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 How to Use the Intranet to Communicate Your Mission, Brand or Change©
by Rick Alcantara
Get employees to adopt your organization's mission, brand or change and you'll be a hero. Prove the value of your communication efforts and you'll likely see an increase in funding, staffing and other resources. The key to success is an integrated, holistic approach to communications that should include your corporate Intranet site.
The interactive, self-paced, easy-to-access nature of the medium lends itself well to communicating ideologies and teaching best practices. You can use it to align policies with practices, increase staff interaction, recognize achievement, humanize senior management, explain your product development process, and more.
Before you can reach these lofty targets, you must determine exactly what your site is designed to accomplish. You'll need to identify not only whom you are trying to reach and what you want them to do, but also how closely the site aligns your short-term communication objectives with your long-term business goals. Most importantly, you'll want to find out how you can best measure your results.
Before you write any content, design any pages or plan any new technology, conduct some research and develop a strategic plan for your site. Use formative research to uncover the following:
- The company's one, three and five-year communication and business plans
- Employee access, use and faith in the company Intranet
- Current employee awareness of your corporate mission, brand standards or change initiative
- Available resources needed to support the site (content authors, designers, developers, etc.)
- What employees need from the company do to their jobs more effectively
- Functionality of the site (design, navigation and technology)
- How your company wants to be perceived
- How effectively the current site (if you have one) is communicating key initiatives
Once you have defined the essence of the organization and the scope of your challenge, draft a strategic plan to allocate resources, revamp the architecture, create a design, craft the messages and launch the site.
In your plan, include steps for conducting evaluative research. The information will enable you to quantify your results to the bean counters. You can measure several outcomes:
- Level of employee awareness of key information
- The tone, frequency and quality of user feedback
- Adoption level of changes in technology, policy or procedure
- Employee impressions of the Intranet site
- Change in call levels to IT support, HR benefits, etc.
Some final thoughts:
If your company says that it supports certain guiding principles, use them to drive the content, design, navigation and technology employed across your Intranet.
Prominently display your mission and brand standards on the site, and explain them.
Feature articles on changes. Use context to explain the personal, team and company benefits behind the changes.
Demonstrate that you practice what you preach. Fill your site with examples of employees embodying the corporate brand or mission.
Finally, align your Intranet messages and design with your print, video and other communication channels.
Rick Alcantara is founder and principal of Tara Communications LLC, a strategic public relations, marketing and Internet firm that helps organizations plan, implement and measure their communications. You can reach him at 856.740.0312.
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