Measuring Your Digital Internal Communication ChannelsEmail, Intranet and Enterprise Social Networks (ESN)

How to improve engagement and prove business valueEffective Channels Put To The Test

LIVE When measuring the impact of new technologies, start with some type of desirable business result, and identify the stakeholder behaviors that will lead to that result. Then, you can apply different techniques to connect the communication method to the results.

Angela Sinickas 1

To get started with sharing, identify the platform your employees are already using. Then think of a story you can tell there that will inspire someone to take action toward achieving a key objective.

Charlene Li, Founder and CEO of Altimeter Groupand author of the New York Times bestseller, Open Leadership4

EMAIL.......................................

INTRANET.......................................

Be sure to measure:1. Both opens and clicks.

2. Content popularity.

3. Opens and clicks on content over time.

4. Device consumption.

5. Email benchmarks.

Measuring will get you:1. Insight into what employees are

opening - or not opening.

2. A view across the organization of your most/least engaged audiences.

3. What devices are most popular?

4. Tracking content popularity to inform editorial decisions.

Be sure to measure:1. Search terms used.

2. Sections visited.

3. Average time spent per employee.

4. Number of pageviews per employee.

5. Percent and frequency of employees that view content .

Will help you answer:

1. What are employees searching for?

2. What content are they viewing?

3. How long employees are staying on the intranet?

4. How often are employees returning?

5. Are there patterns as to what content is viewed across departments, teams etc?

ESN.......................................Be sure to measure:1. Number of messages -

daily/weekly/monthly.

2. Active users/ commenters/viewers.

3. Popular messages or hot topics.

4. Response time to answer questions.

5. User adoption through growth patterns.

WIll help you answer:

1. Is the volume working, are employees responding well?

2. Are employees engaging with you?

3. What content do employees want to receive, are there any trends/patterns?

4. Do employees feel that they can use the ESN as a channel to communicate?

5. Are you identifying trends - new groups formed, increased or decreased traffic to sections?

Best Practice Email Tips

Use your employee data - Emails with targeted content perform better than group emails

Measure, benchmark and improve - Use insight to improve engagement and prove business value

Send it from someone meaningful - Match the message to the sender (i.e. CEO, manager, team leader)

55% of internal communicators don’t measure the performance of their content separately from the performance of the Intranet as a whole.3

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73% of internal communicators ranked social the top channel for collaboration 2

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And finally...Better measurement of internal communications requires that we break down the data and information silo's that exist, not only do we need to look at measuring the impact of our content and campaigns by individual channel, we also need to look at the picture that is presented when you look at the impact and reach of all the channels together i.e. ' a global view'

If you want to get a consistent message to everyone, email is the tool of choice for 78% of communicators.2

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Start with goals and objectives, the questions you want answered. Then you can look for the data in your analytics tools to help measure against these.

Sam Marshall, Intranet and digital workplace consultant, Clearbox

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www.newsweaver.comtwitter.com/newsweaver_ic

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REFERENCES:1. Measuring the Impact of New Media Tools

http://www.sinicom.com/Sub%20Pages/pubs/articles/article100.pdf2. Exploring the Use of email for internal communications

http://www.ragan.com/Main/NewsweaverWhitePaperUseofEmailforInternal.aspx3. 7 mistakes organizations make with intranet measurement

http://signup.newsweaver.com/7-mistakes-organizations-make-with-intranet-measurement-on-demand4. Why No One Uses the Corporate Social Network

https://hbr.org/2015/04/why-no-one-uses-the-corporate-social-network

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