Hi Brittany Bendeck!

This is such a great topic to post. Thank you for polling everyone here. I do not want to scare anyone away so I'll keep my thoughts and experiences brief! 

You couldn't have said it better. End Users expect an omnichannel approach to content. The path to the best engagement will always be one of profiling your user base and listening to the ebb and flow of their feedback. Content is living and needs to be considerate of: 

• User acceptance (how, where, and when end-users work) - do we have to lean on more video due to short attention spans or small windows of opportunity? more short-form content ala tweets? What is a reasonable digest rate?
• Appetite for scale - how much is too much to consume? how often are we sending items to this group? more? less? 
• Timely importance - is this a need to know today, tomorrow, next month? Does it have a dependency coming or past?
• Appropriate shine -  regular email approach, tiny ad hoc tweet note - how should this information be presented? highly polished newsletters to catch attention to key items? 

I would take the above and marry it to a sample matrix, like the one below. This way you can determine before the publishing calendar what channel and which bucket it should fall into. 

Again, this is really just a high-level sample, but I think I would approach all this by bucketing out my delivery channels and labeling some sample content based on the user-based labels above. That way you can set up a publishing framework and fine-tune from that point on with three types of feedback - focus groups, Igloo polls, and surveys (sneak em in the newsletter occasionally)

Looking forward to feedback from others! Tammy Triplett Molly Sproatt Melissa Dignam Sarah Symanowicz Anna Vucic 

fabulous response Tom Ryan !!!

Brad Rooke Andrea Gumz-Dietrich good topic for a community webinar!! Think you found your speaker! 

Tom Ryan, thank you for your response! It definitely brings to light some solutions we could try, however I may have some questions in our meeting on Monday. Ginger Avenali and Laura Shapiro read above!

Brittany Bendeck  - sounds like a plan! 

Tom Ryan - Thanks for drawing me in here.  Happy to explain how Leidos handles communications.

Brittany Bendeck - This can be very complex and confusing for your audience and those responsible for sending out the communications.  Here's what we do at Leidos:

Set the Stage

• Leidos is a global company with about 40K employees across the world in many time zones.  
• About 55% of our employees do not sit at a Leidos facility and many of them do not use Leidos provided equipment or networks or Leidos email.
• We have strict security rules requiring multi-factor authentication to access everything.

How do we reach employees?

• Senior leadership messages are emailed using Cvent which gives us full control over the look of the emails and the ability to track metrics.
• Depending on the content of the message, it may be customized for various regions around the world and sent at the 'right' time for the local audience to receive the message.
• These messages always include the important details that we want to ensure people actually see, then will include links back to our platform for additional/optional information.  This is because of the population not at or using Leidos networks/equipment as not all of them are able to regularly access our platform.
• Most of these message are also posted on our platform as blog posts from the leader.  This gives a way for employees to reply if the choose.  The only ones not posted as blogs are those that are targeted to a smaller audience and would be confusing for anyone outside the target audience.
• Our news stories are posted on our platform and are not always emailed.  It depends on the topic and whether it is required or optional reading.
• Occasionally we have senior leadership messages that are only posted a blog posts.  These are rare, but do happen every once in a while.  
• We publish a weekly newsletter via email that recaps the week's news and communications - including both the content that was emailed and just posted.  It is image/headline/summary and links back to our platform to read the detail.
• Lower level managers are encouraged to use blog posts if their employees regularly use our platform, but also provided an Outlook template to send their messages out.  Outlook is used more than blogs, again, because of our large percentage of employees that may not be able to regularly access our platform.  They are encouraged to also post their messages as blog posts.  
• All this leadership messaging is great, but we know that employees are going to listen to their immediate manager more than anyone else.  So, in addition to this direct messaging, we also have manager communications that are used to ensure managers are informed of everything they need to know and the tools/talking points they need to further communicate with their employees.  We handle this with posts in a blog channel on our platform as information becomes available ... short bullet points on whatever the topic is.  Then every other Monday we compile those into a frontline manager email (via Cvent) and blog post.  And, once a month we hold a manager teleconference to recap all the important stuff they should be talking to their employees about.

I hope this is helpful for you as you think through comms for your company.  I'm happy to discuss if you'd like, just let me know.

Tammy Triplett - this is truly awesome!

Tammy Triplett thank you so much! I'm going to bring this information back to my team and get their thoughts. I appreciate you taking the time to craft a thorough response! 

Thanks for the tag Tom Ryan 

We actually investigated using ContactMonkey or Bananatag and decided we could use Igloo to track our email stats instead. Our plan is currently in development, but the ultimate goal is to drive employees to the intranet to subscribe to our channels, and eventually eliminate emails altogether.

We plan to get there by reducing content in our current emails and moving the “read more” link to the intranet higher and higher up in our messages, while communicating a deadline for employees to manage their intranet subscriptions so they can continue receiving updates from there. This deadline is going to be key to get employees to take action, because today any subscribers end up receiving both the email we send and their subscription notifications (so duplicate content).

In terms of what channels to use for what kind of news, we’ve divided up by:

• Corporate News (more need-to-know)
• Employee News (more nice-to-know)
• HR News (policy updates, etc.)
• People updates (new appointments and promotions)
• Employee wellness
• IT News
• And soon: Diversity, Equity and Inclusion updates

 I think moving subscriptions into employees hands and allowing them to choose whether they want instant, weekly, etc. updates for each of these channels is going to be key to make sure the content we’re sending is actually getting read.

Happy to chat more if you’d like to connect Brittany Bendeck 

Melissa Dignam Oh how I'd like to get to the point of eliminating or nearly eliminating email!  We are 10 years into community now and I had these high hopes when we first set out, but soon realized that with over half of our workforce embedded with our customers and not always even able to access our community from their customer network, we will never be able to stop sending things they need-to-know by email.  I hope you are successful in your transition!

Hey, Rachel Marcus, take a look here.

Brittany Bendeck - This is also a puzzle we're working to solve. We use a third-party email system because it allows us to track metrics, spoof executive name, and do audience customization beyond what Outlook distribution lists (or a lot of BCCing) would let us do. As much as we can, we try to post content to our Igloo and drive traffic there through email.

Karen Rogers, it seems we're in the same boat! Thanks for your feedback