Welcome to Day 2 of our Strategic Storytelling & Writing for Internal Communications virtual conference! Our chairperson will revisit the biggest takeaways from Day 1 and preview the case studies and panel ahead. 

In late 2024 Clemson set out to turn News.Clemson.Edu, a large and decentralized storytelling site, into something readers would stay on, without forcing a widely distributed network of communicators to relearn the WordPress back end. What followed was a year of content architecture, more flexible templates and a stronger framework for photo, graphic and video storytelling, plus a late discovery that the new layout editor had solved almost none of the accessibility problems, which sent a small team back to the beginning to test, repair, and turn accessibility into a shared publishing standard.

Key Takeaways:

• How to rebuild a decentralized news site around categories, topics and tags without disrupting the people who publish to it every day
• Why a more flexible front end can quietly create accessibility debt, and how to catch it before it ships
• The measurement framework Clemson uses to compare the old and new sites on readership, engagement, search traffic, story clicks and video performance

Values statements on a wall do very little, because culture is shaped by the accumulation of everyday content showing what an organization actually rewards. This case study looks at how one team moved culture storytelling out of the annual campaign and into regular channels, and what changed in their engagement measures as a result. 

Key Takeaways: 

• Translate abstract values into concrete stories employees recognize from their own workday 

• Weave culture messaging into regular channels instead of a once a year campaign 

• Reach distributed and frontline employees who miss culture built on office rituals 

When dozens of people across an organization write internal content, quality drifts and employees stop trusting what lands in their inbox. This case study covers how one team introduced shared templates, a storytelling framework, and a light editorial standard that non writers could actually follow. 

Key Takeaways: 

• Build templates and frameworks that raise the floor for writers across the organization 

• Use readership data and employee feedback to refine clarity, not just report open rates 

• Hold a consistent standard without flattening individual voice out of the content 

Internal communicators are writing for shorter attention, more channels, and audiences who compare every message against the content they consume everywhere else. This forward looking discussion brings practitioners together on where the craft is heading and what they are investing in to keep up. 

Key Takeaways: 

• Identify the writing skills that matter most for the teams being built now 

• Prioritize channels and formats that still earn employee attention 

• Prove that strong internal writing changes behavior, not just readership numbers