The intranet is the trusted location for organisation news so it’s important to create engagement and a community within your business. There are many ways to support creating good content and as a Marketing or Internal Communications team, you may already have a comms plan to keep on top of the scheduling.
A lot of the content that comes from a business is typically very formal and focused on business updates and change within the organisation, however, the impact of informal news can enhance engagement and intranet usage. It’s the informal news we see that makes people come back to the intranet and start leaving comments & liking posts.
In this article, we’re going to go into some fun informal ways you can fill up your news hero. These news series are things you can do repeatedly, the idea is that the articles can be templated and used across multiple departments or different team members to start generating fun content that your colleagues can start looking forward to seeing regularly:
Introducing Articles
These are not only great for introducing new joiners to the business but existing staff members as well. If you look at it from a new joiner perspective, it would be great to see articles on current colleagues so you can get to know people and find common interests.
Internally, we provide our new joiners with a template to fill out which will be published on our intranet upon joining and then after publishing, they get to nominate someone to write the next introducing article (ensuring one hasn’t been written before).
Personal Achievements
I love the idea of running competitions from the intranet to increase engagement and a sense of involvement across the business. It’s always great to open the floor up in business decisions to give people a platform to share their opinion. Some examples I can think of are naming meeting rooms or something much smaller like voting on a graphic or design from a Marketing team who are torn on a decision.
Polls
I love the idea of running competitions from the intranet to really increase engagement and a sense of involvement across the business. It’s always great to open the floor up in business decisions to give people a platform to share their opinion. Some examples I can think of is naming meeting rooms or something much smaller like voting on a graphic or design from a Marketing team who are torn on a decision.
Competitions
These can be great fun and should be highlighted on the intranet to register interest in the competition initially but to also keep people informed. I’ve seen annual tournaments and league tables created for sports such as golf, indoor football, table tennis, running, steps, fantasy football & baking to name a few. All events that mostly take place outside of work of course but are advocated by the business. There is a great company I’ve worked with that in a similar fashion to Harry Potter, will place new joiners into a “House” and during their annual company events, these house teams will compete in a series of challenges which demonstrate teamwork & help people get to know other colleagues who may work in separate departments.
Archived Stuff
Or commonly known as “Throwbacks” is a great nostalgic news article that can be shared that also provides context on certain decisions or historic events within the business. It could be old offices, old layouts or old graphics/business names. Grabbing things from the “Archive” is a great way to start engagement and comments on the post. “I remember when…”
Review Corner
This has become very popular in recent times and helped during the pandemic when WFH first came apparent. Writing a review is for anyone to compile and on any subject, you can make it specific to certain categories or open it up for anyone to review anything. It not only helps share opinions and provide recommendations but is also a great way for people to get more of their personalities across. I’ve seen reviews being shared on books, films, tv series, food recipes and restaurants.
Community Events
#SupportLocal, a scheme we've been running to support local businesses, has seen an uptake in the type of news our comms team is sharing, and they’ve gone down very well. It keeps everyone informed on what’s happening locally and can help provide ideas for stuff to do on the weekend with family and friends, as well as ideas for incentive prizes and company events.
Pet Series
An introduction article for a dog or a cat followed by a series of cute photos? How can that not be received well? 😊 As you can imagine, these types of articles get lots of engagement! The more photos – the better! There are other types of articles you can do around pets, I have also seen a “guess the owner” type article which similarly, still uses lots of imagery focused on a little furry friend.
Guess The...
Guessing games/articles are a great way to get engagement but also start little competitions which can be rewarded. Guess the owner, guess the desk and we have also seen a “guess where I am hiding” before which usually gets lots of laughs.
Now that you have some ideas to fill up your news hero, pick the ideas you like most and start working on your first article. With these ideas, a lot of them can be shared and generated by other content authors within the business. What you could also do to start things off, is run a poll and let your colleagues choose which types of news content they would like to see – If “Pet Series” receives the most votes, you know where to start.
Once you have your series templates defined, build them into your content plans to maintain a steady stream of news to your intranet.