Rachel Peifer had already seen what happens when employee data and email lists don’t communicate. She wasn’t willing to manage lists that way again.
Rachel Peifer is Director of Corporate Communications and Social Media at the Crohn’s & Colitis Foundation, a national organization with chapters spread across the country. What led her to explore a new internal email platform was the pain of keeping lists up-to-date and using CRMs with unsubscribe options.
“Keeping our email lists up to date was a nightmare. At one point, we used our CRM to send internal emails at another company and everytime someone accidentally unsubscribed it was virtually impossible to opt them back in. It was a huge headache.”
That anecdote is worth unpacking, because the failure in it is structural rather than a bad product.
The unsubscribe problem, in detail
Marketing tools and CRMs treat an unsubscribe as sacred, and they’re right to. Consent law depends on it. Once a contact opts out, the system is designed to make reversing that difficult, because in a customer context, the difficulty is the point.
Now apply that to your own employees. A colleague clicks unsubscribe at the bottom of an all-staff email, possibly by accident, possibly because that week’s newsletter wasn’t relevant for them. They have now removed themselves from the channel their employer uses for policy updates, benefits deadlines, and safety information. And the system is working exactly as designed by refusing to put them back.
Employees aren’t subscribers; they’re a directory. Any tool that can’t tell the difference will eventually create a version of Rachel’s headache, and the people it disconnects are the ones who most need to hear from you.
What Rachel went looking for instead
Rachel’s requirements weren’t glamorous, but critical to making the internal comms job easier (and simple for IT’s approval!):
“The seamless integration with Outlook and ease of use.”
For a comms function that has to move quickly and probably isn’t large, that’s the whole game. Integration with Outlook means no new system to learn and no separate place where communication lives. Ease of use means the person who needs to send something can send it, today, without booking time with anyone.
Why this matters more at 32 chapters
Scale is what turns those modest requirements into something significant.
“We are able to nimbly produce communications for the entire organization which has 32 chapters across the country and keep people informed and engaged.”
A national organization split into dozens of local units has a genuine coordination problem: some messages need to reach everyone, some need to reach one chapter, and the boundaries shift constantly as people join, move between chapters, and leave.
That’s precisely the environment where list accuracy stops being an administrative chore and becomes the thing that determines whether communication works at all. Get it wrong and you’re either spamming people with content meant for a different chapter, or you’re leaving whole regions out of announcements that concerned them. Rachel’s earlier experience taught her what the wrong tool does to that problem. The Foundation’s setup means she’d feel it faster than most.
The takeaway for comms teams
Two questions are worth asking about whatever you currently send employee email through.
First: what happens when someone unsubscribes from an internal message by accident? If the honest answer involves a support ticket, you are one distracted click away from losing a colleague from your channel.
Second: how long does your distribution list stay accurate after you build it?
If the answer is measured in days, you don’t have a list. You have a snapshot, and a growing gap between who you think you’re reaching and who you actually are.
Both of these questions determine whether anything else you do in internal comms lands.
Are your internal comms effective? Book a demo to learn more about how to improve your internal comms practice, today!
