WPP Enterprise Technology Communications Team Leads the Way with Increased Engagement and Efficiency

The Challenges:

The WPP Enterprise Technology Communications team wanted to raise the benchmark and efficiency of its communications and set itself specific goals to:

• Create greater efficiencies and reduce the complexity of creating and delivering communications
• Improve colleague engagement with IT communications
• Inspire other communication functions to work towards a standardized approach to large-scale internal communications across WPP
• Enable improvements to IT services for the wider organization through better colleague feedback

However, the legacy communications technology used by WPP Enterprise Technology Communications was not fit for purpose, particularly for a team that sends out approximately two million emails across the organization every year.

This resulted in fragmented comms systems that required inefficient, and time-consuming, efforts by the team to create colleague communications that they knew could be far more effective, and achieve greater engagement, if they had the right technology.

Take these two examples:

#1. ’The Wrap’, the monthly newsletter sent to 2,000 WPP Enterprise Technology colleagues.

This was tremendously time-consuming for the WPP Enterprise Technology Communications team to create due to the inadequacy of the technology at its disposal. It meant creating the content on one platform and using Outlook or Salesforce to distribute the newsletter.

Compounding this labor-intensive and inefficient use of resources, the legacy platform prevented the WPP Enterprise Technology Comms team from creating anything but the most basic newsletters, which resulted in a poor user experience.

The result: low engagement levels—newsletter open rates of only 30-35% despite the time invested and best efforts of the team.

#2. Monthly feedback survey of all WPP colleagues on their experience of technology services.

Despite the fact that this all-colleague survey could potentially deliver valuable information and data on how 100,000+ people across the organization felt about the quality of services provided by WPP Enterprise Technology—which could reveal problems or help improve things like onboarding or essential training—the legacy survey delivery technology was not fit for purpose and denied the WPP Enterprise Technology Comms team the ability to accurately mine this data.

Historically, this survey was done through a legacy platform provider that was very costly and delivered emails that looked like spam to colleagues—emails that frequently got caught in spam filters, explained Lewis O’Neill, Senior Communications Business Partner at WPP Enterprise Technology.

"As you would guess, this was a big problem for us, because we knew we had a potentially golden source of data that we weren’t able to get our hands on." — Lewis O'Neill, Senior Communications Business Partner at WPP Enterprise Technology.

With not-fit-for-purpose legacy technology creating inefficiencies, wasting resources, hindering engaging communications, and depriving WPP of valuable data that could have widespread positive impact across the company, the WPP Enterprise Technology Communications team needed to find a better way.

The Solution:

In 2022, the WPP Enterprise Technology Communications team chose Poppulo to help revolutionize their colleague communication capabilities through software specifically designed for employee communications and engagement. Poppulo is a leader in this field and among its 4,500+ global customers are an A-list of the world’s most successful companies, including over 40 of the Fortune 100.

The WPP Enterprise Technology Comms team was the function within WPP to bring Poppulo on board.

The Results:

Having Poppulo as an employee communications platform has enabled the WPP Enterprise Technology Communications team to accomplish the goals it set itself and:

• Achieve significant time saving and other efficiencies by reducing the complexity of creating and delivering communications—with each communicator saving almost two days—15 hours—per month, based on the time it previously took to email the entire organization. This is empowering its communicators to be substantially more effective in their roles, unlocking capacity for more value-add work.

• Double the reach and engagement of their communications and unlocked valuable employee feedback data, transforming the effectiveness of communications across the organization.

• Get quick and accurate access to valuable all-colleague feedback data that was previously either inaccessible or unreliable—important information that could impact essential areas such as onboarding and training, and any problems people could be experiencing with IT.

The WPP Enterprise Technology Communications team has radically transformed the efficiency and effectiveness of its communications systems and content since it brought the Poppulo employee communications platform on board at WPP in 2022.

WPP Enterprise Technology Communications were the first comms team in the wider WPP organization to use Poppulo, and have since championed and led the larger-scale adoption of the platform across numerous departments to help raise the benchmark of their own communications.

Poppulo has dramatically reduced the complexity and time-investment relating to content creation and distribution not only to other WPP communications teams, but to the entire WPP workforce, resulting in significant time saving as well as vastly higher communications engagement.

Significantly, the introduction of Poppulo has also enabled the WPP Enterprise Technology Communications team to unlock valuable employee feedback data for the benefit of the WPP organization—data that had previously been either unavailable or highly unreliable due to a legacy system provider that was not fit for purpose.

Lewis O’Neill said the introduction of Poppulo “created a night to day shift” for the creation and distribution of their messaging both locally and enterprise-wide, in many cases going out to the global organization of over 100,000 colleagues.

The ability to create modern-looking communications quickly, efficiently, and easily, with personalized content that resonated with colleagues had a dramatic effect. And the metrics proved it: engagement rates doubled.

People prefer and engage more with personalized communications, and Lewis and the team zoned in on specific data points for higher levels of personalization in their monthly newsletter ‘The Wrap’, specifically: the recipient’s first name in the subject line and throughout the email, department name in leadership messages, length of service in recognition messages, and engagement personas for adoption messages.

“We dropped a bomb on the newsletter and made the content much more colleague-focused, making really good use of all the features Poppulo offers, which we knew would make a meaningful impact,” said Lewis O’Neill, Senior Communications Business Partner at WPP Enterprise Technology.

The team were able to entirely rebuild the newsletter from the ground up, exploiting new features such as standardized design templates, and personalized content, dynamic articles based on whether or not a colleague met tag criteria, social features such as likes and comments, and microsites. All of which created a far better user experience and increased content engagement, more quickly and efficiently.

The communication team’s experience with the new platform was replicated in their monthly feedback survey.

“We’re able to reach our audiences and email the entire organization's 100,000 colleagues globally more effectively than we’ve ever been able to come close to in the past as a technology function,” he said.

Having Poppulo also means that the WPP Enterprise Technology Comms team can now easily mine that valuable information and data from their all-colleague feedback surveys, giving IT greater insights to guide direction for continual improvement of services to the wider organizations.

Again, just like the monthly newsletter, the impact has been impressive. “Since we introduced Poppulo, the feedback survey response rates have shot up,” said Lewis O’Neill.

But in parallel, it also lays the groundwork for the WPP comms team to become even better communicators as times goes on, and that has an impact on every communications team, helping WPP IT Communications work towards a standardized approach to large-scale internal communications across the wider WPP organization.

So, what problem does Poppulo solve for the IT comms team and how does the team see their use of Poppulo maturing over the short to medium term to support their communications objectives, and WPP’s goals?

"Poppulo empowers our communicators to exploit a number of advanced messaging capabilities without having to be platform experts. And by combining the unlocked capacity through a more effective platform, with the increased maturity of our messaging, we are now able to adopt a more data-driven communications strategy that enables us to place our colleagues at the core of every message we send — Lewis O’Neill.