The challenge: Communicating how and when the employees needed

Stewart Milne Group is one of the U.K.'s award-winning independent housebuilders and leading timber systems providers. With more than 800 employees spread across offices, factories and housing developments, the Internal Communications department needed a streamlined method for disseminating information across all the sites. This was especially important during the period of change and uncertainty brought about by the pandemic.

While employees had access to a SharePoint Intranet site, they often struggled to access it, making it difficult to share information related to their training, HR and leadership messages. Employees on sites and factory floors had limited access to company email to get updates. As a result, there was a sense among staff that they didn’t feel like they were part of the business as they did not know what, how or why any changes were occurring. A more integrated platform for employee communications with multiple channels and the ability to create two-way engagement was needed to drive greater clarity and a sense of inclusion.

We decided to do a staged approach where we first implemented Poppulo Email and then brought in the Poppulo Mobile app. The goal was to reach all of our employees on the channel of their choice and provide them with the information they needed in a quick and consistent manner. Since 50% of our employees are non-desk-based, we required a communications platform that would effectively handle multiple communication channels simultaneously, and we found that in Poppulo.

— Kirsty Morrison, internal communications manager, Stewart Milne

The solution: Building out communication channels for engagement and Inclusion

With the ultimate goal of boosting employee engagement across the company and promoting a sense of belonging, Morrison began with email communications as the first step. She used SMS messages to reach the non-desk-based employees to inform them of an email update, but results were not measurable and it was a costly option.

We implemented the Poppulo Mobile app to best reach our workers on factory floors and sites and already have a third of workforce using it. It has become key to communicating with employees who weren’t in the office or who were on furlough to ensure they were aware of all changes in real-time.

In launching the Poppulo Mobile app, Morrison opted for a methodical approach. “We had a select group of Director and Senior Managers and representatives from all levels of the organization work with us to understand the type of content that resonated, discuss new ideas and act as ambassadors with their teams to get others engaged or demonstrate how to interact with the content,” said Morrison.

The Poppulo Mobile app serves as an information hub for employees. Quick link sections to learning and development, connected with the payslip and benefits programs worked best.

“Workers who are on a job site or traveling to meet with a client or at home can just grab their phone and know the resource is there,” said Morrison.

As the mobile content tends to be short, snappy and with lots of emojis and visual content, it drove higher engagement. The people side of the content has been the highest engaging thus far, whether through human interest posts on the history of the company, sharing of employee photos or for events such as Apprentice Day. Morrison also built out video content with the Executive Chairman, CEO and Senior Leadership teams on the positive side of 2020 and the company’s direction following the pandemic, which drove insightful engagements on the app.

This approach was highly successful in driving clear communications during the company’s internal restructuring. Using the Poppulo platform, employees were surveyed to understand how they were feeling throughout this time. From this feedback, Morrison worked with managers and leadership to address uncertainties through email and mobile communications to allay employee concerns.

“This was not something we had done before. We were able to get real-time thoughts and feelings, connect employees with Senior Leadership, share the 5-year growth plan and how it impacted employee’s learning and development plans and more. We eliminated any guesswork and put the effort into the content that the employees needed to address their fears,” said Morrison.

The results: Simplifying communications creates sense of belonging

In building out its integrated communications approach, Stewart Milne saw success in reaching and engaging with its employees including:

Savings from removing the SMS outreach feature, where they were charged per text message

Engagement with one-third of the employees, and growing every day, using the Poppulo Mobile app, with a goal of reaching as many employees as possible in the coming year

Using video as the most engaging content with longer viewing times by employees

Top takeaways for enterprise communicators

 offer employees the ability to receive a wide range of information, from HR items to culture posts, on the platform of their choice and choose how to engage with that content.

 helps Stewart Milne know which content is favourable, such as the email promoting the Poppulo Mobile app launch, which remains one of the most highly read emails to date.

 ensured that during times of change, whether it was a pandemic or restructuring, the IC team was able to partner with HR and the Executive team to respond quickly and give employees a clear sense of belonging.

Construction/Manufacturing

Stewart Milne Group

One of the U.K.’s leading independent housebuilders and timber systems manufacturers, Stewart Milne implemented an integrated email and mobile communications platform to build a sense of inclusion among its employees who were distributed across a network of offices, factories and housing developments.

Creating connections and belonging through times of change

World Vision is a global Christian relief, development and advocacy organization dedicated to working with children, families and communities to overcome poverty and injustice. With over 37,000 team members and working in 90+ countries worldwide, getting the internal communications strategy right is challenging.

Honestly I don’t know what we would be doing now without Poppulo. Poppulo has allowed us to turn on a dime to reach our employees on the device of their choice. And, our ability to analyze what content resonates with employees has helped us maintain and even increase our engagement levels.

— Christine Head, Global Internal Engagement Communications Manager

The Challenge: Limited agility, analytics and mobile access for communications

World Vision is a global Christian relief, development and advocacy organization dedicated to working with children, families and communities to overcome poverty and injustice. World Vision has over 37,000 employees located in 90+ countries, spanning six continents targeting the most vulnerable through:

Short-term emergency relief, such as providing food, shelter and medical care to survivors of natural or man-made disasters.

Long-term sustainable community development focusing on helping communities meet the legitimate needs its members identify, such as clean water, education, healthcare, agricultural improvements and sanitation

Working with policymakers and the public at the national, regional, and global level to build awareness around poverty and to address the unjust systems that help perpetuate it.

Yet, while the agency excelled in delivering a lasting impact on communities, its distributed organizational structure of offices around the world created internal communication struggles. Reaching employees in a timely manner was difficult. They could not easily access content on their mobile devices, often the only viable channel. Nor could they respond to or share feedback related to the information.

We want our field offices to be empowered to proceed quickly so we moved away from a command and control approach in relation to operations. Yet we needed to reach about 37,000 individuals, with more than half of them located in the field, to share important updates, messages and operational changes.

— Christine Head, Global Internal Engagement Communications Manager

The Solution: Delivering customized content that engages employees across multiple channels

The Poppulo platform has given the World Vision Communications team multiple ways to create and deliver personalized content that more effectively engages colleagues across the organization – with content easily accessible on laptops and mobile phones.

“Poppulo’s detailed analytics and A/B testing of subject lines and headings lets us identify what resonates best with employees, allowing us to improve the relevancy of our content. We can look at the top three pieces of content for the week and adjust our upcoming messaging based on that data. Not only that, but the greater insights from the two way communication and employees’ feedback through likes and comments, is helpful in developing our content strategy” said Head.

One important finding was that leadership videos, especially those from the president, are the most popular form of content. “The analytics showed us that employees want to hear from their leaders. Our president’s videos are far and away the most popular. We also saw that people want to hear about what their peers are doing to be successful. It is motivating for them.

Poppulo’s Event functionality is driving greater attendance at the monthly strategic Leader Talks, a virtual meeting over Zoom where leaders share information about their functional areas. In addition to raising the visibility of these events, the communications team uses Poppulo’s analytics to identify people who have not responded and resend messages to just those individuals.

“We’re able to share high-level metrics with our leadership and use that data from countries not impacted by GDPR to analyze ways that we can boost open rates and also know where we need to do a better job of engaging staff”, said Head.

Poppulo’s platform is designed specifically for rapid, high quality employee communications that can be tailored to each organization’s needs. The World Vision Global Brand team customized the communications format to give it an open look and feel that aligned with the agency’s guidelines for color, font types and imagery.

The Results: Clarity and agility for scalable, data-driven communications

The World Vision communication team is experiencing growing success including:

A 75% or higher open rate for leader targeted communications.

Improved event attendance with more targeted message distribution.

Increased employee engagement with sharing of authentic, moving stories and videos from the field.

The agility provided by the Poppulo’s platform proved to be invaluable during the recent pandemic. The communications team pivoted quickly from sending out three monthly newsletters to a bi-weekly communication to all employees. Additionally, executives receive, two monthly Ignite Global Leaders newsletters from the World Vision International President, and a monthly newsletters to leaders from Global Marketing & Communications.

We more than doubled our communications. There is no way we could have done that without Poppulo. During this time it was especially important for staff to hear from leaders and see them on videos. Our global president uses part of his biweekly video series called Window to Our World to share stories from field and funding offices.

— Christine Head, Global Internal Engagement Communications Manager

Humanitarian

World Vision

Putting people first: How World Vision transformed its employee engagement

The communication needs of a top-ranking modern university are multi-layered and complex. As one of the world’s leading educational institutions, the University of Strathclyde was aware it faced challenges in delivering best-in-class internal communications.

The agile and innovative internal communications team had many great success stories and important information with which to engage the university’s 4,500+ employees, but lacked the enabling communication infrastructure to make it happen.

— Linda Woodcraft, Internal Communications Officer

Specifically, the team had no communication software platform to communicate effectively and efficiently across the university community.

The technical limitations of their existing system meant email creation and distribution were cumbersome and time-consuming. Most significantly, the team had no analytics to deliver insight into what was working and what was not, who was engaging with the content, and who was not.

As a result, they had no way of knowing if important information such as urgent news, ground breaking research, or funding updates was landing or going unheard among its key audience.

This situation had to change. So, like many of the world’s most successful organizations, the University of Strathclyde looked to Poppulo.

The communications team’s Linda Woodcraft had previously used Poppulo at a leading bank – so she knew it would be a game-changer for Strathclyde’s internal communications and employee engagement.

I knew that Poppulo would transform our internal communications, and I don’t use the word transform very often. But in this case, Poppulo proved itself to be extraordinarily transformative.

— Linda Woodcraft, Internal Communications Officer

The team forged ahead and built an effective business case, and got the software implemented. Their first communication initiative was to create a new weekly newsletter as well as a new template for senior leader briefings.

After we sent out our first email newsletter using Poppulo, people called me and told me how amazing it was. The emails are easy to read, easy to navigate, and are ultimately easy to get information from.

— Linda Woodcraft, Internal Communications Officer

Implementing Poppulo has had far-reaching results for Linda and her team, especially in light of the COVID-19 crisis where internal communications are more important than ever. Here are a few of the impressive results achieved using Poppulo:

 Prior to the introduction of Poppulo, the team had no way of knowing who was engaging with their communications. Now they can share key metrics with the senior leadership, which has enabled them to adapt and improve their leadership communication plan based on solid performance data.

 The university fortuitously deployed Poppulo for the first time on January 30, 2020, shortly before the COVID-19 pandemic forced much of the staff to work from home. Throughout the pandemic, the university leveraged Poppulo to give updates and provide resources to the staff.

 The volume of communication has increased exponentially as a result of the COVID crisis, so the ability to quickly and easily create engaging emails with the Poppulo drag-and-drop builder has been of enormous benefit. The team has been freed up to work on other strategic comms priorities in this busy period.

 The university, like many others, is a decentralized organization and ensuring colleagues feel connected with the institution and one other has never been more crucial than this year. User feedback has demonstrated the invaluable role of communications sent via Poppulo – the interactive features such as likes, comments, polls and the ability to host multimedia have brought content to life and engaged the audience to share and recognize experiences and insights.

 Decision making prior to Poppulo was made based on very little factual evidence of what was working or not working, due to the lack of analytics software. Now, the communications team can support their senior executive with data on what type of information works best for the different audiences, when it works best, and in which format.

A crisis will test your internal communications tool.

 No one expected the COVID-19 pandemic to change the way we work and communicate. But it certainly has. Now, more than ever, workplaces need internal communications tools that keep their staff informed. When a global crisis impacted the University of Strathclyde, it became quickly and clearly evident that Poppulo enabled the communication team to deliver when it was most needed.

COVID-19 has been a very challenging backdrop, but it’s given us an opportunity to clearly illustrate the crucial importance and value of our communications. Right now, internal communications is an absolute necessity for the university and our standards are high.

— Linda Woodcraft, Internal Communications Officer

Education

University of Strathclyde

How the University of Strathclyde transformed its Internal Communications with Poppulo

Megan Ferrell and Kathleen Devlin head up internal communications for Valley Health,
a system of hospitals, urgent cares, and physician practices, based in West Virginia, Maryland, and Virginia. Communicating with the team has long been a priority– in 2016, the team began sending a weekly email newsletter powered by Poppulo. This newsletter covers the need to know information, upcoming events, employee spotlights, helpful resources and more.

Although the newsletter was widely read, many clinical staff members don’t have regular access to email-based communications from a computer during working hours. Because of this, much of the team was missing out on internal updates.

So many of our employees are clinical or support staff. They do a wonderful job caring for patients, but they don’t have time to check their email several times throughout the day. As a result, they weren’t hearing from us.

— Megan Ferrell

The Valley Health communications team was intent on finding a solution. The goal? To reach those who prefer mobile as a communications channel.

They knew an employee mobile app would keep their employees informed, but they needed to make sure it was secure. They also needed to make employees aware of the app once it was launched. Finally, the app needed to be valuable to employees so that they’d be willing to download and use it.

The team at Valley Health looked at a few different solutions for a new mobile app. They chose Poppulo because they were already having a great experience with the platform.

I was already comfortable working inside the Poppulo dashboard to write our weekly email newsletter, so the process of rolling email content over into a mobile post saved time and simplified production.

To launch the new channel, the team at Poppulo reviewed Valley Health’s brand standards and proposed a design. Once the app was built, Megan and Kathleen recruited 60 volunteers for a month-long pilot phase to refine the app and develop longer term champions.

Feedback was collected to ensure that the app was as valuable as possible and quickly became a key part of the process. For example, the first suggestion from clinicians was to add access to Shift Wizard, a platform that manages work schedules.

The Poppulo team was great at working with us to take feedback into consideration, edit the app accordingly, and get the it ready to launch.

— Megan Ferrell

The app was launched at the end of 2019, so the team chose to roll it out in a themed campaign called ‘Appy New Year’. Leaders were introduced to the app during a monthly meeting, which included time to download and begin using the app. Human Resources leaders joined members of the communication team for download events held at each of Valley Health’s six hospitals.

Caregivers had time to stop by during their lunch break and take advantage of pop socket giveaways, appetizers and in-person help downloading the app. The communications team hoped that 1K people would download the app within the first six months. This goal was reached and surpassed by February. Thanks to Poppulo, Valley Health now has a mobile app with news that makes it easy for anyone to access information from the organization.

 With the new mobile app, the staff at Valley Health now has access to daily news, which keeps everyone in the loop and increases engagement.

 The new mobile app is secure, so the team doesn’t have to worry about vulnerabilities and security risks.

 The mobile app is built with Poppulo, which is the internal communications platform Valley Health uses. Keeping everything in one platform streamlines the communications flow.

Connecting employee groups during the COVID-19 pandemic:

 The Poppulo mobile app had an unexpected benefit during Valley Health’s response to COVID-19. It became another outlet to receive the latest updates, ensuring all were informed and knowledgeable about what was happening and how Valley Health was responding as the situation changed.

Healthcare

Valley Health

How Valley Health successfully launched an internal mobile app

Like most universities, Wentworth Institute of Technology responded to the COVID-19 pandemic by moving from classroom-based operations to online learning and remote working. That meant significant changes for its three main constituencies: students, faculty, and administrative staff.

For students, these changes meant recalling anyone studying abroad, moving all classes online, closing resident halls, and postponing Spring commencement.

Faculty needed to revise their lectures, assignments and exams for online course delivery, begin teaching from home using new tools, and interact with students, colleagues and administrative staff remotely.

Most administrative staff were directed to work remotely with their colleagues while continuing to serve faculty and students in a constantly changing environment.

The University’s internal communications team found itself on the front line in advising the President and other organizational leaders on how to effectively communicate in this rapidly changing environment. It also played a key role in organizing the information to be shared and the channels used to share it.

And it took the lead in analyzing the impact of this information to guide future communications. In all these roles, the communications team had to find ways to convey large volumes of constantly changing information in a manner that did not overload their audiences, who are already being barraged with information from multiple external sources.

In less than 14 days, our communications team helped mobilize over 4,300 students and 500 faculty and staff to pivot from normal operations to virtually 100% distance learning and remote working. How did we do it? By combining incredibly committed teams, strong executive leadership, effective processes, and the Poppulo internal communications platform.

— Karmon Runquist, Director of Web & Digital Communications, Wentworth Institute of Technology

The Wentworth Internal Communications team worked closely with the COVID-19 Campus Working Group and the President’s office to source all information for their communications. The team already used Poppulo for internal communications and had an existing process in place for content contribution and dissemination, which they adapted for communications around COVID-19. That process leveraged Poppulo’s scheduling capabilities to organize the communication schedules of multiple teams and consolidate content into manageable numbers of communications.

The team used smart targeting to personalize content for each individual recipient based on personnel data. In addition to basic information such as role (student, faculty, administrative staff), the team had access to more detailed data. For students this included class affiliation (e.g. freshman, sophomore, etc), selected major, class schedules, and more. For faculty, targeting included college and department affiliations.

This personalization allowed the team to adopt a “less is more” approach to their communications: delivering just the information that was relevant to each individual at just the right time. This allowed them avoid “spray and pray” communications that reduce the engagement with – and impact of – the materials being communicated.

The team used Poppulo’s advanced analytics to understand and improve the effectiveness of their communications. Messaging language and tone were tested to identify the most impactful wording. Engagement rates helped guide a balance between critical messages and positive stories to raise campus morale.

The combination of comprehensive information, personalized content and support from the University’s leadership successfully positioned the team’s campus newsletter as the one source of truth for any communications concerning COVID-19. This gave students, faculty and staff greater confidence that the university was prepared to effectively manage the situation however it unfolded. This was seen in the increased open rates for communications during this time. Open rates for COVID-19 communications were 15% above normal open rates, and communications from the university President were 57% greater.

At a time where everybody was stretched, the communications team saved significant time and effort by being smart about organizing the efforts of multiple communicators and targeting content for maximum relevance. The University President took advantage of the targeting capabilities to quickly craft inspiring messages to students, faculty and staff that were unique to their situation.

The combination of comprehensive information, personalized content and support from the University’s leadership helped improve open rates 15% above normal for COVID-19 communications and 57% for communications from our President.

— Karmon Runquist, Director of Web & Digital Communications, Wentworth Institute of Technology

Karmon Runquist identified three key takeaways that underlay Wentworth’s success in effectively communicating the changes to students, faculty and staff.

Make sure your communications infrastructure is in place before you need it for a crisis! By the time the crisis hits, it’s too late! Because Wentworth audiences were familiar with receiving messages from the Poppulo platform they trusted it as the single source of truth for COVID-19 information. And having the system in place lets the comms team move quickly – delivering effective messages immediately.

Target your messages as much as your infrastructure will allow. Don’t fall back on blasting emails when engagement with communications is so critical. Insuring your content is relevant for each audience greatly improves the likelihood of getting the behaviors you want from each person. Poppulo made this easy to do, and the results proved the value.

Be transparent. When it comes to leadership comms, Wentworth’s President made it clear that the Institute understood their concerns and was working on them. That generated tremendous credibility.

Make sure your communications infrastructure is in place before you need it for a crisis! By the time the crisis hits, it’s too late!

— Karmon Runquist, Director of Web & Digital Communications, Wentworth Institute of Technology

Wentworth Institute of Technology

A communications success: How Wentworth Institute of Technology pivoted to distance learning in a matter of days as COVID-19 spread

Richard says their challenge was to review and reboot how they were communicating with employees. His team began by conducting a content and channel audit. They found that email was a top tool for communication – but there was no strategy in place to manage what was being sent, when and how often.

We recognized in the audit that every single month we were sending out 25-30 emails to the entire organization. That was simply way too much.

Using Poppulo, the Experian UK&I Internal Communication team implemented a strategy for their email communications. This strategy includes:

Introduction of a weekly email newsletter

 – To help decrease emails sent, the team introduced a weekly newsletter, Switched On. It consolidated many emails that were being sent, and used personalization and targeting based on office location, department and title to provide only content that was timely and relevant to each employee.

Use of single emails for must-read messages

 – Now that the team had consolidated content, Richard says they could then send important messages sparingly, such as singular emails from a senior leader, to ensure these messages stood out in the inboxes.

 – Recognizing the value and impact of managers in delivering information to their teams face-to-face, the Experian IC team introduced a monthly information pack for their 900 people managers, distributed via email.

Use of email as part of a multichannel strategy

 – The team used email to drive adoption of the organization’s intranet and to raise awareness of initiatives such as their annual Compliance Awareness Week.

 – Each quarter when financial results were announced Richard said it would generate numerous emails from leaders at various levels of the organization, with nuanced messages. This made it difficult for people to clearly understand how the results impacted them. His team began pulling together the global, regional and business line information into a simple infographic – and posted this on the intranet. They also embed and send the infographic out in a single newsletter (a Switched On special edition) across the organization when financial results are being announced, along with the three messages from their Global CEO, their regional Managing Director and the leader of their part of the business so everything is now in one place, in their inbox.

By streamlining their email communications the Experian UK&I team have seen far greater impact of their digital messages. On top of this they now have access to insight and measurement to understand how their email communications are being received.

Increased engagement by consolidating messages 

newsletter, The IC team were able to reduce 27 emails a month to 4-5 emails a month. Two-thirds of their employees regularly open 

 every week – with clicks in the 20-25% range.

Decreased ‘production’ workload and duplication for business partners 

– By being able to target articles based on business area and office location within their weekly newsletter, Experian, were also able to reduce the number of local newsletters – instead including these regional articles in the weekly newsletter. “This has meant our business partners can now concentrate on content rather than production, and instead spend more time on their higher-value interactions with their leadership teams.”

 – “We know from direct feedback the manager pack is fulfilling a need; so we have continued creating a monthly pack. It is available on the intranet. We also use our manager email communications to push out the pack to managers. The emails are really helping drive uptake. We regularly achieve 80% open rates, with 50% reading the pack each month.”

Ensures senior leader and urgent messages stand out 

– Because of the weekly newsletter, they’ve significantly reduced the number of singular emails sent out. “We now see a much higher spike in readership of important messages. Our newsletter readership is pretty much in line with industry benchmarks – 60-70% open rates. But readership of our singular emails get even higher opens – typically at or above the 80% mark. In one urgent message sent on a quiet Friday afternoon we saw an impressive 65% click-through to either watch the video interview with our MD – or read the transcript, within an hour of sending. By reducing the noise we’ve made room for the important stuff to get through, making this as close to a silver bullet as you could wish for.”

Measure email’s contribution to raising awareness of initiatives 

– The IC team helped compliance create a theme to heighten interest around their Compliance Awareness Week campaign. “It has been so successful they’ve been running the same theme for three years now. We help drive Compliance Week awareness through email. This year 80% of employees read the email when it went out during Compliance Week. Any day of the week I would take 80% readership on a Compliance Awareness Week email!”

Richard and his team have transformed internal communications at Experian UK&I. In 2014 their achievements were recognized by peers when they won the Best In-House Team award from the Institute of Internal Communications (IoIC).

We use Poppulo to target and personalize emails to employees based on their office location, department and title. We’ve reduced twenty-seven email communications a month to about four.

— Richard Donovan, Head of Internal Communications, at Experian UK&I

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