The second day of Paine Publishing’s 2020 Summit on the Future of Communications Measurement, October 7th, was devoted to measuring the impact of CSR and CSA on internal and external communications. It featured presentations by Cindy Villafranca and Rachel Forrest of Southwest Airlines, and Emily York of BeamSuntory. See this article for an introduction to the 2020 Summit. Visit this page to view a recording of Day 3 of the Summit.
Cindy Villafranca and Rachel Forrest of Southwest Airlines:
Measuring community citizenship
Day Two began with Southwest Airlines’ Head of Communications Measurement and Analytics Cindy Villafranca, joined by Communications Lead Rachel Forrest. At Southwest, they explained, citizenship is baked into the brand. Their purpose is “To do right by our people, our performance, and the planet,” and they accomplish it by giving back to communities, the planet, and employees.
Villafranca emphasized that, at Southwest, citizenship isn’t a campaign or a response to COVID; everything they do is approached through that “citizenship” lens. “We call it, ‘Acting with a servant’s heart,’ ” explained Villafranca, adding that a key outcome of that philosophy is that everyone can be “fearlessly authentic.”
Many metrics
To measure all that community citizenship requires a variety of different techniques, including:
- Total number of hours employees spend volunteering in the community. (This amounted to some 200,000-last year.)
- The number of “tickets for time” which employees accumulate by volunteering. (Employees receive one complementary round-trip ticket for every 40 hours of volunteer time, and can then donate or give them to friends, family, or their favorite charity.)
- The number of tickets donated to charitable organizations
- Number of hours employees spend in training and education
- Customer satisfaction (JD Power)
- SouthWest’s reputation score, as measured through RepTrack. With particular emphasis on the CSR dimensions: clear vision, supports good causes, positive societal impact, environmentally responsible, rewards employees fairly, employee well-being, equal opportunities, open and transparent, behaves ethically, does business fairly.
- The level of engagement with CSR related content
- The number of awards the company earns
- Human content analysis of themes in comments in social media and community forums
- The number of students that pilots interact with and mentor
- The number of online ticket sales attributed (through Google Analytics Tagging and their CSM program) to comms
What is essential to this measurement effort, Villafranca stressed, was that “it’s not just one team measuring in isolation. It is a cross-functional team for all the efforts.”
Southwest’s most important KPIs are:
- Ticket sales
- On-time performance
- Baggage handling
- Employee retention and hiring
Each one is tied back to some element of the communications program, either through tagging, employee and customer service, or internal data.
Emily York of Beam Suntory:
Metrics to measure during a pandemic
Next up was Emily York, Senior Director, Corporate Communications at Beam Suntory. She gave us a first-person account of what it’s like to manage and measure communications in the middle of a pandemic.
Beam Suntory is the world leader in bourbon, whisky and scotch, and sells a lot of other spirits as well. Its purpose is Growing for Good: to grow business to create sustainability and inspire human connections. But as Emily put it, “maintaining that in the middle of a pandemic became tricky, both for doing business and on employees.”
As it did for Southwest, the pandemic had an out-sized impact on Beam Suntory customers. Bars, restaurants, airports, and events are key stakeholders for Beam Suntory, and when they ground to a halt in March, they had to adapt to a number of unexpected and unplanned consequences.
Principles to guide their purpose
They quickly established five core principles that would guide all of their response:
- Protect our people
- Secure our supply chain
- Give back to society
- Win in the new normal
- Anticipate long-term trends
York explained that they took a “people first” approach. They made sure senior leadership was always visible, and concern for employees was always a priority. They were fortunate to have visibility into what had unfolded in China, so they were able to learn from their Asian colleagues. They took lessons from case studies from around the world to establish best practices.
Act, measure, refine, and improve
Another priority was to continuously reinforce and express confidence in the corporate culture. They did this with weekly messages from senior leadership and a biweekly newsletter, just to ensure that all the information they needed to get out, really did get out. Town halls, which used to be quarterly affairs, became monthly events. They produced 13 newsletters between July and September, tracking open rates and engagement. They redesigned their newsletter in midsummer in response to their metrics.
They also celebrated their culture and their products with content, like virtual happy hours and socially distant ways to celebrate holidays.
For internal communications they used Yammer to run engagement programs. One was #spiritsup, a morale booster to check in on employees to find out what they were doing to, yes, keep their spirits up. They also launched a #traderescue effort to help displaced restaurant workers, and #dailyskol, to promote engaging video toasts. They used Pigeonhole, an online platform to collect comments and answer employee questions during virtual town halls so employees could vote up things they were interested in.
Cross-functional cooperation was key
Communications was just as important to operations, since now all “normal” protocols had to change. To ensure operational continuity, the comms team had to listen to people and partners, as well as to elevate health and safety messages across the company. It was not without its challenges, York admitted, especially given the political nature of mask wearing.
The need to social distance in factories around the world required a major rethink of everything in their business. Enhancing benefits, providing greater flexibility, more time off, and, especially, personal wellness support were all part of the weekly messaging to stay healthy and safe.
External audiences were equally important
Communications couldn’t ignore the stakeholder groups outside the company, including industry partners and the communities in which they operated, all of which were incredibly hard hit by the pandemic and equally important.
One of their first actions was to start up a new production line to produce hand sanitizer for health care workers in the communities in which they operated. They also increased their matching gift program and offered it worldwide. They implemented specific programs for the bar and restaurant industry, and expanded allowances for volunteer time off so employees that wanted to donate time could.
Pandemic metrics
They tracked and reported on the usual things, like increase in followers and engagement. They also looked for substantive signs that their efforts were working, such as the amplification of key messages, and the effectiveness of their support of the Black Lives Matter movement.
To make all this a little more challenging, a couple of potential reputational crises were on the horizon. The first was when they won an award for “Whiskey of the Year,” but the creator of that award was found to use language offensive to women. To deal with this, Beam Suntory “publicly distanced themselves… all but rejecting [the] award.”
Then came reports of a dramatic increase overall in people’s consumption of alcohol. Beam Suntory’s actual sales were down, in part because of the closure of most of their larger customers in the bar, restaurant, and travel industries. Also, with diminished capacity in the factory, production declined. As York explained, “We wanted to promote responsible consumption,” but they still needed to market the product.
So, they put out recipes for individual drinks rather than large batches. While they were on the forefront of cocktails-to-go legislation, they also worked to ensure that the regulations would promote personal responsibility, and not allow sales of huge vats of cocktails.
Perhaps the most important metric in all of this was the sentiment of employees. They conducted an employee pulse survey mid-way through these efforts and found numbers that are almost unheard of even in normal times: 95% felt supported, 92% knew what to focus on, and 91% had enough info.
York’s lessons were straightforward:
- Be clear about principles used to frame decisions;
- Keep leadership present, visible, and empathetic; and
- Use Comms to tell stories internally and externally. ∞
