. The Chief Actuary should never learn of an assumption change from a peer reviewer. Material movements are communicated when they are known, not when they are scheduled.
• No surprises outward. The state insurance regulator, the appointed independent marketing organizations (IMOs), and the reinsurers each learn of matters that affect them through a deliberate channel, on a deliberate cadence — never incidentally.
• One version of the numbers. Every audience sees figures traceable to a single source. When the internal rate of return is stated as 13.4%, it is that figure everywhere, and the superseded 14.6% is never quietly left standing in an older deck.

1.2 Principles

• Communicate the decision, not just the status. A stage-gate audience does not primarily need to know that the program is 43% through Stage 2. It needs to know whether the next gate is still expected to pass, and what would change that. Status without a decision-implication is noise.
• Bad news travels at the speed of good news. The recycle at Gate 1 was communicated on the program's own initiative within two business days (Section 8). That is the standard, not the exception.
• The audience owns the message, not the sender. A message is successful when the recipient can act on it, not when it has been sent. Effectiveness is measured at the receiving end (Section 10).
• Written where it matters. Decisions, conditions, assumption changes and external commitments are communicated in writing and retained. Conversation accelerates understanding; it does not constitute the record.

2. Stakeholder Analysis & Information Needs

Communications are designed against the specific information each stakeholder group needs to perform its role, not against a generic broadcast list. The program's 90-person effort touches the audiences below, in decreasing order of decision authority.

2.1 Influence and interest

The Board members are high-influence, high-interest and receive the most tailored communications. The regulator is high-influence but narrow-interest — it cares intensely about a specific slice (forms and rates) and nothing else, so its channel is formal and bounded. The IMOs are the inverse of a typical “keep satisfied” stakeholder: low influence over the gate decisions but decisive over the business case, because the entire premium projection of $185,000,000 in year one rests on their 6-wholesaler distribution assumption — of which only 4 were committed at the last count (I-06). They are therefore communicated with as if they were high-influence, because in the business case they are.

3. Gate-Milestone Communications — The Governing Rhythm

The single most important structural fact about communications on this program is that they are organized around gates, not around a calendar. Every gate produces the same five-phase communications sequence, and that sequence — not a weekly status report — is the backbone of the plan.

3.1 The five-phase gate sequence

Phase 4 is where most communications programs fail, and where this one is deliberately explicit. A gate outcome is not self-explaining. A “Go with conditions” means very different things to the actuarial team (you have five conditions to close) and to distribution (the timeline holds), and each hears the version relevant to them within two business days.

3.2 Gates already communicated

Two gates are closed, and each generated its full sequence:

• Gate 0 — Concept Screening (05 Feb 2026): outcome Go, 5–0. Clean cascade; no conditions.
• Gate 1 — Business Case: outcome Go with conditions, 4–0–1 on the second pass, following a recycle on the first. The recycle itself is the crisis-communications case in Section 8.

4. Internal Program Communications

Internal communications keep the 90-person program moving between gates. They are lighter-weight than the gate sequence but feed it: the material that surfaces in a weekly team rhythm is what eventually becomes a gate package.

4.1 Standing internal communications

4.2 The status snapshot

Between gates, the program maintains a bi-weekly status snapshot — distinct from the dashboard, which is live, and from the gate package, which is decision-grade. The snapshot answers three questions and no others: are we still on track for the next gate, what has moved since last time, and what needs a decision now. It is deliberately short. A snapshot that grows into a report is a snapshot that stops being read.

5. Gate Review Board & Executive Communications

Board communications are the highest-stakes and most tightly governed. The governance model sets the rules; this plan sets the practice.

5.1 The gate package

The gate package is the primary Board communication. It is distributed five business days before the gate, is frozen at distribution, and carries a fixed spine: the decision requested, the evidence, the financials against the 11.0% hurdle, the open risks, the conditions proposed, and the recommendation. Board members read it in advance; the gate session interrogates it rather than presenting it.

5.2 Between-gate executive contact

The Chief Product Officer, as sponsor and chair, is in continuous contact and receives early signal on anything that could threaten a gate before it reaches a package. The Chief Financial Officer and Chief Actuary receive targeted notice on movements in their domains under the mandatory-notification rules of Section 7. The remaining Board members are contacted between gates only when a matter in their domain moves materially.

6. External, Regulatory & Distribution Communications

External communications carry the highest consequence for error because the recipients are outside the program's control and their responses bind it. Three external channels operate.

6.1 Regulatory

Communications with the state insurance regulator are owned exclusively by the General Counsel & Chief Compliance Officer and flow through the regulatory filing plan. No one else initiates regulator contact. Filing submissions, responses to objections and rate justifications are formal, written, and retained in full. The filing cadence is milestone-based, keyed to the contract-form and rate approvals that must clear before launch.

6.2 Distribution / IMO

Communications with the appointed IMOs are owned by the Head of Distribution. Because the business case rests on IMO-driven volume, these communications are treated with unusual care: product features, the illustrated cap rate (9.25% on the Calder Balanced 5, 1-year point-to-point), the competitive floor (8.50%), and launch timing are communicated only when confirmed, and never as forward promises that pricing could later break. The gap between the 6 planned and 4 committed wholesalers (I-06) is an open communications matter, not a closed one.

6.3 Vendor

Communications with Cordelane, the external actuarial and systems vendor, flow through the SOW and are owned by the relevant function lead. Requirements, acceptance criteria and schedule changes are written and version-controlled; the SOW is the communications contract as much as the commercial one.

7. Mandatory Escalation & Assumption-Breach Notifications

Certain events do not wait for a scheduled communication. When a program assumption breaches its tolerance, notification is mandatory and immediate, routed to the Board member who owns that assumption. This is the mechanism that makes “no surprises upward” enforceable rather than aspirational.

The downside scenario in the business case — volumes 30% below plan, driving IRR to 10.1%, below the hurdle — is the specific outcome these notifications exist to catch early. If the program is drifting toward that scenario, the Board learns of it through this mechanism, one assumption at a time, not through a failed gate.

8. Crisis Communications — The Gate 1 Recycle Case

This program has already run one communications crisis, and it is documented here as the working model rather than a hypothetical protocol. At the first Gate 1 pass, an 87 basis-point understatement of the new-business capital charge was identified — the strain assumption had been carried at roughly 3.33% when the correct figure was 4.2%. The corrected charge pulled the internal rate of return from the 14.6% shown in the first package down to 13.4%. The gate recycled.

8.1 What was communicated, and how fast

• The error was disclosed to the Gate Review Board on the program's own initiative — it was not surfaced by a reviewer catching it.
• A written recycle memorandum was issued two business days after the recycled gate (04 May 2026), stating what was wrong, why, what it cost, and what would change.
• The superseded 14.6% figure was retired everywhere it appeared; no deck was left carrying it.
• An external actuarial peer review (GC-03) was commissioned and communicated as a condition, at a contingency cost of $180,000.

8.2 The crisis-communications principles it demonstrates

• Self-disclosure beats discovery. The program told the Board before the Board asked. That is the difference between a recoverable error and a credibility failure.
• Put a number on it. The recycle memo did not soften the cost. It stated the basis-point figure, the IRR movement and the contingency draw plainly.
• Correct the record everywhere. A crisis is not communicated until every downstream document carries the corrected figure. A superseded number left standing is a second error.
• Close the loop with evidence. The peer review was not a gesture; it produced findings that were communicated back to the Board as condition-closure evidence.

9. Communications Tools, Channels & Records

The plan deliberately keeps the channel set small. A proliferation of channels is a proliferation of places a message can be missed.

The retention column is the point. Decisions, notifications, regulatory correspondence, external commitments and vendor agreements are retained permanently; coordination chatter is not. The test is simple: if a future gate, audit or regulator could need to know that this was communicated, it is retained.

10. Communications Effectiveness Measurement

Communications are measured at the receiving end. A message sent is not a message received, and the metrics below all ask whether the audience could act, not whether the sender acted.

The figure-consistency metric is the one the Gate 1 recycle taught the program to watch. Its target is absolute — zero superseded figures — because a single stale IRR in a live deck is how the credibility earned by correct crisis communications gets quietly spent.

11. Governance, Ownership & Document Control

This plan is owned by the Program Management Office and approved by the Chief Product Officer as sponsor. Channel ownership is fixed: the GC&CCO owns regulatory communications, the Head of Distribution owns IMO communications, function leads own vendor communications within their scope, and the PMO owns everything internal and the gate sequence itself. No channel has two owners.

11.1 Related documents

• Stage-Gate Governance Model — sets the gate package rules this plan operationalizes.
• Program Dashboard — the live status surface the bi-weekly snapshot complements.
• RAIDD Log — the assumption and risk register whose breaches trigger Section 7.
• Gate 1 Recycle Memorandum — the crisis-communications case documented in Section 8.
• Regulatory Filing Plan — the detailed regulator communications this plan summarizes.

11.2 Version control

Prepared by the Program Management Office, Lighthouse Financial Services Company, and chaired from the PMO without a vote. Approving authority: G. Marchetti, Chief Product Officer. Status date 16 October 2026.