Join your internal communications peers for coffee & communications with our #ALIComms partner, PoliteMail.

Everybody’s striving to get employees to consume essential emails and newsletters. If only there were techniques you could apply today and see immediate results.

In fact, there are.

This free guide from PoliteMail and Ragan Communications reveals the six steps you can take today to improve your email effectiveness. What words should you use? How long should your email be? Should you include images or links? How many? Get the answers now.

You will learn:

• The best times and days to send emails.
• Why you should link to longer content.
• How to jettison corporate-speak to address your workforce in genuine ways.
• Verbiage you can cut to instantly improve your emails.
• Whether videos and images help or hurt your message engagement.
• The best way to ensure that employees open and read your emails. (Hint: It has to do with segmentation.)
• How much space you have at the top of an email—whether mobile or desktop—to grab readers’ attention.
• How to boost your employees’ engagement with your emails.

We welcome you to the top-rated 7th Annual Strategic Internal Communications - East conference gone virtual!

Join in to go over a few notes on how to maximize your virtual training experience, an outline of the agenda for today, and navigate where to find resources.

Welcome to ALI's 7th Annual Strategic Internal Communications - East virtual conference. Back by popular demand, we bring you Game On Nation to facilitate this year's conference while adding the element of play to enhance your learning and networking experience over the next 2 days.

As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to have unprecedented effects on the world as we know it, Newell Brands is closely monitoring the situation and making decisions in the best interest of our employees, consumers, customers, and communities.

As we respond to the ongoing situation, we are doing everything possible to deliver excellent support to our partners and delight our consumers while prioritizing the health and wellbeing of our employees.

Hear from Newell Brands and discover how they ensured transparent and regular communications during this pandemic, including tactics to help you support frontline and office-based employees.

Many of us face insurmountable odds as communicators. We do so much for our businesses and audiences: inform, educate, train, connect, engage, make compliant, keep productive, and more. As internal communications and employee experience are relatively new functions, many of us have small teams to manage this onslaught.

Faced with inadequate channels, an intranet that wasn’t being used, and a disparate audience –  Alkermes needed to learn how internal communications had to adjust for a remote workforce of 650 field employees.

At Alkermes they knew that successful business results come from the right combination of communication team members working within the best-fitting digital channels for audiences. In this insightful talk, learn about the journey of launching Alks2GO, the flagship, award-winning, mobile Intranet that’s gotten rave reviews from staff, and high engagement from leadership with 89% of top performers visiting the app every day.

You’ll walk out with an overview of the Alks2GO journey, which includes tips to help you:

• Choose the right communication technologies
• Architect and design your intranet
• Create and execute a launch communications campaign
• Build a pipeline of content and editorial calendar
• Tips and lessons learned to meet employees where they are at – and to make it fun along the way!

Details coming soon!

It has been a year of uncertainty, crisis, and learning a new way of work.

During this session, you'll be split into smaller groups where you'll have the opportunity to discuss your challenges, but more importantly your successes, with your peers.

We ask that each group choose someone to take notes of all the ideas shared. Each group will submit these via chat in addition to the One-Drive folder for reference post-conferenc.

Take this time to grab something to eat and catch up on work. Feel free to catch up on things alone or if you'd like to grab something to eat and join a group - we'll have a breakout room available for you to continue discusssions.

Chat will remain open if you have any questions, comments, or concerns before we resume.

We've got a full afternoon and no time to slow down.
This session will help shake things up and energize you after lunch.

Details coming soon!

Sponsored by PoliteMail

Creating and executing a new communications strategy and campaign is no small task. Months of hard work go into developing your strategy and planning out every detail of your campaign to making sure it’s solid. Unfortunately, COVID-19 had other plans, and for many everything changed overnight.

Learn how Kroger, the U.S.’s largest grocer rolled out a new internal email campaign to communicate with all stores across the country. With data collected using PoliteMail, Kroger was able to make informed decisions about their emails to evolve their communications strategy throughout the course of the pandemic and beyond.

In this session you will learn:

• How Kroger responded to the COVID-19 crisis with target and timely email communication
• What data was collected using PoliteMail to influence decision making and evolve a strategy
• What changes were made as a resulted of data trends
• How cadence affects email readership and engagement
• Plans for the path going forward

Sponsored by theEMPLOYEEapp

In a short period of time Avera Helath was able to identify their need for new communication technology, received leadership buy-in, and deployed their first employee app.

This session will showcase proven tactics and strategies to help you identify and implement new technologies with the creation of a clear plan to help you do so, including how to:

• Work with your employees to understand the shortcomings in your existing internal communications tactics
• Make a successful business case to leadership for investing in new tools and technologies to better communicate with and engage all employees
• Quickly move from vendor selection to successful deployment
• Develop a content approach that meets both the needs and wants of your employees

Discover how NC State Poole College of Management, a young and innovative business school that has never had a formal internal communications strategy over its 25 years of history, develop an internal communications strategy that has proven to be effective.

This session will walk you through a nonlinear process of establishing systematic internal communications through organizational research, strategizing, planning, and implementation. If you don’t know where to start or are looking for examples of lessons learned, you will benefit from this session.

Learn how to:
 

• Understand internal communications as an interdisciplinary management function
• Communicate with your employees where they are
• Know what leadership wants to achieve through internal communications
• Set up a successful strategy and specific action items

Having employees work from home comes with its own set of unique challenges.

So how do you make sure employees are engaged and motivated even when they are away from their traditional work environment?

This forward-thinking panel will provide you with proven techniques and strategies to help you seize the opportunity and think long-term.

You've covered a lot today. Take this time to ask any final questions or share 'a-ha' moments with the group.

Grab a cocktail, beer, wine, or drink of choice and join us for some fun!

This demonstration and conversation will address the communications and employee engagement needs of the 3 billion frontline workers and deskless employees.

theEMPLOYEEapp was created by professionals with decades of communications and HR experience to address the challenges organizations face in communicating with a dispersed, frontline and deskless workforce through the use of mobile technology.  Our solution wasn’t developed by a group of tech folks thinking they understood the issues that exist — we actually have lived and consulted on them.

With the employee as the focus of our development, theEMPLOYEEapp is more than just a newsfeed. It is a holistic internal communication solution that allows frontline workers and deskless employees to have fast and easy access to the information, documents and tools they need to succeed in their work.

Learn more about why theEMPLOYEEapp is the leading solution for internal communication and engagement for frontline workers and deskless employees.

Creating a work environment where people feel supported, appreciated, and motivated isn’t rocket science; but it does take work. And it starts at the top of your organization.

During this session, learn what leaders can both do and say to create and sustain a highly-engaged workforce. Also, see how using three simple strategies can create a workplace where people love coming to work and perform at their best.

Communicating with employees during a crisis can be a challenge, especially when you have a lot of vital information you need to get across. It’s even more difficult when the crisis is an unknown virus affecting the entire world.

Ochsner Health is a 16+ hospital health system across the Gulf South that spent the month of April as one of the biggest COVID-19 hotspots in the country.

In this session, you will learn how Ochsner Health used effective and timely communications to instill a sense of calm and trust among its 26,000 employees during a national pandemic.

Many organizations and individuals are in the midst of a long-overdue “awakening,” realizing just HOW MUCH work needs to be done to dismantle systems of inequality and racism in the workplace -- but many are struggling to know where to get started.

This is your chance to have some real talk with a panel of experts who have devoted much of their careers to helping organizations fight racism, address systemic inequalities, and adopt antiracist policies and processes at work. They’ll share their insights and recommendations, and answer your questions on how to make meaningful progress within your own organizations. The panel includes:

Moderated by: Ann Mellinger, CEO, Brilliant Ink

Panelists include:

Michele Heyward, Founder, PositiveHire
Dean Delpeache, Sr. Manager of Talent Acquisition, Fiix Software
Neelam Chand, Senior Vice President, Diversity & Inclusion Officer, Zions Bank
Dorianne St. Fleur, Racial Equity Consultant & Coach, Dorianne St Fleur Consulting

Details coming soon!

One of our greatest opportunities as internal communications professionals is to tap into the power of data. While our colleagues in Marketing have long used data-driven insights to set and refine strategies, communicators have lagged behind. Now, as internal communications tools and resources become increasingly sophisticated, we’re gaining access to more and more powerful data about our people's communications preferences and behaviors. But it’s easy to get overwhelmed by the volume of data and how to pull out the most important insights.

In this session, discover how to gather data from storytelling and apply it to internal communications to help you pull out key insights from your measurement data and present them in a visually compelling way. The session will cover specific tips and techniques for:

• Distilling and translating data - from newsletter opens to open-ended survey comments - into actionable insights.
• Choosing the right kinds of visuals to illustrate different types of data points.
• Tailoring your data story for a leadership audience, highlighting the information that matters most.
• Using your measurement story to demonstrate how you’re moving the needle on employee engagement, and to get more resources, budget, and support!

You will learn strategies for analyzing and extracting key insights from common sources of internal communications data, including email and newsletter clicks/opens and survey responses, as well as how to:

• Use different types of visualizations to illustrate various types of data and tell a compelling story to key stakeholders
• Gain insights into the best ways to advance from simply presenting data, to sharing analysis, recommendations, and next steps
• Collect meaningful quantitative data from places you’d least expect - without necessarily investing in expensive software and tracking tools

Details coming soon!

Returning to regular work is imminent for many employees across the world. There are the essentials to consider this return is properly handled, from rethinking the physical workspace to maintaining safe practices and intensified cleaning of the space.

But how do you address employee morale after such a shakeup? Chances are you'll have some employees back in the office as others remaining working remotely, how do you ensure your communication and tactics reach both properly?

In this final panel session, our IC leaders hope to ease your mind and provide you with tactics you can start implementing now to make your return to work a success.

Panelists Include:

• • • • Laura Lee Kong, GM - Communications & Employee Engagement, Flight Operations, Delta Air Lines
      • Kathy Eichlin, Head, Internal Communications, Syngenta North America
      • Elizabeth Mull, Director, Employee Communications, TEGNA
      • David Pitre, President, Davis & Company

Our virtual conference moderator will outline the top 5 things you can do right now as this virtual conference ends to refresh and enhance your internal communications strategy.