How to Audit Your Internal Comms for Future Success

Speaker A: Hello everyone. Welcome to the Monkey Business webinar series with Contact Monkey. So I'm just going to wait for a couple of minutes to let people trickle in before we officially begin. So I don't know how many attendees we have from different parts of the world, but over here in Toronto, It's really bad with the snow. It's freezing cold. So I really hope most people are in warm places right now. Okay.

Speaker B: It's not warm here either. So we're having a bit of weather across the— across North America, at least.

Speaker A: All right. So we're going to just get started. So today's topic is how to leverage the power of stellar content to boost employee engagement. And our partner is Davis Company, and I'm really excited to introduce you to Allison Davis, who is the CEO and founder of Davis Company. Davis Company is a leading employee communications firm that helps companies motivate and engage their employees. Alison is also a sought-after speaker on employee communications, and she has written and edited several books, including 49 Ways to Improve Employee Communications. And for those of you who don't know who I am, my name is Filza. I'm ContactMonkey's content marketing specialist. I will be the other person presenting today, and I really hope I can add value and help you improve employee engagement in your organization. So just a little bit on the format for today's webinar. You can ask questions throughout the webinar. We will have time at the end as well for Q&A, so you can save your questions for the end as well. We'll try our best to answer as quickly as possible while we're presenting. So let's move on to our first tip, mastering the art of storytelling. So a lot of you may be wondering, you know, what is storytelling? And why has it emerged recently in internal communications? You know, is it just a buzzword? How do you really use storytelling? Well, stories are how humans have always communicated and come to understand the world. And according to many cultural theorists, corporate storytelling is very effective in enhancing company culture and driving your company's mission and values forward and helping employees understand what your company's values and your company's mission is. So storytelling is definitely something that you should be taking very seriously. But you may be wondering, that's all well and good, but you know, how do you use storytelling? So there are certain principles that you should keep in mind whenever you're communicating with your employees. So whether it is writing something for the employee communications magazine, whether it is writing a company newsletter, Focus on the why. Why are you writing this? And who are you writing for? Why should your audience care? So try to put yourself in their shoes and ask yourself, you know, why should my audience care about what I'm writing? And company news can often be very boring and mundane, so it's up to you to really make it about your audience. Use a mix of different visual elements. Remember, you're competing with YouTube videos, you're competing with memes, So try to be entertaining. Use a mix of like videos, audio, use memes, use GIFs. Keep your tone light and conversational. That's super important. Your employees are human at the end of the day, so they want to be entertained and they want, you know, they're more likely to read your stuff if you're going to keep it light and conversational. Ensure your copy is concise and mobile responsive. So what that means is that you need to make sure that you're not writing long paragraphs that are not going to look good on mobile devices because most people are viewing emails increasingly on mobile devices nowadays. So how can you really, you know, get employees to actually read your communications? So the first thing is to make sure that you're keeping employees a part of your story. You're inviting them to tell the story. So whether it's making a company video, whether it's your company newsletter, make sure that you're regularly featuring employees and getting them to be a part of the conversation. Deploy the power of gamification. So what this essentially means is introducing fun elements into your communications to drive home the message. So for example, this could be as simple as introducing Trivia Tuesdays, you know, where every Tuesday you gather employees in the conference room and you quiz them on the company's policies and procedures, you know, a fun interactive quiz. And you could offer like a small prize for the winner, you know, whoever gets all the answers right. Use creative campaigns to drive employee engagement. So when we think of campaigns, we really think of external marketing a lot of the times, but don't be shy to introduce internal communications campaigns that can really help employees become a part of the story. And this is an example of what I actually mean when I say campaigns. So this is a case study from Siemens. Siemens wanted to solidify their culture after the launch of their factory. So what they did was they invited employees to be a part of their story by featuring them in all of their graphics. And they used the visual metaphor of their wind turbines throughout their imagery. What they also did was they introduced a quote from each employee, something that, you know, the employee something that the employee felt really resonated with them and that really helped communicate what it means to be working at their company to the outside audience. So featuring employees in your communications, including quotes from them, can really help boost, you know, the overall engagement within your organization. This is another example of a case study from another company, Ascendia. So what they did was they introduced a fun quiz. And you can do this too. If you're having a survey and you want to gauge employee feedback, make it interactive and fun. Introduce different elements. Like for example, this one, they have actually used imagery from Lego to communicate to employees that their culture and their company is all about having fun, is all about trust and friendliness. Because that's what LEGO entails, and those are LEGO values as well. So this is a really clever way of trying to make sure that you're using something very famous, using some famous imagery, bringing that to life, and then communicating that imagery throughout your own communications to really connect with your employees. So you don't have to be boring. You can be super creative. And I'm going to hand it over to Allison.

Speaker B: Thank you.

Speaker A: Thank you.

Speaker B: So I was just thinking as you were talking, Philza, that, that, that those examples were not at all corporate. You know, I think one of the challenges that, that internal communications faces today is too much of it is, is really kind of stiff and corporate, and that doesn't attract attention. And obviously what's a very important element that that you can control, that is within your power to do, is headlines and subject lines. So we're going to talk about that. Oops. See, there's always a moment when I got to get the— got to get this right. So headlines are actually the most important content element, or one of the most important content elements. They increase readership by up to 73%, and 80% of readers access only the headlines. And although that may be a little depressing to some of us, what that means is headlines have to really do work. And so headlines are really, really important. So the problem is the same as that corporate kind of issue, is internal communication headlines are boring. These are actual headlines disguised to not— so as not to embarrass anyone. But these are very typical headlines. US sales leadership announces organizational changes. XYZ product exceeds expectations for sales. New initiative to improve time to market for products in development. And they're very news, you know, kind of old-fashioned newspaper headlines. They don't really speak to the employee as an individual, like what's in it for me if I read these stories? What will I learn? What are the insights that I will gain? So I really would encourage us to think differently about headlines. First of all, headlines are a promise. Headlines are saying to someone, hey, this is worth your time and attention, at least to pay attention to the headline, hopefully to open whatever it is that, you know, you're creating, whether it's, you know, something on an app or an email or an article, and then hopefully to be so interested that you click through, that you click in. I'm having a little mouse problem. Oh, there it goes. There it goes. Okay. So we've got 3 essential principles to make it simple to upgrade your headlines. 1, 2, 3. Number 1 is really focus on your audience's needs. Oops, sorry. Now my mouse is working too well. Katie, so there's always some little technical difficulties.

Speaker A: Yeah, there is.

Speaker B: Let's try that again. Okay. So address your questions. What are my employees interested in? What do they need to know? So here are 3 examples. 3 ways the new open door policy supports a better workplace. Have questions or concerns? New open door program gives you a voice. So these are much more like consumer headlines. Like the example that Philza showed. They're, they're, they're much more personal and, and they, they promise some value. The second tip is to use consumer media as your model. And I'm going to show you some fun examples. The middle, in the middle is the famous New York Post, which is very famous for having very provocative headlines. There's, there's one about President Trump and the head of North Korea, the Kim and I. On the right is more of a tradition— a little bit of a traditional news headline. See how simple the words are? And then the left is a consumer magazine. And what consumer magazines do really well, or any kinds of consumer media, some how-to media, is it's all about promise. Make it fresh. Flavors you want to taste right now. Really, it's as if they're written by a person to appeal to another person. And, and so I encourage you to look at external media headlines because these folks really know how important it is to make their headline work, to attract people to come to their site, to open their mag— buy their magazine, open their magazine. And they're really good inspiration for us to see how headlines work. Number 3, I keep talking about this word promise, is to make a promise. Valuable content is the promise that you're making. So we're going to show you some examples. Not this kind of a— this very newsy, straightforward, dry headline: New time tracking app now available on phone. But this: Enter your time anywhere, any— anytime, any— enter your time anywhere, anytime from your phone. Never be late entering your time with MyTime app. So we're offering you something. You, the employee. And then I'm just going to do a really quick headline makeover. This was an actual headline again, fall networking event on September 23rd. Very flat, not very much of a, you know, what we can do for you. And then here's, here's the, the alternatives. 5 reasons not to miss this valuable networking event. Advance your career at the upcoming networking event. So it— what it says to someone is, hey, wait, this might be of value to me. And that's the best kind of headline that you can create. So back over to you on amp up your content.

Speaker A: Yeah. So our 3rd tip is all about newsletters and how to refresh your newsletter content. So many of you might be wondering, you know, why use employee newsletters at all, especially in today's age of employee apps and so much else that's going on in terms of the tech? Well, newsletters offer a strong internal communication line to connect your company with your employees. So they're actually very important, especially if you're dealing with a remote workforce. You know, they— the newsletter is pretty much the only thing that's kind of giving them all the company news and what's happening around the company. So it's something that's extremely important. The second reason why they're important is because they can feature tons of different types of multimedia. Media. So if you're trying to use a mix of different visual elements, newsletters are the way to go. They're also formal means of communicating information, and they can be read on any device. So a lot of people are increasingly viewing stuff on mobile. There are some things that you need to keep in mind when you're thinking of crafting your newsletters. So a lot of the times company newsletters can be extremely boring and employees don't even bother to read them. And that means they're missing out on very important company announcements. So the way to kind of avoid that problem is to again feature employees within your newsletters. So you can feature employee recommendations. You can start featuring, you know, team spotlights and major events. So for example, if the sales team at your company hit their targets for the month, feature them, you know, highlight them, highlight what they did. And you know, that's a great way for other departments to also figure out what each department within the company is doing and how they're helping the overall company mission. Make the content snackable. So try to divide up your paragraphs, you know, with different information. Don't overload. Don't do information overload. You know, break things up with visuals and text both. And then test newsletters and ensure responsiveness. This is something that a lot of people don't really even think about. You know, the fact that, you know, you've created a newsletter and it looks great on desktop, but it might not look really good on a tablet or a phone, for example. And again, another reason why you should be using email newsletters is because they can actually give you valuable insights on employee engagement. You know, you can monitor email performance. You can track how many links were clicked. You can look at how many opens your newsletter received. And then you will be able to, you know, improve performance over time by looking at these metrics. And then there are amazing new tools like Contact Monkey where you can actually facilitate 2-way communication within your employee newsletters because you have access to social reactions so employees can react immediately to whatever news you've announced and there are pulse surveys so you can get instant feedback. This is a newsletter example from The Skims. So for those of you who don't know about The Skims, Skimm. The Skimm is all about latest happenings around the world. And what they do really well is that they're really good at conversational writing. So they're really good at making serious news sound super interesting and super easy to read. So this is a style that you can simulate, especially if you're not very design savvy. I really like that they have a quote of the day at the start of their newsletters. This is something that you can also simulate within your employee newsletters. Feature a funny quote, something funny that an employee said, feature that in the newsletter. Have your social icons within your newsletters so employees can share latest stories. And they also have a great section called Skimp Picks that offer inspiration for employee newsletters, because what you can do is that you can actually create a section where you can feature employee recommendations on the latest books to read, the latest lunch spots that are close to your company that people should visit, the latest Netflix show that they should binge watch on. So stuff like this can actually make your newsletter more interesting to read, you know, because you're actually featuring employees. I'm just going to see, we have a question in the chat. So somebody's asked, does ContactMonkey allow employees to react to company announcements within the newsletter? Yes. So we, we do have a social reactions feature so employees can react immediately. We also have pulse surveys so you can always ask employees questions and, you know, they can react immediately. And then this is another newsletter example from From Moo. And the thing that I really like about this newsletter, it's actually animated, but I think Zoom is not allowing the animation to show. We're using Zoom for our webinar today. So if you're doing company announcements, you can always, you know, use something more simplistic that's not very text heavy, but it's very heavy on the visuals so that, you know, employees just know, okay, this event is happening. And we just need to sign up and there's the button, instead of like you trying to put different types of information within the newsletter and people becoming so overwhelmed with the information that they're not even bothering to read it. So somebody has also asked, how do you ensure responsiveness within your newsletters? So that's a great question. So for that, the best thing to do would be to get a tool that allows you to test your newsletters. And make sure that they are responsive. So there are tons of tools out there. ContactMonkey does ensure that your newsletters are responsive. Outlook can really mess up the formatting. So sometimes you can't see images within Outlook. So if you're using a tool like ContactMonkey, it'll ensure that your newsletter is responsive on all email clients across all email devices. So I would definitely recommend doing that to make sure that your newsletter is responsive. And you can design your different templates within Contact Monkey. We have some custom-made templates as well. You can design your own as well. And then you can track and optimize all your data. So you can see how many opens and link clicks you got. So I'm going to hand it over to Allison.

Speaker B: Thank you. And I just— there are a couple more questions and I just thought I'd take one, which is how often do you find people are sending newsletters to their employees? I mean, it really varies. I think that many, many organizations that we're working with are doing it weekly or every other week. It really depends on, it really depends on, you know, how much information you want to share. And as Filza said, it's a great thing to test, you know, to see what happens. And you don't have to make a decision and stick to it forever.

Speaker A: It's forever.

Speaker B: It's not like you're building a stone tablet. So you can say, what happens if we send the newsletter every week? What happens if we change the frequency? And you can look at your metrics and you can decide what is the frequency that works best for your organization. And so that's valuable. And then Amy— sorry, another question. For headlines, is there a recommended length? Is long okay as long as it's engaging? There's a lot of debate about that in the marketing world. The rule of thumb is to make headlines very short. And there's many formats where you do have to do that in order to fit. I write a column for Inc.com. And those headlines tend to be longer because my editors at Inc. find that keywords, the The more that you— not to stuff them with keywords, but the more that you really explain and use language that is very specific, the better your headlines do. So I think it— again, it's something you can test to see how it works. And, you know, I'm just going to be— I know Phil says too— a big fan of testing because you can try a lot of different things out and then you can watch the metrics and see what happens. So that gets to the next thing. And please continue to ask questions. We're fine. We love questions. We're fine to take them as we go. I think that makes the information more useful to you. So here we are on tip number 4, which is trade old news for useful information.

Speaker A: Just going to make sure our clicker works.

Speaker B: There's always a little transition from you to me, Philza.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: Keep it, keep that. There we go. We've talked about the fact that, you know, a lot of what we see in internal communication is stuck in the past. I know that a lot of communicators that I talked to feel like they're, you know, struggling a little bit against the bureaucracy of, hey, we've always done it this way. And I would encourage you to keep pushing the envelope a little bit because I think there's a lot that we can do in internal communication to make make the work that we do much fresher. So let's— so what we hear from employees, these are actual quotes from employees in focus group, variety of focus groups. Employees don't really want news in the traditional way. They want useful information. You know, you can get news about most organizations externally. You know, there's a lot of transparency and many, many, especially a big organization, is in the news a lot. But employees are really looking for these kinds of things. Help me do my job and be more successful. Emphasize the action I need to take. Connect the dots. What is changing? What does it mean to me? I'm so busy that I welcome anything that makes my life easier. And see that whole thread about, can you help me do something? Can you help me understand something so that I can take action or, or do a better job or whatever it is I need to do. So we're going to give you some examples. This is an example from an organization that provided managers with some tips. Managers often feel like they have, you know, a big job to do in terms of managing feedback. They could use some help. So these are some tips that we created about a year-end assessment. And then the next example, this is from a company called Wyeth, which is now— was acquired by Pfizer a number of years ago. This is something that we created because employee feedback said that people who were having a baby had to search around for information related to their maternity leave or paternity leave. So, we brought all the information together in one place. And here's kind of a handy guide with everything you need to to know, including who to contact, including on the bottom is a timeline of how leave works. So all of that is, is meant to be useful information and provide employees with a service. You know, it's— and this is not relevant to anyone who's not having a baby, but for someone who is, it's very, very convenient and helpful.

Speaker A: So someone has asked if we are going to provide a copy of the presentation after. So it is being live recorded, so you will be emailed a recording of the entire live video. So don't worry about taking notes.

Speaker B: So you can share it with your colleagues.

Speaker A: All right. So personalization and segmentation. So why personalize? In a time when you can customize everything, you know, from your Starbucks coffee to your running shoes, we expect brand touchpoints in our lives to be relevant. And this of course applies to your biggest advocates, who are your employees. And then the same goes for segmentation. You know, segmentation and personalization are both important topics within marketing, but we've noticed from the people that we've talked to, a lot of internal comms pros, are not using personalization and segmentation. And I'm here to tell you that you should be doing that in order to make sure that you're creating more engaged audiences and you're creating engaging content for those audiences. By segmenting lists, for example, if you're using email, you can create different Outlook distribution lists according to country or region, because a lot of the times, especially for communicating with communicating in a large organization which has employees all across the world with different branches, different regions, different departments. It's always a good idea to have different lists and then create specific content that actually is relevant to each list. Segmentation can also help you identify internal influencers. So you'll be able to see, okay, these are certain employees that keep clicking on my emails, that keep replying to my emails, that are always engaged. You know, so these are some of the employees that I could actually leverage as internal influencers and help get across important company announcements and messages. And then again, there are so many tools out there that can actually help you personalize and segment your distribution lists and your communications. So for example, ContactMonkey. Allows you to simply use your Outlook distribution lists and send email newsletters and all kinds of emails to those distribution lists without ever having to leave Outlook. You can also personalize subject line and body of the email. So even if you're sending a mass email to a huge list, you know, each employee is going to see their name in the subject line. So it's going to say, hey Sally, you know, have you heard about our latest update? Even the body is going to say, hey Sally, and then go on to talk about whatever company news or event is happening. I don't know about you guys, but I always like to click on emails that have my name on it, even if I know that this is an email that's being sent to a huge list. I'd rather always see my name. Hey Philza in the subject line, that always compels me to open my email, and I'm sure your employees probably feel the same way as well. So to sum up, use distribution lists if your primary mode of employee communications is emails. If you're using an employee app, you can also use push notifications to notify employees. Ensure you are personalizing the subject line if you are sending mass emails to huge distribution lists. Make sure to also personalize the body of the message. Thank you. And then I know we've been looking a lot at external marketing examples to kind of figure out how we can make our internal comms better. And this is an example from external marketing that I think is very valuable for internal comms as well. So this is about segmentation and how Avocados from Mexico, which is a company that imports and exports avocados to the US, how it used audience segmentation to spread brand awareness. So they realized that they have 2 different types of audiences, those who are avo-aware, those who know about all the health benefits of avocados, and those who are avo-unaware, those audiences who don't know anything about avocados and why they should be having avocados. So what they did was that they created different content streams, and they made sure that they were targeting each of their segmented lists with relevant content. For example, the Avo Unaware group was shown and given content that was all about the health benefits of avocados and why they should be looking into including avocados within their diet. And this worked really well. They witnessed a drop in bounce rate. And a 23% increase in site traffic. So you can see, you know, this is a very powerful example of how segmentation and personalization can completely change the way your audience is consuming your content. And I'm really curious to know if you guys have ever used personalization or segmentation for internal comms. So I'm actually going to launch a poll. So I'd love to hear, you know, your answers. I'd love to hear if people have never used it, if some of you have been using it, and also, you know, if you haven't even heard about it but you're considering it. I can see people are still loading.

Speaker B: So while you're, while you're waiting, we have a question. So can I just jump in?

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, that'd be great.

Speaker B: So it's, how do you craft a subject line for a newsletter that has lots of different content? Do you use different ones for different segments? Which is kind of 2 questions. Let me start with the first one. What I'm seeing a lot in terms of if you have a lot of different articles in a newsletter is often the subject line is about your most compelling story or your lead story. That's often how I see that done, because what you're trying to do is you're trying to really get somebody to say, oh, I've got to, I've got to open this, I've got to read this. You know, a very poor subject line is January 17th newsletter because it doesn't say anything about what the content is. And then if you're, if you're segmenting Segmenting your newsletter, sending different editions to different people, obviously then you, you need different subject lines for each of those editions.

Speaker A: Yeah, I think that's a great answer. And again, I know I keep talking about testing, but it's always a great idea if you're confused about 2 or 3 different subject lines, you know, try to send a couple of different versions to different distribution lists if you're sending to multiple distribution lists and then which subject line performed better. So that's also— and over time you'll see trends and you'll notice, okay, this is what's working better and these kinds of subject lines work better. And then you'll be able to adapt your content accordingly. So I'm just going to end the polling. So 28% have never used personalization or segmentation. I'm really pleased to see though that 43% have used personalization and segmentation for internal comms, and 31% are considering it. So I think that's great. For those of you who have used it, I'd love to hear in the comments, or perhaps you could email me if you have the time later. I'd love to hear how the results were before and after you implemented personalization and segmentation. And Allison, I think we can move on to tip number 6. Yes, great.

Speaker B: I'm just closing. Okay, so my tip number 6 is move, move from reading to skimming. You know, I think that many of us who've been around a little while in employee communication, you know, we're thinking about— we thought about writing articles. and that people would read them. I guess I'm putting air quotes around everything. The reality in today's world is that everyone of every demographic is really not doing as much reading. We're looking at things on screen. In many cases, it's a small screen, like a phone screen. And so, you know, if you think about scrolling down with your— using— with your phone, We're really looking at content very rapidly. So we have to really think of it in terms of how can we create something that's skimmable. So this is the point. Even English majors like myself, I call myself a recovering English major, and baby boomers aren't reading the way they used to. So this is an example of how we worked with a company to take their message platform from something that was very long, you know, kind of let's talk about our strategy in a very long kind of narrative, into something that is what we call a story arc, which is we really think about how we— remember, Filza started us with storytelling, and this is storytelling too, where you think about your story the way you would think about a story if you were creating a movie about your company. So the story follows that our organization was built on a strong foundation, we delivered solutions. We help solve unmet needs, but the healthcare environment has changed. We also stumbled with new product innovation, but now we've got a strategy that focuses on core products and new innovations. With change comes risk, um, but we can play a part in contributing to our success. We win, the customers win, and patient lives are improved. So you see how because of what we're doing, because of our— the work that we're going to do, We can all contribute to this organization's success. So one more is— this is an infographic. This company had a big event, an employee event, and you might think that the typical way of communicating about it would be to write an article, you know, that people would read. But instead, we've got this very visual infographic with people's stories. with facts and figures, with some insights that were learned during this event. And this is something that someone could look at it in just, you know, a minute, and they really get the sense of the excitement of this event, how people participated, and it doesn't really require reading in the traditional sense. So And just one more example. This is, this is actually a communication about ethics and compliance. You see that it's very different. It's like all of the examples we've been showing. It's not heavy at all. We're using visuals. I mean, in some cases we actually created physical things for people to play with, like cards and something to sit on people's desk. It kind of pops out. So again, we're looking at things that are a lot different from the traditional sort of heavy communication and really looking at it from the point of view of how do we intrigue people in these communications. So I think we have a couple more questions. Yeah.

Speaker A: So I know we have a question on, have you seen newsletters work for plant factory employees who may have limited or new computer or no computer access? So Kelly, the thing with newsletters is if your employees are able to view it on mobile, if your newsletter is mobile responsive, that's one of the best ways for your newsletter to work and it's going to be more effective. If you're not ensuring your newsletter is responsive, on the other hand, then A lot of the times your remote workers, if they don't have access to a computer, they're not going to be able to, you know, look at your news or see your news. I know employee apps are very popular when it comes to communicating with a remote workforce, but there's definitely success with responsive newsletters when communicating with remote workers. We also have another question on how do you identify which segment employees belong to, how to segment employees. So I think the best thing to do here would be to do a little bit of detective work. So you're going to have to initially conduct some surveys. If your company is smaller, you could even do some focus groups and stuff to really identify, you know, how you can segment employees. The easiest way to start would be to segment your employees according to region or country if you're dealing with employees employees in different countries, or even by department? I think that would be helpful. Allison, if you'd like to add to any of these questions, feel free to.

Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, the question about segment— I always start with demographics, as you're suggesting. We had a conversation yesterday with a client about— they happen to have a really good HRIS information system. And they could— not every company has this, but they're really able to segment. So we were having a conversation about segmenting managers and non-managers in this case, because there's a lot of change happening in this company this year. And a lot of it kind of falls on managers. So that's just one segmentation, right? Managers, non-managers. But that can play a big role, because then you can customize information to managers that will help them do what they need to do. I mean, you don't necessarily need to— I saw in the poll some of you, a lot of you are thinking about it. You can start with just a very simple segmentation, you know, 1 or 2 dimensions and start there and see how that goes. And that can make a big difference in terms of helping people get the information they need.

Speaker A: We also have some more questions. So somebody's asking, how would you guys go about actually getting buy-in or a better budget to implement some of these ideas? I think that's a great question. One of the ways you could try doing that is that if you're trying to implement a tool or introduce a tool, a lot of the tools have free trials. So I would recommend definitely downloading the free trial and trying that out, playing around with the metrics and testing to see, you know, what the results are. And then showing that to upper management, you know, especially if there has been an improvement. That's an excellent way to showcase to upper management that, you know, this tool is worth investing in because we have seen, you know, an increase in employee engagement. We have another question on how do you strike the balance between employee emails on specific topics versus your employee newsletter? Are we getting to the point where we can, should be cutting back on individual emails and consolidating into one newsletter per week? So again, I think that's a great question. And honestly, it depends on your organization and the way it's structured. So you're going to have to do some testing in the beginning to see whether you need to be— whether just one employee newsletter per month is enough. Or if you have a lot of content all the time and your employees are super engaged, you will have to increase the frequency. So you could do a biweekly newsletter. Some companies might even need to do a newsletter every week. So it honestly depends on how engaged your employees are. If you want to start out, I would suggest going maybe like once a month or biweekly and then increasing the frequency if you think people are really engaged. And, and there's one last question. My organization is very formal. How do you suggest convincing executive leadership to try more conversational writing for our employee communications? Allison, would you like to take this one on?

Speaker B: Yeah, that would be great. So one thing that, that we've used is we have used demographics to, to talk about how the organization— particularly if you're in an organization where the organization is changing, you're bringing a lot of new people in, people of different generations. So you can, you can use demographics. Another thing that we've done with leaders is we've asked them what they— how they get information. You know, what are the things that they're looking at in the world? And almost every channel out there has become more conversational. So I think you can use external best practices and bring those internal. And of course, any research that you have, testing, for example, A more informal headline versus a more formal headline and the performance of that, or if you're doing focus groups and you have— or you've done a survey and you have any data, all of that is really good for making the case to change the way you communicate.

Speaker A: Sounds great. Jason is asking, how do you know when writing a traditional article is necessary and when it's better to use visuals, infographics, etc.? So I would try a combination of different things and test it out. Visuals and infographics always, always perform better in my experience than writing a long article. But I also understand that sometimes corporate organizations have very strict rules and you can be extremely formal. So I think the best way to do something is to strike a balance. So always strike a balance. Always use a mix of different visuals and a little bit of text to— especially if you're trying out something new for the first time. And then test and see whether only visuals are doing well later on, or only text-based communications are doing better. We also have a question on tips for identifying internal influencers. So I will actually get to that in the end, because I do touch upon internal influencers a little bit. All right. So continuing, we have tip number 7, measuring the success of your content. So we've talked a lot about content and what makes good content. But if you are doing content, you really do need to think about measurement as well. This is because measurement in internal communication, in internal comms, can actually help you improve your worth to executive leadership. It also helps to improve performance because you're able to see what subject lines are performing better, what headlines are grabbing attention. And then again, it enables you to manage your time better because you're able to identify what kind of content are employees seeking, are employees after, and then you can spend more time doing other important things. So how do you actually go about measuring, especially if you have never ever measured your content? So there are a couple of ways to go about it. Use quantitative data. So if you're using— if your primary communication is only through email, for example, then use an email tool to measure the metrics. Look at opens. Look at how many link clicks you're getting if you've included included links. You can also look at location. So which location are employees viewing the email from? You can also look at device. Are they looking at your emails primarily on mobile devices or are they looking at emails on desktop? So this kind of information is really going to help you figure out what kind of content to create based on the analytics and metrics that you've get. And if you're using an employee app, for example, there are always inbuilt analytics in those as well. So that's something to keep in mind. There's also qualitative data. So aside from, you know, a tool, you should also always be conducting surveys, group interviews, anonymous feedback. And then again, you should also try to identify internal influencers. So internal influencers are those people who are your regular employees, but they just happen to have a lot of other— a lot of their colleagues really trust them and come to them with important information or problems that they have within the company. So you really need to identify who are the employees who are most invested in your company, who are willing to help you out, who are trusted by other people around the company. Once you're able to identify these influencers, you can really help get across important company messages, announcements, and policies. There are tons of different ways you can identify internal influencers. Again, you'll have to use a mix of different qualitative data. If you're using surveys, you'll have to see, okay, whose name keeps popping up in survey questions. You'll have to talk to employees one-on-one as well. To kind of figure out, you know, who do they confide in, who do they talk to the most. So it's going to take a little bit of detective work on your part, but kind of make it your mission to identify internal influencers, because once you do, it's going to make your job a lot more easier. And this is a case study from Macy's that actually used internal influencers very effectively. They looked within their store to find internal influencers. Rather than going out and looking for external social media influencers, Macy's started a program called the Style Crew where they used their own employees and asked them to become a part of this ambassador program. And employees were going about posting Macy's handbags on their social media and talking about what it means to be a part of Macy's, and one employee actually managed to sell 15,000 handbags because of, you know, because of being such an advocate. And this is an excellent way to really increase employee engagement as well, because once you involve employees in your sales, in your company's mission, they're more likely to become more engaged with your brand, and it's going to really resonate with other people as well. Because people are more likely to trust recommendations that are coming from friends rather than from some stranger. So it's a great way to kind of evaluate whether you should be using— if you're using a different mix of qualitative data, internal influencers are a great way to kind of evaluate whether employee engagement went up after you employed the influencer program. If you're doing something around health and safety, for example, you can also gauge, you know, if health and safety incidents went down after you implemented a campaign or program. So you'll always have to make sure that you're measuring the before picture and the after picture. So I'm going to move— we're going to move to tip number 8.

Speaker B: And this is a very quick one, which is about lightening up. And we had some questions about you know, formality, and we've talked about kind of being corporate. And I think at the, at the heart, heart of this, the foundation of this is how do we make communication appealing to people? And one of the ways is, is quite frankly to lighten up. When we, when we talk to employees in focus groups and other forums, a lot of people say, well, why does everything have to be so serious? I mean, obviously the work is serious. you know, what the organization is trying to do is serious, but that doesn't mean the communication has to be. So we're going to just quickly show you some examples. One is here's a character that we created for a client that was introducing their benefits for the year. We created a character named Benny, as in Benny Benefits, and he's just a little kind of fun guy, kind of hipster guy. He kept showing up in our communication. he was kind of the expert. He— so he played this role of answering questions, explaining terms, giving people tips and hints about how to— how best to choose and use their benefits. Just a little lighthearted. Not— obviously not— when I'm talking about fun, I'm not necessarily talking about telling jokes or, you know, falling down on the floor laughing, but just creating some whimsy in your communication. Here's another example of— for a pharmaceutical company, we created Bitmojis for their executives. The executives wanted to be more visible. They wanted to relate to people more. So this, this was an executive, and here we're showing he likes to run. He likes to wear colorful socks. And this is a way of, of, you know, kind of making him more accessible and friendly to people in the organization. Those are my really quick tips. Are there other questions?

Speaker A: So I love the engagement that we were getting throughout the webinar. Lots of really, really good questions. But if there are any other questions that anyone else has, we're happy to answer them over here as well. So I see we have one.

Speaker B: So the question is about for memes and GIFs, is there a good service we can use that is in public domain? That's a little tricky. And, and your management and legal team may get a little nervous about that. There are some, some of the stock photography houses do offer illustrative art. that you can use. It's not quite a meme or GIF, but it is, it is stuff that you can use to create. So, you know, I think you just have to, have to explore that and see what's permissible within your organization because there are public domain sources. The question is, how comfortable is your organization sort of bringing those inside? So just be a little careful.

Speaker A: Yeah, I absolutely agree. And you can always link to the original source as well. So as long as you're doing that, that's usually safe. But you will have to kind of go with what your organization's policies are on that end. We have another question.

Speaker B: Yeah, that's a question for you.

Speaker A: What are some key performance indicators that can be used to measure success in ContactMonkey? So for ContactMonkey, it's primarily an email measuring platform. So you're able to see who opened your email, so opens. You're able to see the link clicks. So if you've included any links within your email, you can look at link clicks. And then you're able to see device, which device was your email viewed on. You're able to see the location. So it'll tell you the exact region that you're— the area where your employee viewed your email communications on. And you'll see dashboard analytics that are inbuilt. And the good thing about ContactMonkey is that you don't have to leave Outlook to access any of this data. It's all built within your Outlook. It's an Outlook plugin. You can easily send employee newsletters as well without leaving Outlook. So that's the great part about ContactMonkey. I think we have one more question. Let me just see what I have missed. All right, thanks Jason for for that comment. I'm really glad that you found the information helpful. Okay, so just gonna tell you guys what's next. I know that a lot of you were asking about visual stuff and the visual tools, so I really encourage you to sign up for our next webinar that is on Feb 26th. You can sign up through social media. We have the links. We've been sharing the links everywhere. We'll also send an email about this webinar. So this is going to be all about using visuals and what kind of visuals to use, what kind of tools to use to really make compelling visuals for your internal communications. I see there's another question. Our executive team doesn't like styled messages, that is using infographics or a template. What are things we can do to improve his messages without deviating too far from his style? So in this regard, I would say try to stick— the good thing about a lot of tools like ContactMonkey is that you can actually stick to your company's style. So for example, if you're looking to create a newsletter template, Our tool actually allows you to stick to your brand colors because you can create your own template or you can access custom-built templates that are already pre-made. So if you're using, you can easily build your own template using your own brand colors. I don't think that should be a problem. And you'll be able to stick to your company's colors and tone and write whatever is the standard for your company. And there is a great guide that Davis Company is going to send out to you. So keep an eye out for that. It's all about creating compelling headlines that attract employees' attention. So that's a great one. I think there's another question. Do you create your own graphics or do you have someone that assists? So that's a great question. It depends according to the organization. I know a lot of people don't have an in-house designer. So in that case, you do have to create your own graphics within internal communications. There are tons of tools. What I'll do is I'll send— we have a detailed blog on the kinds of tools that you can use to create your own graphics. So, I'll send out that blog in an email to everyone who's attended this webinar. And I also encourage you to sign up for our upcoming webinar because we're going to go over a lot of these tools. Testing sometimes— there's another question. Testing sometimes feels like giving some people the good stuff and some people the bad stuff. And I worry about missing— I worry about someone missing out. Um, yeah, that is, that is a battle that I think everyone faces. So you're just going to have to exercise your best judgment, probably go with your gut feeling on this one, because as, as much as we'd like to see every single person happy, you can't make everyone happy. So you're going to have to go a little bit with your instinct over here. All right, Allison, is there anything else that you would like to add?

Speaker B: No, I think this has been great. Thank you everyone for your great questions. I think you're kind of making us all think, which is terrific. So I've really enjoyed talking to all of you.

Speaker A: I know. Thank you so much everyone for the amazing engagement that we got on this webinar and for taking the time out to attend this. Thanks so much for joining and see you all next time.

Speaker B: Thanks.