National Grid is a progressive energy organization with electricity and gas operations in the UK and US. It has over 35,000 employees, almost half of whom are operational and field workers. 

The company’s field force is geographically dispersed and works in a range of different environments—from electricity pylons and wind turbines to underground tunnels and liquified natural gas depots. Most roles at its US and UK offices are now hybrid, and it also has contact centers and control room staff. 

The diverse nature of the company’s workforce across employee functions, business units, and geographies presents particular challenges for the company’s internal communications team. 

National Grid’s Colleague Communications and Engagement team is highly focused on ensuring that internal comms are aligned with company goals and deliver business outcomes. Because of this, Sally Jackson, Senior Manager, Content and Channels, and her team set out the following priorities:

Improve the colleague experience by modernizing and simplifying communication channels

Reduce communications noise and overload through comms platforms capable of delivering targeted and personalized content

Utilize advanced analytics to derive important insights into comms performance and colleague preferences and behaviors

Capitalize on these insights to ensure alignment with performance measures and business strategy

Prior to having Poppulo Harmony as its platform for company email and newsletters, the National Grid comms and engagement team could not deliver on the priorities outlined above and was, as a result, inadequately resourced to enable the company to deliver key business goals. 

Sally and her team could not target email communications effectively and lacked the data and analytics to know which communications were working and which weren’t. 

Additionally, the inability to target content for different audiences meant that people were receiving information via email not relevant to them or their roles, leading to information overload for colleagues—which often turns people off company communications instead of encouraging them to tune in. 

Getting Poppulo Harmony as their comms platform proved to be a game-changer and revolutionized National Grid’s communications.

Poppulo has changed our lives. We can get the right information to the right people when they need it, we know what’s working and what’s not, and we have the analytics to derive really important insights into the behaviors and preferences of our colleagues. — Sally Jackson, Senior Manager of Content and Channels, National Grid. 

"It also gives our business stakeholders reassurance that we are delivering the right message to the right people at the right time, has added additional rigor to processes, and enhanced the professionalism and consistency of email and newsletter communications delivered. This enables us to be far more effective in what we do and support business outcomes," said Sally.

The Poppulo Harmony platform plays an integral part in building and implementing a communication strategy based on National Grid’s overarching company strategy and performance measures to achieve company goals.

Superior communication performance insights through advanced analytics

Significant time-saving—up to 50%—in the production of quarterly reports

Increased employee engagement in company values campaigns

Greater comms relevancy with targeted, personalized content for specific employee audiences

A typical example of how Poppulo enables the National Grid internal comms team to achieve company goals is their use of the platform to promote and achieve employee engagement with newly introduced values. “These underpin how we work every day and deliver our strategy,” said Sally. 

“Over the last two years we introduced a new value and have three company values in place: Find a Better Way, Do the Right Thing, and Make it Happen. We used Poppulo Harmony to encourage colleagues to participate in the ‘living our values' peer recognition campaign and to recognize those nominated with personalized messages. We got hundreds of nominations the first year and almost 1,000 teams and individuals were recognized in the second year,” she said. 

In addition to being able to use Poppulo analytics to demonstrate reach and involvement in the campaign, Sally and her team also saw a correlated improvement in values-related questions in their engagement survey.

As a result, National Grid’s values were among the top 20 conversation topics on its social channels for a sustained period, and values-related questions recorded a 79% positive response rate in the annual survey, up 2% from the previous year.

Modernizing National Grid’s comms channels has supercharged the impact of its weekly global news roundup, with the launch of Grid:news using Poppulo Harmony targeting to create a single global newsletter with a local feel, establishing it as a key trusted source of company information for colleagues.

It is part of the global channel mix that includes its intranet, Grid:home; its leadership emails, called Grid:updates, and a number of other channels, including an internal social network, webcasts and townhalls, and a growing digital signage channel. 

The ability to segment and target Grid:news content through Poppulo Harmony for many different audiences, greatly improving relevance and reducing noise, and creating a local connection and feel for colleagues, played a critical role in establishing the channel as a trusted source of information. 

Additionally, Sally and the comms team use a “push” and “pull” comms strategy for maximum effectiveness. With “push” targeting and personalization, content is selected for specific audience groups, giving them relevant content and reducing noise.

Intranet (targeted home pages and news, menus, and page variants)

The “pull” customization has the benefit of allowing audiences to select the content that interests them. It includes:

Intranet apps and tools shortcuts on the homepage

Intranet news which can be personalized by selecting preferred topics to follow

Viva Engage communities, followers, and topics

The combined “push” and “pull” comms strategy has proved highly effective for National Grid. Personalization delivers on the desire of employees for more control over the company information they receive and the need to reduce information overload, while at the same time delivering the consumer-grade experience employees expect and demand today.

"We cannot control or prevent all the “noise”, but we can allow colleagues greater control over what they see and interact with. With Poppulo, we can help draw out the most important things for our people, and we can use the platform’s analytics to understand what they are interested in, which in turn informs our future content targeting decisions and content design," said Sally.

Poppulo Analytics: Better Insights for a More Effective Strategy and Time-Saving

Poppulo’s Advanced Analytics also plays a critical role in measuring the performance of National Grid’s strategic group-wide campaigns, with the executive leadership receiving regular performance updates throughout the year. 

Poppulo’s Advanced Analytics have been incredibly useful in helping us shape and refine our communications strategy, understand where to focus resources, and even underpin business cases we make for investment in improving our communications channels.  — Sally Jackson, Senior Manager of Content and Channels, National Grid. 

"The Advanced Analytics have saved our communications team time in analyzing channel performance and allows us to focus more on the so-what element of measurement, providing insights and recommendations that shape our communications strategy, and help the business understand where to focus resources," said Sally.

The team uses topics to measure the reach and impact of email-based communications and how they perform against each other and alongside other content and campaigns. Quantitative metrics from Poppulo and other channels are combined with data from colleague engagement surveys and focus groups to arm the comms team to make any necessary campaign adjustments to achieve company goals. 

The team also uses this data to help with business stakeholder conversations—to help build an understanding of what tactics work best for different types of content and audiences and assist with decision-making and planning.

 For example, the team has used data to demonstrate that alongside colleagues telling the business less is more, the data also confirms this, with higher volumes of content leading to lower average engagement in that content. And that Friday afternoon is generally not a good time to send company emails, even if that’s when a stakeholder has time to write a message!

"We have been working with Poppulo for a number of years now, and the comments from across our team are that the tool works really well and provides great insights into how colleagues interact with content and channels,” said Sally.

 We find the newsletter targeting allows us to bring our global and local strategy to life and balance local content and feel with a single newsletter that brings different parts of the organization together in a way we would not have been able to achieve otherwise. The advanced analytics are also a fantastic resource, and we use them to feed into our strategic reporting — Sally Jackson.

Advanced analytics has transformed National Grid’s ability to measure the performance of its communications, the time it takes to do so, and the speed at which it can then act on the insights learned. The comms team went from not being able to measure a channel, to being able to track reach but having limited time to produce reports or do anything with the data, to now being able to quickly produce reports that include insights and recommendations—and having the time to do that, and take action on those insights.

“We have cut the time in half that it takes to produce our quarterly reports, and we have increased the insights and recommendations that we include in the reports. Simplifying the creation of one quarterly dashboard saves us approximately 45 hours a year. Poppulo, as one of our key data sources, has contributed to that. Before, it would have taken us two days to pull together data across all our channels for a specific company-wide campaign and analyze it. Now, thanks to Advanced Analytics, we can do that in a few hours,” said Sally.

Energy

National Grid

  Advanced analytics and targeted communications are key to achieving company goals

Creating a Better Employee Experience and Delivering Business Value at National Grid


As part of a multi-year digital transformation project, NGC sought to improve communications and productivity on the factory floor as well as provide a modern lobby experience for one of its new, high-traffic buildings. The two primary goals of the project were to empower floor managers and technicians with real-time, data-driven information and ensure employees and visitors could easily navigate the 110-acre NGC campus.

While the goals for the new lobby experience revolved around showcasing the capabilities of digital signage including wayfinding, the team’s vision for digital signage on the production floor focused on improving quality and efficiency. But in a high-mix, low-volume production environment, with data coming from multiple systems, the right solution for various floors and projects required a high degree of flexibility.


The manufacturing industry, in general, struggles to democratize information, as data is often siloed in different systems, and it is challenging for anyone to gather that information and to make sense of it.

—Oscar Castillo, Factory Modernization & Digital Transformation Project Manager, Northrop Grumman

Compounding the issue of siloed information, simply unlocking the data is not enough—the team at NGC needed a way to aggregate that information, make it actionable, and help technicians and managers prioritize it. The team worked to automate as much of this process as possible, so sensors were added to manufacturing equipment and code was written to ensure that monitors were continuously sent production data, essentially letting the factory speak for itself. Because the production floor can be so dynamic, with constraints and priorities shifting continually, the NGC team also wanted to allow floor managers to easily control the content displayed, ensuring teams were kept in the loop. Their goal was to reduce span time due to slow communications channels, while also ensuring stringent quality standards were met. To illuminate the challenge of the work the team does, Oscar stated:

We're sending stuff into space. We can't send repair people to go and deal with something if it doesn’t work exactly as it’s designed to. That’s why quality is so important to us—once it's launched, it's launched. Anything we can do to help reduce the time it takes to produce a product and ensure its quality—that’s meaningful to Northrop Grumman. And that’s why we use digital signage on our production floors.

NGC selected Poppulo (formerly Four Winds Interactive) as its digital signage provider for the building’s lobby experience and production floor communications.

The initial implementation included an interactive wayfinding solution and a large interactive screen in the lobby designed to showcase the company’s mission, innovations, and more, as well as 15 screens on the production floor. The screens on the production floor were interactive, allowing managers and technicians to see top-level metrics and then drill-down into custom dashboards as needed. The solutions implemented were far-reaching, built to solve specific challenges NGC’s manager and technician communities faced every day.

One example is the NGC team’s factory floor screen showing real-time environmental conditions within a lab. Given the nature of the work done at the Space Park facility, certain specifications must be adhered to—in this case, the products must be built within specific environmental constraints. Otherwise, production must stop. Prior to implementing the screens showing temperature and relative humidity during dry months, floor managers would have to walk the floor multiple times a day, check the analog sensor readings, and communicate any necessary mitigation strategies back to everyone else—a time-consuming process. Today, all that information is readily available to everyone on the floor, and mitigation strategies are programmed to display if certain conditions are met. This alone democratizes the environmental information and empowers everyone on the floor to take action if needed, ensuring the floor operates efficiently without needing manager intervention.

One of the primary goals of our digital signage project was to improve situational awareness through better communication, freeing up time for both floor managers and technicians. I’m happy to say we accomplished that.
—Oscar Castillo

That solution was accompanied by screens displaying other operational efficiency metrics designed to reduce dwell times, enhance situational awareness, and improve communication on the production floor. To ensure the factory floor could speak for itself, Oscar and his team enabled managers to control the content on their screens, ensuring that critical information could be deployed—quickly—whenever the management team needed to. In addition to ensuring the managers could control the content their teams saw, regular user experience surveys helped refine what was displayed on the integrated, data-driven screens.

We knew the factory floor could move much faster with more real-time, integrated comms, but to make that a reality, we had to figure out a way to free all the information trapped in different systems and ensure people could access it whenever they needed to. Poppulo’s platform helped us realize that goal.
—Oscar Castillo


Northrop Grumman's digital signage network has significantly enhanced workplace communication, improved situational awareness and efficiency, reduced span time, enhanced site navigation, and more. However, its success wasn’t limited solely to the use cases the company initially sought to solve. Shortly after the factory floor signs were in place, the Health and Safety team inquired if they could get their content on those screens to help with its slips, trips, and falls campaign. Due to the flexibility of the Poppulo platform, that was easy, and by amplifying that campaign on digital signs, NGC’s health and safety team was able to reduce injuries.

Overall, Oscar and the team responsible for the project agree that it was, and still is, a success. According to Oscar, “Digital signage is definitely helping our production floor move more efficiently, which means shorter span times and improved quality.” Through feedback, additional applications have been developed, with one of the more recent data-driven use cases revolving around oven temperatures. This application was designed to show oven temperatures and trigger alerts if thresholds were met, reducing the need for re-work, and ensuring quality. This type of application—and many others in use at Northrop—are changing how the factory floor operates simply by democratizing and displaying key data.

The initial project’s success led to the continuous growth of Northrop’s digital signage network—today, the Space Park campus has 80 screens—but the use cases have also increased. Over time, the team added digital signage to its breakrooms and hallways, but those locations did not display production or wayfinding information. Instead, the screens in those areas were dedicated to organizational employee comms like anniversaries and new hire introductions. Additionally, they were used to celebrate significant accomplishments like the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope—a project that many team members at the Space Park had worked on for years.

With a multi-decade project like the James Webb Space Telescope, some people had spent their entire careers working on it. So, when it launched, there was a lot of pride, and we absolutely featured that—and the teams responsible—on our signs. Everyone loved seeing that.
—Oscar Castillo

Using the digital signage program at the Space Park as a blueprint, NGC's Chandler, Arizona, and Palmdale, California, facilities have each implemented screens to solve similar challenges. Due to the success of digital signage at the Space Park location, Poppulo now powers hundreds of digital signs across Northrop Grumman’s facilities. Leveraging innovative technology and a commitment to continuous improvement, NGC has created a more connected and productive workplace environment, reinforcing its dedication to excellence in all operations.



Aerospace

Northrop Grumman

Northrop Grumman Corporation (NGC), a leader in aerospace and defense manufacturing, embarked on a digital transformation project in 2018 to enhance operational efficiency at its “Space Park” facility in Redondo Beach, CA.

Improving Efficiency & Giving the Factory Floor a Voice at Northrop Grumman

When Adventist Health, an integrated health system located in the US West Coast and Hawaii, approached Poppulo in 2014 for digital signage at one of its California hospitals, the goal was to introduce public-facing screens at a single location to share information with patients and visitors. At first, the IT team managed all aspects of digital signage, including content. Over time, it became clear there was demand for digital signage systemwide. The flexibility of the software enabled expansion into additional applications, like employee-facing signage. As the network grew, the Marketing and Communications team was a natural partner to assume responsibility for content management.

Historically, the process of deploying content to the company’s digital signage was manual and time-consuming. Lengthy training was also required to learn to use the software. While the IT and MarCom team enjoyed Poppulo’s powerful digital signage authoring capabilities and advanced data integrations, monthly content updates took up to two full business days to complete. Additionally, all content requests had to go through one person. This slowed down both the process of getting screens updated quickly, and the development of new digital signage applications.

Jen Jacobs joined the Digital Marketing team at Adventist Health in 2018. Her main responsibility was to manage content for the growing digital signage network. But in order to truly expand the network to other facilities in the system, there needed to be a way for local contributors to manage their own signage.

Adventist Health needed a simpler way to update their screens. After exploring the new functionality offered by Poppulo Harmony Signage Cloud, it was clear that a cloud-based approach to digital signage management was the answer.

In January 2021, Jen began the process of migrating to Harmony Cloud with the support of the Poppulo team. By the beginning of February, the migration was complete. Jen began enjoying the benefits of migrating to Harmony Cloud immediately.

Poppulo Harmony Cloud’s user interface is so beautiful, intuitive, and easy to use—when there’s a problem with a screen, I’m even able to fix it from my phone.” –Jen Jacobs, Digital Marketing Manager at Adventist Health

Adventist Health's number of screens had grown organically over eight years. It was the move to Harmony Signage Cloud that boosted expansion by finally enabling multiple people to contribute content and manage screens. After the migration, Jen distributed 20 licenses to contributors in different locations, allowing each market to manage their own content. When a new contributor is added, Jen sends them a tutorial document and walks them through a 15-minute training - something that was not possible pre-migration.

Everyone saw the value and benefit of local content contribution, and everyone wanted more. They’re already creating this digital content—why not share it on digital signage and get it in front of more eyes?”—Jen Jacobs, Digital Marketing Manager at Adventist Health

One challenge the team faced related to growth was finding budget to purchase new hardware. However, digital signage is an effective tool for patient education. In some locations they applied for grants to fund the hardware needed for screens to keep patients informed (COVID-19 prevention, vaccine education, etc.). This enabled the network to grow even more rapidly.

As the digital signage network continued to expand, so did the variety of use cases. Today, Adventist Health powers its patient-facing and employee-facing screens, including wayfinding, directories, welcome screens, video walls, breakroom signage, menus, lobby installations, and other custom use cases with the Harmony Signage Cloud.

Today, 20 of Adventist Health’s 26 markets have digital signage. With 195 screens total—approximately 80% of which are patient-facing. the time it takes to update and manage content has decreased, despite the steady growth of their digital signage network. After migrating to the Harmony Signage Cloud, Jen saves 16 hours a month for content updates, and new screens are added in weeks, not months. The health system also saw a reduction in the amount of print signage needed, saving money by eliminating tens of thousands of dollars in printing costs, and improving Adventist Health’s environmental impact.

The real key to Adventist Health’s digital signage success has been the flexibility of Harmony Signage Cloud and the improvement in time-to-value. One of the ways they measure the success of digital signage is through engagement- they include custom QR codes in content so the audience can take action. For example, when an employee is retiring, colleagues can scan a QR code from a digital sign and be taken to a site to share their well-wishes. This not only allows Adventist Health to turn interest into action, but it streamlines the employee experience and enables the health system to support a culture of recognition. Another way that Adventist Health supports a culture of recognition on digital signage is by highlighting when nurses win DAISY Awards—an award given by the DAISY Foundation that recognizes a nurse who exemplifies each hospital's mission and values. DAISY awards have been proven to impact healthcare areas by contributing to a healthy work environment, improving nurse engagement, and enhancing the patient and family experience, so highlighting the nurses who are recipients has a positive impact on Adventist Health’s overall success.

There's so much potential with digital signage and it has become a key part of our communication plans. My favorite things are when new contributors begin to realize the power available in this tool and when local leaders specifically ask for things to be 'on the screens'." —Jen Jacobs, Digital Marketing Manager at Adventist Health

Looking to the future, Jen hopes to implement digital signage in every market in the Adventist Health system and train more local users to contribute content. She continues to look for more innovative ways to leverage the full capabilities of Poppulo Harmony Signage Cloud and better inform and engage patients and employees.

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