April 9, 2008 at Raytheon in El Segundo.
Speaker: Paula Cassin from Cut Through Communications
Download the presentation materials (coming soon)
About 20 people joined us for the lunch event to hear how Vodafone in New Zealand was able to reduce its dependence on email and improve their employee communications.
First, Paula walked us through Vodafone’s internal communications objectives (and I’m sure these will sound familiar to anyone in internal communications):
• Reduce all-staff emails
• Grow and reinforce knowledge
• Reinforce brand and values
• Increase intranet usage
• Involve staff, build engagement
• Build community spirit
• Centrally manage communications
• Targeted communications that fit with work flows
Then, she introduced us to some interesting new channels offered by Snap Communications that helped Vodafone achieve those objectives.
Screensavers:
Okay, maybe you’re already doing this, but if not, it can be an effective way to market to your employees. Vodafone ran a series of screen savers detailing where they stood against their annual business goals. They also used them to ask employees for creative ideas to grow the business. Then, they created screen savers to share what employees were saying. They also used screen savers to promote an initiative to recycle mobile phones and drive awareness for an upcoming ‘Loud Shirt’ day to raise money for charity. And the list goes on. Using the snap tool the screensavers were quick and easy to produce and launch. They didn’t even have to go through IT! And the screensavers can link to anything you want them to link to so people can get more information.
Alerts:
You know how in outlook you can get that little pop-up window that tells you when you have a new email? Well, the snap alert system is similar. It pops up on the employee’s screen to give them a quick bit of information (and they can click to read more). You can target it to very select groups. For example, if you have a training class starting in 15 minutes, you can send an alert to the people registered for the training class that pops right up on their screen. This is also useful for crisis communications or if the email systems go down and you need to alert everyone.
Employee-Driven Content
She also talked about a wonderful tool that allows employees to submit news stories or announcements they want everyone to see. They submit them online using a template form that you create. When a new story is submitted the person you designate as the editor is alerted and they can accept the story, decline the story or edit the story before posting it. All the stories are then summarized on one nice html page that you can broadcast to employees as frequently as you wish. She said you can even have this html page come up when people are logging-in, so they can check out the latest stories for a few minutes each morning.
She also talked about quizzes, surveys and a ticker bar that can run across the bottom of the screens for “hot news”.
Other attendees also shared what they were up to including ensuring their external and internal webpages are accessible via blackberries and other mobile devices and hosting webcasts.
This is just a fraction of what we covered at the meeting. You can see Paula’s presentation here. (coming soon)
Let us know what you’re company is doing to limit its dependence on email as a communication tool. Are you having success with webcasts or video? Do you have a new tool or a strategy that’s worked well for you? Tell us about it!