Effective internal communication benchmarks?

March 9, 2008 | Comments (1), | Categories: Practical how to |

It may be impossible to measure effectiveness of your communication

My previous note on “Spam from Corporate Communications” triggered some comments and questions from around the world.

Rachel McAlpine picked up on it and I put a comment on her blog “Content that makes people happy” saying that 90% of the time people want local news. That’s what they find relevant. But that the trick is getting the other 10 % right.

Of course, the percentage varies, and also depends on what you consider “common” and what you consider “local” or “specific”. Those are words full of meaning to most people, and can set off long discussions!

I received an email from a senior content manager who said he was struggling with the issues I raised and says ” I find it difficult to measure the effectiveness of our communications and channels. While we have internal benchmarks, I would like to measure our effectiveness against external companies. I am curious if you have, or are aware of any bench mark studies. I would be interested in click rates, effectiveness of the communication and contribution to our strategic priorities.”

I was also recently asked by an intranet manager in a global company if I had any idea what “click rate” or “watch rate!” to expect when a new corporate video is published. In their case, the videos are published both on the web site and the intranet, as well as being project from screens in the lobby and around the organisation. Good strategy, but that makes it nearly impossible to know how many employees have actually seen it.

The short answer is No, I don’t have any benchmark studies and would love to know if anyone out there does. Please share them with us here or send me an email.

Don’t be afraid to involve people, transparently

However, I do have some suggestions as to how to keep employees informed and feeling involved:

  1. Be sure to include at least one question about your intranet in your annual employee “climate” survey. This lets you build from a baseline.
  2. Consider doing a short online survey to find out whether or not people know the strategic orientations of the company, and where they get that information. See if it is from internal sources (managers, newsletters, intranets, colleagues, etc.) or external (press clippings, TV, ..)
  3. Do regular quick polls on your intranet to assess user opinions about different subjects including strategy.
  4. Do not forget to include employee usage of your web site (in addition to the intranet itself) when you consider how employees get corporate information and messages.

Candid camera?

If you are really brave, do “candid camera” or “live news” style interviews one day in the canteen, by walking around with a mike and a video camera asking people to tell you what the company strategy is in their opinion. Then publish it on the intranet.

I’m half joking. You might get some really interesting answers, or you might get fired!

One Response to “Effective internal communication benchmarks?”

  1. Glenn Says:
    March 14th, 2008 at 3:30 am

    Our read rate or click rate is around 6%-10% depending on the subject. Articles about human interest get the most hits. Articles about security and technology are much lower. We employee about 130,000 employees. We publish about 6 articles a day and publish them to the homepage of our intranet.

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