Welcome to ALI's 8th Annual Strategic Internal Communication- Summer.
Our Conference Chair will go over a few details and kick things off.

Then you'll have a chance to say hello, share your challenges and get to know a little about your IC peers. You are encouraged to turn on your camera to join in on the fun and interaction.

You’ve just joined a great company, but one that went through major restructuring last year. Or, you’re part of a start-up. You alone are the communication “team.” Wondering how you can build a communication function that adds value to the business bottom line? You can do it!

In this session, learn how to:

• Make a positive impact, quickly
• Get creative with no budget or resources
• Gain senior leadership trust, leading to career and team growth opportunities

There’s no going back to the working world we knew pre-pandemic – so how can we simultaneously embrace that reality and effectively fit physical offices back into the employee experience?

During this session, you’ll learn:

• How to create a framework for your organization’s future of work
• Ways to embrace experimentation and feedback at every stage
• Techniques to make the re-introduction of offices a galvanizing moment for employees

Measuring the effectiveness of communication isn’t enough anymore. Senior management is asking for more direct correlation of the money spent on communication with the business outcomes resulting from it—how it increases revenue or reduces expenses. This workshop will show many examples of how other organizations have calculated the return on investment (ROI) for internal communication—including government entities.

This workshop will help you build measurements into your communication planning process in a way that you can later calculate the return on your organization's communication investment.

Specifically, we'll cover how to:

• Identify the current knowledge and attitude messages leading to undesirable actions and the ideal ones needed to achieve behavior changes
• Conduct a variety of measures on messages, channels, and outcomes to see how effective your communications are in contributing to the change
• Calculate the return on investment (ROI) for specific communications, and even estimate the potential return with your management before you present them with the budget you’re recommending

We are still facing many uncertainties in our work environments. Remote work is blending with returns to the office, creating a hybrid work environment that needs continuous engagement opportunities.

In this session, you will learn:

1. How to use survey results to plan video content that tells a story while building community and boosting employee morale.

2. How to drive employee engagement during the creative process.

3. How to share engagement results with leadership to influence culture.

Working from home has its perks, but it can feel isolating. Ensuring employees feel seen—and appreciated—is critical to their personal success and the success of your organization.

During this session, you’ll learn:

• How St. Jude transformed a much-loved service award program to not only be virtual but meaningful.
• Creative ways to leverage social networks to boost recognition and appreciation (they were built for this!)
• How to strategically share employee stories to keep employees connected to each other and the company mission.

Get answers to your internal communications technology questions!

What’s available and how can it help you better communicate across your organization?

Discussion Topics:

• Communicators working better within their organization
• Digital workplace/engagement/experience transformation
• Bringing people back together (in office and hybrid)

Join Simpplr for a 10 minute demo of today’s modern intranet purpose-built for internal communicators.

See how you can:

• Easily manage and update your intranet with no need for IT or coding
• Align employees and leadership with centralized communication
• Segment and personalize communications by role, function or location
• Track and measure content consumption and intranet usage

In today's socially conscious world, businesses of all sizes are proudly taking a public stance on societal issues. When Mayo Clinic announced a $100 million commitment to fight racism, a robust plan was needed to engage and communicate with the organization's 70,000 staff. Join us for a compelling and timely case study.

• Learn how to complement and build support for your organization's social commitments.
• Ground staff engagement efforts with company values.
• Offer your employees options to grow, contribute and share their own commitments.

Creating videos of your own has never been easier. Now, everyone has instant access to filming, editing and publishing, but just because you post a video doesn’t mean it will be successful.

During this session you will learn:

• How to know if video is the right medium
• The secret to great video storytelling
• Tips to keep your script short and snappy and your audience engaged

Today is a heavy time for our employees' mental health, and companies must pay attention to the needs of their workforce. Our position as internal communicators puts us in the perfect place to discover what employees are thinking and feeling, then work backward to raise specific awareness and address their needs.

In this necessary talk, Kelsey Buckholtz, author and Senior Manager of Product Communication at Janssen Pharmaceuticals, and Marissa Reale, Senior Communicator at Local Wisdom, share their experience and tips for launching engaging events focused on the mental well-being of employees.

A few nuggets of wisdom you'll gain from this session include how to:

• Gain buy-in from stakeholders
• Identify authentic topics and engaging speakers
• Collaborate with leaders, departments, and ERG groups
• Keep the content focused
• Promote and generate interest leading up to the event
• Define what success looks like

Communicating to employees on behalf of your Executive Leadership team (ELT) can be a complex challenge for many reasons. How do you create engaging, relevant, and timely communications, with a consistent voice, while aligning to your larger communications strategies and modalities?

In this session we’ll discuss how:

• Humanizing your ELT for your employees helps build connections and trust
• Using all the resources at your fingertips aids in developing engaging content
• Delivering content in different mediums and channels can drive increased engagement with your messages
• Addressing change management in a proactive, positive manner empowers employees’ future success

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 Michael’s presentation, learn what leaders can both do and say to create and sustain a highly- engaged workforce. Also, hear how three basic principles of effective communication can empower leaders to accomplish this:

• Mission: Tie the work people do to the reason (or purpose) your organization exists
• Message: Ensure leaders’ external messages are consistent with the organization’s internal value system
• Media: Use modern forms of technology to maximize opportunities to make authentic connections with staff

These tools and tips will help you create a workplace where people love coming to work and perform at their best.”