This piece originally appeared as a free article in the Early November edition of The Measurement Advisor newsletter.
Years ago my company was asked to develop a system to measure the effectiveness of internal communications for a very large banking institution. They wanted us to analyze internal emails to see what people were doing with them, e.g., storing, opening, reading, or discarding.
At the time, finding an internal communications measurement tool was a challenge. Valdis Krebs at Orgnet was the only person even remotely trying to map and analyze internal communications (and that system was a bit too complex for our client’s taste). So, we designed a manual process whereby we would be registered as company employees and copied on corporate internal comms emails and any replies. About one week later the company was taken over and the project died, but the experience got me intrigued about measuring internal comms.
Today, organizations like Bananatag have automated the process so you can track which emails are opened, which attachments are read and where, when, and how people are reading your internal communications. They bill themselves as “the MailChimp for internal communications.” Since I love MailChimp’s analytics, I was intrigued, so I grilled Chris Wagner and Andrew Benes last week at the IABC Canada West Conference.
Turns out it’s a pretty neat system that can actually do most of what we suggested to our client a decade ago: Measure engagement, report in real time on what content employees are engaging in, and enable you to export the data into Excel for further analysis. They don’t yet offer the A/B testing capabilities of MailChimp, but they assure me that they’re working on it.
So if you want more accountability for your internal communications, Bananatag is a terrific place to start. Congrats to Bananatag, our Measurement Tool of the Month.
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