Using Infographics and Visuals to Boost Internal Communications

Speaker A: Okay, so we're just broadcasting. We're just going to give people a few minutes to join the webinar. But thank you so much for tuning in today and joining Aditya and myself on this webinar. We're going to be talking you through kind of different ways to use visuals and infographics to boost your internal communications and more importantly employee engagement in a remote atmosphere. So I'm just going to give people a few more minutes to join. I can see quite a few have joined in so far. So Yeah, we can get started. And also, we're coming to you from Toronto today. It's lovely and sunny out. You can probably see the reflection in the windows behind me, but let us know in the chat as well where you're coming in from. So let's get started. So, I'm Katie Liston, the head of marketing here at Contact Monkey. Contact Monkey is an internal communications tool integrated into Outlook and Gmail, and we help you kind of track employee engagement from your internal newsletters to your employees and all within Outlook and Gmail. So you don't have to use another third-party system or worry about learning another tool. And I'm joined today by Aditya from Venngage. So Aditya, do you want to just tell people a bit about yourself?

Speaker B: Hey everyone, thank you for joining. My name is Aditya. I do content marketing at Venngage. We're an infographic maker primarily, but we also help folks make brochures, flyers, email newsletters, and the like. And yeah, as Katie said, we also here from Toronto, really excited to be doing this. And yeah, I hope you guys find value in this webinar.

Speaker A: Great, thank you. And just, I'm just having difficulty with changing these slides, but just to go over a few housekeeping before we get started. So we will be answering questions as we go along, and we do have time designated at the end as well. So you can either just send your questions through the Q&A box or also the chat. Maitili from our team is also— will be monitoring the chat just in case we miss it. And also, if you can't stay for the full webinar, if you want to share it with your colleagues afterwards, we will be sending everyone who registered the recording via email today or tomorrow. So let's get started. So just in tip 1, I'm just going to kind of go over the basics first. So kind of first thing to start with is visual storytelling. So what is visual storytelling? So this is really kind of going back to the basics of kind of how humans interact and kind of how copywriting best principles. When you think of day-to-day interactions, whether that's kind of— I suppose at the minute we don't have much day-to-day interactions if we're working from home. But in general, kind of everything we do is all around storytelling. And then when it comes to, say, for example, advertising, they always kind of heighten this by using visuals. And we see this a lot in our day-to-day, whether it's marketing, it's getting more and more prevalent as well in internal communications and sales and customer success, with people kind of using visuals to prompt the response over just words or kind of talking points. So before we get into the visual story aspect, I'm just going to kind of go back to kind of just storytelling 101 or kind of the basics when it comes to copywriting. So before you kind of craft your message, one thing I like to kind of do is kind of figure out the why. This is something we do internally on the marketing team here at Contact Monkey. Before we write anything, we always try and identify, okay, why are we writing this? What is the intent behind the piece? So this is something to keep in mind, especially when you're talking to your employees or if you're communicating internally. It's kind of thinking about who are you talking to, why are you writing this, and why they should care in the first place. Because at the end of the day, you want to appeal to kind of your audience and kind of get the message across as clear and efficiently as possible. And visual elements can help with this. So using a mix of visual elements within your storytelling or copywriting techniques can help emphasize your message. And Aditya is going to go into this more in depth when he talks about infographics and using infographics storytelling. But keeping a light tone can also emphasize this as well, and kind of playing around with how your audience speaks as well, using their tone of voice and kind of how they like to talk themselves, can emphasize your points, especially when you're trying to get an internal communication across. And then another thing to remember is just being concise. and kind of making sure it's clear what you're trying to say. A lot of the time, especially in kind of where we're working now, it's kind of difficult to engage with employees. There's more distractions than ever before. We're all working from home. Kind of, it's hard to cut through the noise now. You could be cutting through the noise of maybe someone is working from home, they don't have childcare, so kind of kids are running around, and you might be living with other people who are also trying to work from home. So now more than ever, there's a lot more distractions. And so kind of using visual storytelling will help you cut through this noise and help you engage with your audience. One of the most important things kind of I like to think about with this is just trying to be human and listen. If you listen to what your employees want and if you talk like an employee, you're kind of to get the point across easier than if you're talking more jargon speak or kind of more corporate tone. At the end of the day, if you are an internal communicator or in charge of employee communications or corporate communications at your company, you are an employee, so why shouldn't you talk like one? You are the target audience as well, even though you are delivering the message. So here's just some quick tips when it comes to visual storytelling. So, one idea could be to make the employees the engaged storytellers. So, there could be different brand advocates from whether it's different departments, different locations, or different teams who you can put forward as the main storyteller within your communications. That could be including them in different pieces of content or focusing them on the intranet, whether it's a video or maybe an interview. Also, making Communication is a two-way street can help with emphasizing the message. So making sure you're kind of taking on board feedback from your employees, you're kind of identifying what they like and what they want to hear about and kind of showing that you respond to— if you put out a survey, that you respond and actually show that you action this data. And then using different creative campaigns can also be used to drive engagement across different communications. This could be within the intranet, could be when we get back to the office, if we ever do. It could be just kind of in person talking at different events. And then one other thing to always remember is, if you think about it, visuals speak to our emotions, and kind of words can say stuff on a page but might not get the message across. You can learn more in 10 seconds by looking at a picture than than 10 seconds reading text on a page. So this is something also to keep in mind when you're using visuals in whatever type of communications you're using. So with that in mind and the fact that we're living in such a distracted workforce at the minute, we'd like to know from you listening today, how are you finding it to engage employees while working remotely? So I'm just going to launch a poll question. And I'll give everyone a few minutes to answer. So the poll should be up on your screen now, and I'll be able to see kind of who's answering. So I can see a few responses coming in now. So I'll just give you guys a few more minutes. Okay. Perfect. So we're at about 65% have voted. A few stragglers. Okay, great. Just a few more seconds. Okay. Okay, perfect. Looks like the majority have voted, so I'm just going to share the results. So in terms of finding it difficult to engage employees, It seems like everyone seems to be a mixed bag. The majority kind of finding it the same as before or maybe slightly more. It's interesting to note that kind of people are sticking in the middle. And then about 6% don't find it more difficult to engage. So we'd love to know of those 6%, were you always a remote workforce? Is this something new for you or had you planned in advance? Okay, so now— And just from that question, we'd love to know if you could comment in the chat what you found successful or challenging for yourself when it comes to engaging remote workers. And now I'm going to pass it to Aditya for your point.

Speaker B: Thank you so much, Katie. So yeah, this section is going to be all about the whats and the whys when it comes to infographics. So I'm going to get straight to the point. So what is an infographic, right? An infographic is a collection of imagery, charts, minimal text that gives you an easy-to-understand overview of a topic. And As an example, you can kind of see 2 things here. You can see a boring block of text on the left and the same boring block of text on the right, but in this instance it's visualized. And yeah, the question I have for you guys is what looks more appealing to you? If you're like me and if you're in the majority, you'll probably say the visual on the right looks far more appealing than the boring block of text on the left. So the idea is infographics are essentially great for turning boring or contents block of texts into a visually pleasing and easy-to-digest format, right? Just give me a second. So yeah, my favorite part, why infographics? Why use them? In research by TechSmith, they interviewed— they actually surveyed 4,500 millennial office workers And more than 65% of millennials say they understand information faster when it's communicated visually versus just 7% who don't. So again, crazy numbers. The same study states that employees absorb information 7% faster when it's communicated using text or static images than when it's only communicated with text. So these numbers just by themselves make a really strong case as to why you should be incorporating infographics or any kind of visuals in your workplace. And, you know, now that we covered the what and the whys, when do you create an infographic, right? So again, like with most things, it starts with a goal. So if your goal is to summarize new or key concepts, maybe it's, you know, how to social distance at work, for example. Maybe your goal is to show steps in a process, you want to employ— onboard new employees, you want to show project timelines, or you want to just list a bunch of concepts, ideas, or policies. So that could be a company FAQ. Ideally, these are really good candidates for turning into an infographic. And again, here are just some few examples of infographics. They kind of make the boring or, you know, the overwhelming information that much more interesting. So when it comes to internal communications, you can use infographics in a wide variety of ways. So it could be, you know, communicating workplace FAQs with both your new and existing hires. You could teach your company about workplace diversity and inclusion in your next lunch and learn, for example. Or you can help a new hire break the ice by sharing an infographic that includes fun facts about them with the team that they're going to be working with. So again, the use cases are virtually limitless. But if your goal is to engage your employees or improve how you communicate internally, I'd recommend spending some time identifying which kind of information to visualize. And not only, again, not only just, it doesn't have to be just infographics. It can be visuals of any kind. And that's pretty much it from my end for now. Katie is going to take this forward.

Speaker A: Perfect. Thank you. And oh, these slides are always temperamental. Sometimes my laptop works, sometimes I have to click somewhere else. So in terms of tip 2 from Contact Monkey, we're going to go through the design elements of a great employee newsletter. So one thing kind of before you get started is just to think about kind of something that often gets overlooked is using a template when it comes to communicating internally or sending messages to your employees from your emails. This can be easily overlooked because more often than not, people are trying to hack a template rather than find a system that can help you build one really easily. So for example, we've seen people just copy and paste an image or a PDF and just put it straight into the Outlook send window. A lot of people kind of attach a PDF as well. So they kind of, please see attached to your newsletter. And then for those who kind of want to go the more hacky tech route, they're doing Word mail merge, which can be a nightmare to do if anyone has ever tried to do a Word mail merge from Outlook. So this is kind of often why templates are overlooked when it comes to internal communications. You more so associate good-looking, kind of great emails with marketing comms or kind of newsletters you sign up to for B2B or maybe different B2C products, but not necessarily with your internal comms. So luckily for you guys, that's something we offer at Contact Monkey and it's really easy to do. So one thing kind of to think about before kind of Pushing out your messages, who is your audience? So whether you're kind of emailing the whole distribution list or everyone at your company, or you're segregating via location, department, or maybe different team, or maybe there could be a few different subdivision companies within the organization. Another thing to think about when you're kind of developing up your template as well is the frequency. Maybe you're sending multiple comms per month or per week. Have you developed up a frequency calendar and kind of maybe you have your monthly newsletter with kind of key news from that month, or maybe different with COVID and everything that's going on at the minute, maybe you have a weekly update to kind of keep employees in the know when they're working from home or working remotely on kind of what corporate is doing to kind of overcome the different challenges that are faced with remote working. Another thing to kind of identify is what kind of— what does your team look like and what resources do you have? More often than not, what we found, especially in our global survey that we just launched, a lot of different internal comms teams or communication teams would be only 1 or 2 people. And you're lucky to kind of have a few more on the team than that, and resources can be limited because of this. That's why it's important to kind of maybe find tools that kind of help you along the way where you don't have to outsource to maybe a graphic design company or maybe to the marketing team in-house and kind of rely on other teams to kind of get your communications out there. So that's where the whole tools come into it. Are you just using Outlook? Are you kind of hacking your way through a Word mail merge or just copying and pasting an image into an email, whether that's Gmail or Outlook, or using a tool like Contact Monkey where you can design beautiful HTML templates and send them to your employees from Outlook and Gmail. Or perhaps you could be using a marketing system. We often find that, like Mailchimp or Constant Contact. And then last but not least, probably the most important thing is the content you're sending out. So kind of, if you have different comms going out on a month-to-month or week-to-week basis, making sure your template speaks to the content as well. So if you have a kind of a cadence going in different sections that are happening every week, Say, for example, we have a blog subscription that goes out from ContactMonkey. We always like to showcase maybe one new resource in that a week. So you could do something similar with your internal newsletter. That could be like an employee spotlight or kind of here's the latest update for our remote working or kind of what's happening for the past week from the leadership team. So here's just a quick look about what I mean when I say HTML and nice looking emails. Here's a look at the different ones that we actually have. Just in ContactMonkey's bank of templates. Kind of, it'll help you if you do lack resources or maybe you're a small team and you don't have the budget for a designer. You can do it all within ContactMonkey. So that's just a quick look. I'm just going to go through 3 different types of ones briefly on this webinar just to show you the different ways you can get different messages across when it comes to creating visually appealing communications for your employees. With kind of the main goal of here is employee engagement, and it's also to get that message across that you're trying to communicate, or you're spending kind of so long trying to get out, or maybe crafting a message but don't know if people are reading it. Maybe they're just sending your emails straight to the spam folder. Who knows? So here's an example of a weekly newsletter that could be sent out. You can see it's kind of grouped by sections and visuals for each section to help emphasize the message. And we've also included clear call to actions, such as buttons within each section. So if you wanted someone to kind of go to the intranet to learn more about this, you could direct them to the company intranet from your employee newsletter. That's what we find a lot of companies do. They kind of use the employee newsletter from Outlook as the main channel to kind of push communications, but they push it to their intranet And try and drive engagement through other internal channels there. You can see also at the bottom of this newsletter, this is a feature that we have bespoke to Contact Monkey. It's kind of getting a 2-way communication going. So for example, if you just started testing out different newsletters, you could add a question about what was your favorite piece here? Did you like the content? What would you like to see more of? And they can rate it. This is just one example, a star rating. Or just an ENPS scale, but you can also add comments to these, which will be anonymous as well, so you can rest assured employees respond honestly. Here's another example that we developed more— most recently because due to COVID, so just kind of a quick template you could use. You can see here it's L'Oréal Ipsen logos, so they can be all kind of slotted out for your own company logo, and you can change the visuals from the bank of visuals we have within ContactMonkey. So you don't have to kind of get another Shutterstock subscription or something. We have a lot of imagery and kind of stock photos included. So this is kind of a good, maybe weekly message you could send out, whether on a Monday or Friday, to employees about kind of maybe key updates when it comes to coronavirus, a reminder of the different symptoms and kind of how to prevent it. You could also use something like this to start preparing people for going back to work if that's something kind of you're planning as well at the minute. And then the great thing about this, you can start asking weekly questions, kind of like, how do you feel about the current situation? By kind of getting employees used to answering these questions on a week-to-week basis, it'll be easier to get honest feedback. And then as you go on, you can start asking more strategic questions like, how aligned do you feel with the company mission or the corporate strategy within the company? Because employees will be used to answering it week on week. So it'll just become second nature. And this is just a quick kind of alert message. You can see here there's less visuals compared to the previous ones. So it just shows you depending on kind of what you want to get across, if it's one message, one action, this is another type of sample you could use. So just kind of to wrap all of that up, it's just wanting to kind of consider show rather than tell. You don't want reams of information similar to the infographic Edithia showed at the start. Reams of information, you get lost and you lose your audience. So kind of show them rather than telling them. Dividing into the blocks is useful kind of for different sections within, whether it's your newsletter or a message from the CEO. Using visuals at each stage helps emphasize each fact. It's also great to make it responsive. So And if you're tracking your emails currently, you'll be able to see if employees are opening them on maybe a mobile, on their desktop, or a tablet. Probably more often than not now, people are probably more mobile, seeing we're all working remotely. So it'd be good to align your newsletter to this to make sure it's not all squashed when it's on a smaller screen. And then finally, use clear calls to action so your employees can do or kind of be pushed to do the action that you wanted them to take, whether that was respond to a question, leave a comment, or just direct them to your intranet. Over to you.

Speaker B: So yeah, coming back to the topic of infographics, this section is just going to be— we've already covered the whats, the hows, the whats, the whys, the whens. I'm going to talk about at length on how to make an infographic. And how you can use visuals to safely reopen your workplace if you are there. I can speak from our personal example.

Speaker A: Yeah, no problem.

Speaker B: So at least for us in Canada, we are slowly starting to reopen things at a, you know, on a phase-by-phase basis. So if you're there, I think you'll find this super actionable. If you're not there yet, I would still recommend you guys check this out and just kind of This could kind of just give you some ideas on how to approach reopening your own workplace. So let's get to it. So yeah, how to make an infographic. So Katie and I've already talked about this. If you want your message to have impact, to be memorable, to evoke a certain kind of emotion, you need to visualize this. You need to visualize it. And especially considering how important messaging around, you know, things like social distancing or sanitation of the workplace can be. I've already made a case earlier as to why visuals are superior when you compare them to text. So if you want your employees to remember key information easily, that is. And if you've been wondering, this is usually the part where a lot of our customers get stuck. And if you're one of them, and if you've been wondering whether infographics are difficult to make, spoiler alert, they're not. So, in this mini section, I'm going to kind of walk you through how to make an infographic effectively to communicate company reopening policies, hand hygiene, or really any kind of important information. So, again, when it comes to creating infographics or really visuals of any kind, as I've said earlier, it's really important to start with the goal of the visual. Your goal will determine what kind of visual you will need to make. For example, you know, stuff like hand hygiene best practices—that's something that would probably fit well on a list-based infographic, or maybe like a visual checklist of sorts. Something much more comprehensive, like your workplace reopening policy, for example—that would require a much more in-depth or a multi-page approach. Sorry for that. So once you've kind of identified your information, now. This is where things get a little tricky. You have to identify which information to visualize. For a lot of people, this is again including me, who don't have a formal design background, this can be a little tricky, but I'm going to share a simple trick that Venngage taught me when I joined here that's going to make this whole process super easy. So yeah, how do we find information worth visualizing, right? We look for something called content gold. So what is content gold? It's just a fun thing Venngage came up with where we kind of, we would kind of use content gold to describe nuggets of information in text content that is ideal for turning into a visual. So content gold is typically facts, quotes, statistics, tips and tricks, step-by-step instructions. So when you go back and look at any kind of text-based information that you have, you will probably want to start by finding these, start by finding facts, quotes, statistics. You start looking at content gold within your own information. Or even just information that you don't want your audience to miss, or information that is super important and that you know will grab their attention. And once you have that information, you've sourced all that information, turning it into an eye-catching visual, you know, it could be an infographic, maybe a slide deck, a short video, or even a newsletter, for example. That part is pretty easy, I think. The main thing is just identifying that information again. And yeah, this is perhaps the simplest thing you can do right now to kind of identify which information to visualize. And once— sorry for that. So yeah, once you've determined your goal and once you have— once you've determined your goal and once you've identified which kind of information to visualize, the next thing you would probably do is pick an infographic template. Now again, to be very clear, you could probably even work with your own in-house designers or work with a tools like Photoshop, for example. But if your goal is to kind of create a lot of visuals really fast, you don't, you're not really comfortable with the long lead times that designers might usually take, or you're like a small team that doesn't have access to these expensive tools, I think working with a tool like Venngage makes the most logical sense for your use case. And yeah, these ready-made templates are pretty good to go as is. All you have to do is just kind of slot your information in where it makes sense. And yeah, outcomes are really professional-looking design that nobody will really know where it's from. So yeah, you would start with the template. We have tons of templates on Venngage.com/templates. Highly recommend you check them out. And I'll also be talking about actionable tactics at the end of this webinar that you can use to scale visual content creation. So how to kind of make a lot of visuals really fast. So stick around till the end and I'm going to talk about that too. And yeah, onto the next one. So once you pick your template, I would probably start with just playing around with certain templates and seeing where the information slots in. The main thing to remember is if there's anything you need to avoid when designing infographics is to make sure that you're not using too much text in an infographic. I think that's the common mistake everybody makes. Including me. So yeah, the goal really is when you're creating an infographic to avoid overburdening it with text and kind of balance that text with visuals. So as I said, we have plenty of templates. So it's really a matter of just picking templates, seeing which kind of template works with the information you have, opting for icons and illustrations wherever possible, as long as it helps maintain context. Obviously, oftentimes text really is important in a way. And once you've experimented with a few templates, you will kind of come up with, with a design that's exactly what you want it to be. It's clean, it's visually pleasing, it communicates what it needs to communicate effectively. And congratulations, you have basically made an infographic. And yeah, a few more best practices. Again, not super important, but just something to remember. Um, you can incorporate your branding. I'm going to talk about this at the end of the webinar again. We also have a chart and graph maker within Venngage. So if you want to visualize any key data, you can do that with our charts and graph maker, for example. And also, I mean, this is again pretty common knowledge, but you can use a highlight color to, you know, mark key information that you want your audience or your employees to remember, for example. And if you want to be an infographic pro, I highly recommend you read our guide on how to make an infographic. It's a Google search away. All you have to do is search for how to make an infographic with Venngage. And yeah, with a little practice and just reading this guide, you'll be an infographic pro in no time. And yeah, I'm going to hand it off to Katie again.

Speaker A: Great. Thanks so much.

Speaker B: Oh, sorry. My bad. Just give me a second. And yeah, again, sorry for that. Yeah. So these, again, infographics, checklists, newsletters, for example, they're highly shareable right within Venngage. So you can email them to your employees, you can print them and post them across your workplace, you can Slack them. The possibilities are again endless. And the main idea for visuals is to kind of reinforce the message consistently so it sticks. And that's really what visuals help you do. And now I'm going to hand it off to Katie for real.

Speaker A: Great, thank you. And those ones, those last options you just showed are definitely very helpful, especially Right now, when people kind of don't know what messages to push out or how to reinforce these guidelines, especially when you come back to the office, you can easily put them everywhere from digital to print.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Speaker A: So I'm just going to talk about how you can test for engagement with visuals. And so kind of before we get into the testing side of things, first you kind of need to measure. So just one second, this video is in my way. So when it comes to— we just did a global survey and we identified that 72% of communicators find it difficult to measure the effectiveness of internal communications. And kind of bearing this in mind with the fact that IABC, the International Association of Business Communicators, have also identified that 60% of internal communicators do not measure their strategy at all. It's kind of hard to think, how can you test for engagement or just use the testing mindset when it comes to internal comms if no one is measuring at the minute? So that's why we want to push this question to you as well today to find out how many of you are measuring the effectiveness of your internal communications currently. So I'm just going to launch a second poll. And just give you a few more minutes, maybe not a minute, a few seconds to answer it because I feel we are coming up to time and I want us to get through this whole webinar and have questions at the end. But just let us know quickly if you're measuring. I'll give you 5 more seconds. Cool, I see a few more trickling in. Okay, that's great to see. The majority on this webinar are measuring their communications currently. So, this is going to be ideal for you on how you can start adding a testing mindset to that measurement. Okay, perfect. Bear with me with Zoom while I try to navigate to the next slide. And this is just another statistic we found from our global survey, kind of some of the key KPIs that stood out to us that internal communicators are looking to kind of measured this year is email metrics, employee satisfaction scores, and also employee survey responses. So more of a mindset on kind of that 2-way communication and also backing up kind of what you're doing with stats. So why should you measure and test everything? And this should be applied to not just email, it should be applied to everything you do across your communications, whether that's on your intranet or kind of maybe with town halls and more face-to-face environments. So, the whole idea about measuring and testing is to improve performance, kind of to identify trends and kind of what's working and what's not, to engage your employees, as that's kind of one of the most important things right now, especially at this minute. We want an engaged workforce and also to have actionable data so you can see, okay, this worked at that town hall, but this didn't. Let's do more of what worked and less of what didn't. Didn't work and kind of keep refining your strategy as you test different things and identify what resonates with your audience or your employees. And it's also something that communicators— it's come up a lot at different conferences I've been to, different webinars I've attended, and just surveys we've done or kind of guides I've read. One of the main difficulties communicators say is finding that seat at the table or proving their worth to the C-suite. So by backing up kind of everything that you're doing with analytics and data, it's kind of adding value to that and kind of proving your knowledge as well. Rather than just being tactical, you can be more strategic in your decisions and less of an ad hoc kind of always chasing your tail effect. So where do you start when it comes to kind of testing, especially when it comes to visuals? First thing, similar to what Aditya talked about, the what, the why, and the how. So kind of figure out what you're testing first, why you're doing it, and how you're going to do it. So there's different things you can do, whether that's templates. So testing a plain text version of an email versus one with visuals. You could test multiple imagery versus just one kind of key action item. You can easily test subject lines very easily. One quick test for this and for open rates is just by personalizing with first name. So kind of first name plus your subject line and see kind of the difference in engagement there. That's a really simple test you can kind of just do straight away. We actually offer that capability as well to use merge fields within ContactMonkey for testing. One other thing to test is your sender. So are you sending from internal comms hub or from the CEO or kind of from your first name? This is something that can often lead to higher engagement when sent from the CEO because employees might think, oh, the CEO is messaging me and that must be an important message, versus communications at kind of Company X. Another thing to test for is with your content is your click-through rates. So kind of if you want to direct people to the intranet or if you want to find out what content resonates with employees, see which ones they're clicking the most from your emails. And then you can start creating more content around that, or maybe ask a question on why that content. Another thing, like I mentioned earlier, testing for device. So if the majority of your employees are opening a message on their phone, it's better to be concise, shorter templates, and maybe plain text might work here, or just kind of one key image, headline, paragraph, and call to action. And another thing that can be helpful as well is always gathering employee feedback, whether that's just with quick questions on, did you enjoy this newsletter? What did you like about this? Or what kind of content would you like to see in the future? I'm just seeing one question come in. So, Elizabeth has asked, will we be sending a copy of the slides? Yes, we will at the end. Thank you. So, I'm just going to go through 2 quick examples, very different, you can see here. And this is something you could test in the day-to-day. So here's an example from the SCIM, which is very minimal design. There's no real visual assets here. It's more iconography and kind of clean text, bold headings, and just sections in different parts. By adding kind of something that's key to the day, like an attention-grabbing quote here, your eyes are drawn straight to the top and then kind of through each section. So it's quite clearly divided. Just see, just checking the questions. And here's another example of something completely different, similar to the same one I showed earlier, but using more clear imagery and layouts. You can see the difference here on where your eyes are drawn to when you just look at them differently. This one is great for kind of maybe if you wanted to do the the news from your local region for the day and kind of just keep people up to date versus one where you want to get kind of key action through call to actions across or maybe to employees to respond to kind of how they are feeling. And just in terms of kind of different, different testing hacks to think about when you are testing, one thing I always like to do for marketing, whether it's A/B testing on a website or kind of testing in advertising, is One message, one action. So think about kind of the one message you want to get across and what is the one action you want people to do from that message. And think about your audience as well and kind of how they will respond. This is great, kind of, I'll come on when the last point I'll talk to you about segmentation, but kind of testing different messages with different audiences. Sales might be interested in something different to say what engineering is interested in at the company. Also, being consistent with your testing schedule so you can get into a rhythm and kind of understand what's working and what's not working and bring your actionable data forward each week is great. Creating a testing calendar is even better. And we actually have a content calendar plan on contactmonkey/resources. So it's ready to go. If you wanted to start testing today, you can just download it from our website. I'll also include a link to it in the follow-up email with this recording to this. And then one of the most important things that people often forget to do is acting on your results and kind of making action. So for example, if you found out a message from the CEO gets better open rates, start using that for all future comms. Again, if you find out personalized messaging works better, it's good to keep that rhythm going with the rest of your communications. And then just remember to repeat and test again. So that's why it's great to have a calendar for all of this so you can keep yourself accountable. Over to you, Aditya.

Speaker B: So in this section, I'm going to talk about why effective onboarding is strongly correlated to improved employee engagement, and I'm going to share some fundamental tenets, tenets of seamless onboarding and how visuals can kind of help you make your onboarding process that much more effective. So yeah, the friend— my friends at BambooHR surveyed 1,000 American workers, and here's 3 interesting things they found. Organizations with effective onboarding had 33% more employees who felt engaged. Employees who experienced effective onboarding were 18 times more likely to feel highly committed to their organization and 30% more likely to feel integrated into the culture. And to me, this kind of proves effective onboarding is directly correlated to how engaged your employees are at work, right? And so yeah, to keep things simple, there are 3 principles of effective onboarding based on, you know, my own experiences with getting onboarded at different companies. It's to understand the mindset of a new hire. You can kind of think of this as optimizing for the question of, you know, what am I to expect of this new environment? When a new hire is joining, that's kind of the question they have in their own minds. The second thing is understanding how to best optimize your time and resources. This is especially true again if you're a small team, or maybe you're just a one-person team trying to juggle multiple things at once. You know, how can you be realistic with your own limitations and expectations and capacity? And third is understanding and using— and understanding and, you know, learning how to use effective communication. So So to make your efforts, you know, to get the most bang for your buck, you must add value to those you're communicating with. And it has to be direct and to the point. And you also have to be accessible and engageable so people actually listen and care about your message. So this is again a really amazing example of an onboarding manual every new employee receives when they join Venngage. This is something I received too when I joined Venngage last year. You want to make sure your onboarding manual is colorful, interesting, something your new hire would want to read. And believe me, I've read the whole thing. It's pretty interesting for an onboarding manual. So yeah, again, you can either work with the design team or, you know, this is again a template on Venngage itself that you can use to kind of create and save them as a custom template. So you can just reuse them again and again and just kind of optimize for your time and resources. I'll talk about more— I'll talk in length about reusable templates again at the end of the section, so stay tuned for that one. So to kind of unpack this onboarding manual a bit further, the first page is our core values, our work culture, our mission and vision. Core values are the foundation of any great company. We all have them and, you know, we likely aim to identify and articulate them in everything we do. So it only makes sense you would include them in this manual as well, just to kind of set the tone for new employees. Sorry, just give me a sec. Yeah. And, um, yeah, this is again page 2. Uh, what is your first day going to be like? It's kind of helpful to share that information with any new employees who are joining your company so they know what to expect. And this way you're kind of saving on time. You're not really operating in that space where there's so much confusion involved. So, you know, giving them this heads up in advance kind of helps them. It kind of saves you guys time. And the first day can really be focused on the meets and greets and the team lunches. And again, um, you know, you can have the same template, uh, as a reusable template on Venngage. So when it's time to onboard a new hire, all you have to do is make a copy of this template, uh, fill it out, customize it quickly, add their names, information about their managers, any kind of personal details. And you're pretty much good to go. Again, a few more examples of onboarding visuals. So you've got onboarding handbooks, you've got onboarding infographics. Sorry for that. So you've got onboarding infographics, handbooks, company FAQs, and you've got onboarding checklists. So I, again, like these visuals, I think can make a really big difference on know, how quickly our employees are on board and how effective the whole process is. Back to Katie.

Speaker A: Great, thanks so much. And we're both struggling with these slides today. So I'm just going to talk about personalization and segmentation when it comes to boosting employee engagement. And kind of one key thing before we kind of deep dive into how to do it is looking at kind of what's happening in your workforce currently and kind of in general the trends around the world. So at the minute there's a lot I'm seeing kind of in the news about low employee engagement and people working remotely and lots of distractions. According to Gallup, 13% of employees are actively disengaged and 52% are not engaged at work at all. In our global survey, we also found that only 25— 27% of respondents are experiencing healthy levels of employee engagement at their organization, which is quite worrying seeing that we spend the majority of our days at work and kind of around people we work with or kind of in a work environment. To find out that a lot of us are unhappy or disengaged is not very kind of motivating. So how— what can you do to kind of overcome these low employee engagement levels? One thing you can do is personalize the employee experience. So like I've talked a lot through this webinar, two-way communication is very important when it comes to kind of boosting employee engagement and personalizing the employee experience, gathering real-time feedback using different things like Employee Net Promoter Score, full surveys on the current state of the company, perhaps try and find out what engagement levels are like at your company. eNPS is a great thing to use. We did ours recently once we moved to remote work at ContactMonkey. So it's a great insight and you can get lots of actionable feedback from it. Another key thing is employee recognition. This is sometimes something that can go by the wayside. So, making sure you acknowledge personal and career accomplishments, whether that's maybe someone just— maybe not now, but someone who ran a marathon, completed their first marathon, maybe a work anniversary, or someone who kind of excelled at their role. You can see a lot on LinkedIn at the minute, people giving kudos to different employees. And this could be something that you could enforce within your employee newsletter, in your employee app, or within your intranet as well. And then also personalizing your communications just with maybe first name, last name, sending based out of interest as well, rather than just blasting your entire organization. So when it comes to newsletters specifically, there's different things you can test: subject lines, your body copy, and you can kind of use merge fields, like I mentioned, to have your first name in it. You can kind of use whatever you want, as long as it's in your directory, to kind of insert that into the body copy and make it more personalized to the employee. You can use real employee imagery and photos within your communications and newsletters. You can also segment your distribution list so that maybe people in your Dublin office in Ireland are getting different communications to someone in your San Francisco office. And then also always asking for feedback, finding out what employees like, what they don't like, and what they want to see more of. And then another kind of key consideration is how do you encourage employee participation, especially now when we're all working remotely? So here's kind of a few different things you can do. What we started doing since we went remote is hosting virtual town halls at Contact Monkey with different activities as well. Integrated in them so we can boost engagement rather than just the leadership team talking to everyone, that it's more of a 2-way environment and kind of more receptive to questions and kind of communication. You can also run different competitions and host the winners on your intranet or showcase them in your employee newsletters, maybe most interesting remote from-work desk setup. Maybe a lot of people are with their animals and kind of pets at the minute, most interesting kind of pet setup at home, different things like that, just to kind of get that human aspect out and personalized to your employees. You can also get active with great weather in Toronto anyway at the minute. I know it's different at home in Ireland, but you could host different things like virtual bonding activities that you can all do at the same time. Maybe now we're not doing kind of the summer activities that we would usually do as a group. you could do it virtually altogether and get employees to submit the photos while they do it. And then also different wellness initiatives for remote workers will also help kind of encourage employee participation. And over to you for our last tip, because I know we are running short on time, so I would like to leave questions for the end as well.

Speaker B: Yep, I'm trying to get— I'm trying to go— I'm trying to get this done fast too. So I'm going to— what I'm going to do is talk about the last section again. How do you scale and hack your visual content creation? Again, if you're not a designer, if you're working in a small team, this can, you know, creating new designs can get super cumbersome. But again, with a tool like Venngage, pumping out visuals that engage, educate, and inform is just, you know, you can do all of that in a matter of minutes. So I'm going to get to the next slide first. Yeah. So, How do you do that? How do you scale your content creation? You start by creating reusable templates that you can edit in seconds, as I've mentioned a few times in this webinar already. This doesn't really apply for just policy guides. You can kind of do this for hiring and onboarding employees too. And you know, you can save custom templates to use them as and when you like. And yeah, to make this even more easier, you can not only save templates, you can not only have master templates, but you can also save templates in separate folders to make them super easy to find. And yeah, the real kicker here is you have folders dedicated to various departments and like leadership, marketing, human resources. And all you have to do is just right-click on any template so you can customize it for each hire and you can, and that's it. Like you, that's how you can kind of create personalized visuals at scale. The next tip is Yeah, the next step is using— just give me a second. So yeah, reusable templates are great. Shared folders are great. I think to really kind of get to the next level, we have a feature called Brand Kit. So what Brand Kit does is if your challenge with visual content has been kind of creating visuals that are on brand, consistently, it gets a little difficult. So Brand Kit is something that kind of helps you do that. All you need to do is upload your logos, input your choices of fonts, and choose your brand colors. And you can essentially create visuals that look exactly the same, that are always on brand. And so that's how it looks like. You have your logos, you have your colors, you have your fonts. And once you kind of have those set up, it's just a matter of cycling through them whenever you're creating new designs. And that truly is your secret weapon to creating endless number of designs that look consistent and that are always on brand. And yes, I am pretty much done. And I think we need to do the Q&A now, if anyone has any questions. Yeah.

Speaker A: Yeah, so I'll just, I saw some coming through.

Speaker B: Okay.

Speaker A: Okay, sorry, this is a very long one. Yes, so Elizabeth is saying she thinks the reason why a lot of people use a lot of text is because creating infographics is an art. If marketing is not our background, it takes a lot of creativity to come up with images to use and what we want to say. How to get creative with images is my biggest struggle. And that's kind of definitely something I've dealt with in the past as well. I remember my first job in marketing, I was crafted with learning Adobe InDesign and creating an infographic from scratch. Whereas if I had Venngage, I could have done it in about 10 minutes instead of maybe a month what it took me to do. And then it wasn't even great at the end. And then Michelle is asking, what if you have a brand template? Can you just upload it? Aditya?

Speaker B: Yeah, to answer the first question, yeah, I mean, as Katie said, I've had the same experience. I still don't know how to use Photoshop. With Venngage, and the reason why I joined Venngage in the first place was creating an infographic was super easy as a process. What I can tell you is with respect to the images aspect of things, it kind of does take time. But if you can kind of, at least with Venngage, and there are a lot of tools out there that let you find royalty-free stock icons and illustrations. But Venngage itself, we have our own icons and illustrations pack that we update every month. So kind of once you're creating a template, it again takes a lot of tries. You have to kind of work with a few templates. I'm not going to sugarcoat it, but the end result is always, almost always fantastic. Especially when you're just playing around with the templates themselves. picking your icons and illustrations and kind of just seeing, you know, how to kind of play with different kinds of fonts, icons, and just the color aspect of things. I hope that answers the question. But as I said, there's already— we have a guide on how to make an infographic. I highly recommend you check that out. I think that should answer most of your questions.

Speaker A: Okay, perfect. Thank you. And Sam is asking, my team has been super heads down down in the work since COVID and it's taking a toll on all of us. How have you kept your team and yourself engaged and motivated? I'm looking for some ideas that go beyond visual. Maybe I'll answer this first and then you can jump in, Aditya.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: But here at Contact Monkey, what we've been doing is initially kind of before the weather was good, we'd do Friday socials. So we didn't have to have an activity, but maybe if someone wanted to pop on for a drink and a chat, just do a group Zoom call together. And then we had kind of more formal ones as well. So we've organized different kind of fun activities from the marketing team. We were playing Jackbox TV, which is kind of virtual games and quizzes online, and then we have prizes for the winners. So like maybe Uber Eats vouchers or Ritual vouchers or maybe kind of like a food delivery service we were giving out. And then the overall team together as well, we were playing different things from different quizzes from like Cards Against Humanity to kind of Word Scrabble games, just different things to get engaged and make sure we did different teams. So people were working with different teams and getting to talk to each other on a basis. And then also internally, something we've launched recently through our Slack group is this thing called Donuts, where each week we're paired with someone to go for a virtual coffee. Because at the minute we're not really talking to people as much as we used to. A lot of the teams are kind of siloed. So that's great as well. And then one thing we do every evening is our end-of-day stand-up with the whole office. And I know this might be different for larger organizations, but you could do it with your team or kind of maybe different departments. Just a quick 30 seconds for someone to talk about what they did today. Make sure video is always on. It's also a key aspect because it's easier to grab people's engagement when the video is on. What about you, Aditya? What are you guys doing at Venngage?

Speaker B: So yeah, a lot of the same things you guys do. We also experiment with doing it a lot where I'm having a coffee date with an engineer from our team next week just to kind of get some face time. But we have been experimenting with a lot of ideas. My content marketing manager, for example, Sarah, she's a huge trivia fan, so every week We have virtual trivia. That's pretty exciting. We have also started kind of having weekly lunch and learns where somebody from the content team or somebody from the marketing team, or it could be even engineering team, for example, we just kind of get together and they kind of talk about a topic they're passionate about. We found that that seems to have helped. A UX/UI designer on our team is a huge fan of yoga and stretching. So she organizes weekly stretching sessions. Those are pretty fun and interesting too. But yeah, I mean, you know, just kind of to go beyond visuals, just kind of experiment with these ideas, team building activities. I think they're going to be super beneficial. And again, this is the new normal. So we just have to kind of get used to this, at least for the time being, as to how things are, how things will be.

Speaker A: Okay, perfect. Yeah, it's new normal for everyone. We're all struggling. I'm just seeing, and there's a good few questions coming in and we are coming up to time. So Radha has asked, I worked at a bootstrapped startup in Vancouver. I'm the only HR person doing the hiring and little social media. I loved all the examples you both shared. Does Venngage have any offer letter templates, social media images for promoting our new openings?

Speaker B: Yes, we do. You're in luck. So yeah, we do have those. You can find them on, again, www.vengage.com/templates. You can just find them on the left side of the pane, or you can just search for them. And yeah, I hope that helps.

Speaker A: Perfect. And also connect with either Aditi or myself over LinkedIn afterwards, and we're happy to help as well. Tony has asked, do you offer nonprofit pricing? I know ContactMonkey does. Does Venngage?

Speaker B: Yeah, I think we do.

Speaker A: Okay, perfect. I'm just getting through the quick ones. Should we turn our company-wide updates and weekly memos from our exec team into visuals, or would text-only format work better for a formal update? I think this is a mix. Yeah, you go first.

Speaker B: Sorry, Katie, you can go first. No, no, it's okay.

Speaker A: We're both too polite. I think it's a mix. It really depends. on kind of what the message is and the overall tone of your company. Some different brands have different brand voice. So as long as it fits with your corporate brand and the imagery works well and kind of emphasizes the message rather than taking it away, I don't see why not.

Speaker B: Yeah, I have the same opinion. For me, I think everything is an experiment. You will only know if you experiment. I mean, at the end of the day, it really depends on the length of the email to. Are they super long, super short, in-depth? Either way, it's really a matter of testing out various formats, getting feedback from your employees and seeing what sticks.

Speaker A: Okay, perfect. And just 2 last questions I see. So I've been struggling with identifying the right info as well as picking the right structure for my infographic. Any tips? I'll leave that to you. Yep.

Speaker B: So yeah, again, kind of look for the content goal aspect of things first. If that doesn't work, here's another way to think about it. I would kind of invite you to ask yourself, what kind of info are you trying to visualize, right? Is it a timeline of events? In that case, a timeline infographic would make more sense. If you're telling a story with numbers, you're trying to convince your board you want to invest in content marketing, for example, you would go with a statistical infographic in that instance. So they're great for visualizing numbers with charts. Graphs, pictograms, and other forms of data visualization. And, you know, there's like 9 or 10 types of infographics. So it's, there's a lot of options for you to kind of like, just look at what you want to make. But most importantly, I'd probably recommend starting with a template. I've said this before too. I think creating something from scratch, really anything, right? You're right. If it's writing a blog post or if it's just designing something, creating anything from a blank canvas is super difficult. Trust me, I've tried. So yeah, creating your own infographics can be difficult unless if you have a template, I think it gets really simple. You just kind of know where certain information fits on that template. And once you kind of experiment with a few tries, a few templates, I think you should be good to go. I hope that helps.

Speaker A: Okay, perfect. Thanks. And our final question, what does your hiring onboarding process look like and how do you use visuals in those processes? So I think Aditi, you can speak to this a lot, especially especially with the onboarding guide you showed?

Speaker B: Yeah. So, I mean, currently we're on a hiring freeze, but pre-COVID our hiring process has been pretty straightforward. I think what I can— what we do things a little differently is when it comes to onboarding. It's an onboarding I've personally really enjoyed when I joined Venngage last year. And that's where the visual aspects come in. So after I got hired, I was sent an onboarding manual. exact next day. I think a week before I was set to join, I was even asked some fun facts about myself and the people and culture manager at the time shared this information in like a handy infographic and it's shared with the company. So it's sort of as an icebreaker. So, you know, it's things like Kanye West is my favorite artist, for example. So somebody on the team could be like, hey, Kanye West is my favorite artist too. So it's kind of interesting. You kind of start talking based on those. sort of little icebreakers and fun facts. And yeah, upon arrival, I was taken through an onboarding checklist, which was made on Venngage. And yeah, but throughout the week, it was all about me just checking off every single item from that onboarding checklist. And that's pretty much it. And I mean, to be completely fair, like I've worked at a few companies before Venngage, but yeah, for me, I think Venngage and their onboarding process has been hands down the best process I've been under. And I think a lot of it has to come down to the visuals aspect of things and how they've kind of tried to stray away from those boring Word docs and just emailing me a list of tasks. They've kind of opted for the visual route and I actually sort of enjoy the process.

Speaker A: Makes us all want to work there. And just one final question and then we're done because I know we're at time. Any plans to go 3D with infographics? So I'm not sure what you guys are doing.

Speaker B: Sorry, can you repeat the question again?

Speaker A: Any plans for Venngage or just in general to go 3D with infographics?

Speaker B: It's a little tricky, if I'm being honest. One day is the answer I can give you. And yeah.

Speaker A: Okay. So that's all of our questions. Thanks so much for them all. And I'm sorry we have gone a few time, so if you couldn't make it, we will be sending the recordings anyway. Here's just a few quick guides that we have. So this is just what we have on our website if you are struggling with your crisis comms at the minute. We have a plan and a template that might help you. And also from Venngage, do you want to talk about this?

Speaker B: Again, yeah, if you've been looking for a way to be a better communicator, improve your internal communications, engage your employees, check out Venngage. We have tons of infographics, checklists, the whole nine. And yeah, I mean, if you're— this is especially if you're a one-person team trying to make things happen all on your own, you don't have a lot of time to make visuals. I think Venngage could be a perfect companion.

Speaker A: Great. So thanks everyone for tuning in and joining us today. It's been great. And until next time.