Soliciting Content for Internal Communications Vehicles

Some corporate communications departments face the unending task of soliciting articles and bulletins for the employee newsletter. If there isn’t an existing cadre of regular correspondents, they have to try to build a network of contributors.

Following up on my latest post about offering prizes for employee contributors, let’s look at employee participation for a wide range of communication vehicles.

Intranet info areas, internal blogs, brown bag lunch info sessions, wikis, newsletters … they’re all vehicles for helping employees understand the industry you’re in, your products, clients, and priorities.

If managers and line employees don’t see these tools as a valuable way to get information out, and to receive feedback, how do you kickstart the process?

Don’t sweat if the late adopters haven’t tried a new method of communicating. Let the early adopters do their thing, while working behind the scenes to drum up as much activity as you can. This involves finding people or projects that need to get a real discussion happening, and making it as easy as possible to post something.

A blog, newsletter or discussion area will bog down if you’re constantly dragging people into discussions they don’t want to have. But even for meaningful information exchanges, communication vehicles will die on the vine if you don’t do some coaxing, cajoling and bribery to get things started and keep them going.

If a business unit recognizes a real benefit to having an internal audience to test ideas on, they will want to use your communications tools. If not, no amount of pestering will get them to use it and keep using it.

Find the units in your organization that really need to get others informed about what they’re up to. Show them how participation will help. Don’t ask for a long-term commitment. Just get them to provide some content for the short term. If the medium being used works for them, make sure they know how well it worked, and entice them to do more communicating. Use them as a positive examples when encouraging other units to get involved.

Your primary goal should not be to make your communication vehicle successful.

Your goal should be to help make the organization successful. Keep that in mind when deciding who to approach and what kind of discussion and information sharing you want to encourage.

Photo via iStockphoto by Ivar Teunissen.

See my recent post on IBM’s internal podcasting initiative.

Tags: business, corporate, internal communications, newsletters, blogs, engagement, communicating, goals, sharing