Breaking down the silos at Paddy Power
By
— March 18th, 2016
“We brought in Newsweaver, and it was a game changer." - Rosie Valentine, Paddy Power
About
Paddy Power is an entertainment giant with over 5,000 employees. They have both an online presence, and shops located across Europe and Australia.
Challenge
Founded in 1988, Paddy Power has transformed from a one-room office in Ireland to the global company it is today. Last year, the newly appointed CEO introduced a vision for the future of Paddy Power. To successfully implement that vision, effective internal communications needed to be put in place to actively engage their diverse workforce. Rosie Valentine accepted that challenge, and moved over from marketing into the newly created role of Head of Internal Communications.
Rose’s first step was to conduct an audit to gain insight into the scope of the challenge. Her team audited internal channels and technology. They also surveyed all employees, and visited each location to conduct stakeholder interviews.
The audit found that posters, and emails sent via Outlook, were the two most common methods of communicating. Internal messages tended to be too frequent and were inconsistent. A lack of communication between HQ and the rest of the organization was creating silos - and a feeling of disconnect for many employees.
Solution
"We needed to improve what and how we were communicating."
The first step Rosie took was to create a centralized briefing process for all internal comms requests to help manage and decrease messaging. Her team then built out a monthly comms plan to ensure the right messages, sent at the right time through the right channels were reaching all of their employees.
Rosie says they chose to overhaul the most popular channel first - email. She was keen to apply her marketing experience to what they were emailing employees. "After all, employees are like customers - I am trying to grab their attention in a very cluttered world."
"We brought in Newsweaver and it was game changer. Newsweaver’s platform is created for internal communicators; it gives me the ability to create visually stunning, branded emails that could be read on any device. I could deliver the same digital experience employees were used to seeing outside of the workplace."
The team worked with Newsweaver to create a number of email templates.
A weekly newsletter - "PaddyFlash streamlines and consolidates multiple messaging. It helps us bring our brand to life internally. We tell all our great stories in one weekly update celebrating achievements, promoting our strategy, and breaking down the silos between departments and geographical locations. Social media is an important part of Paddy Power’s branding; but we want employees to hear and see things first. In PaddyFlash we announce new products, and share our exciting mischief and external brand campaigns before they are launched externally."
Campaign templates to send data-drive messages - "We were using Outlook and were having a nightmare manually sorting lists to ensure people in different locations only received messages relating to them. Now, with Newsweaver we can easily manage data in our account. We can use the data to tailor our messages to different departments and locations so the other countries are getting relevant information - and not details about the HQ Halloween party that they were not invited to!"
Results
Since Newsweaver was put in place, Rosie says the response to her streamlined and high impact email campaigns has been overwhelming. “We have received so many private emails from across the business saying "Well done, this is brilliant, this is exactly what we needed."
A decrease in frequency, and increase in relevance - “By implementing a central control, and limiting access to who can send our internal comms messaging, we were able to remove pointless or repetitive low impact messages. Also, having access to data, we can now send campaigns based on specific data.”
The ability to embed videos into emails - “Using Newsweaver we can embed CEO videos, such as quarterly performance updates, and short videos prepared specifically for regional events. We also embed our external social media videos.”
Access to insight and measurement - "The part we love the most about Newsweaver are the measurement dashboards. We now know videos are working really well and getting a lot of clicks. We can see what stories people are interested in, and what they like through the social like and commenting Newsweaver features. We review the reports every week in our editorial meetings - and this insight feeds into how we approach future campaigns."
"In the last 14 months we achieved a lot with a team of two people and these are only some examples. As a result, we’ve become a highly recognized respected team in a short space of time - and we have a valuable seat at the leadership table."
