Poppulo and FWI combine to change the game in employee communications

As you might be aware by now, we are very happy and excited that Poppulo has combined with Four Winds Interactive (FWI), the leading provider of enterprise digital signage software and office space management solutions for flexible desk and conference room bookings.

By coming together, we are creating a global employee communications powerhouse for the new and radically changed world of work. Not only are we a totally natural fit for our creation of a truly unmatched omni-channel communications platform, the vision, values and cultures of both companies are also very much aligned.

But first, we’d like to take a moment to provide some context around what we are seeing in employee communications, and why we made this decision to combine the efforts of Poppulo and FWI to meet this market’s needs.

In short, the modern office environment has changed greatly, and how we communicate with our increasingly dispersed teams must change with it. Due to the fundamental nature of the changes over the past year, there are clear benefits to an omni-channel employee communications approach, given the need to deliver information in both a timely and effective way, regardless of where employees are working from.

Together, this solution is what Poppulo and FWI will provide.

As the corporate office morphs from a sea of assigned desks and full-time in-person work to be more of a venue for collaboration designed to enable a hybrid workforce, businesses need to adapt how they will handle employee communications to be sure they can reach everyone according to their individual needs. 

Some employees will only make use of the corporate office sporadically, some more consistently, and some will never return to the office at all. This flexibility in the new office environment is a great thing, as it prioritizes effectiveness of the individual and the needs of the task at hand, but also brings with it a necessity to evolve how employee communications are conducted if businesses want to be sure they are equipping their employees with the information they need to be successful.

When the world transitioned to working away from the corporate office at the beginning of the pandemic, it became immediately apparent how challenging communicating with a large workforce would be. We saw an increased amount of whole company email blasts, an increased amount of full team functional meetings, and an increase in the volume of communications being sent overall. 

But was the increased volume effective? It is likely that some people found value in some of it, but for many, this increase led to more time spent sifting through the volume to find relevant information. As we all know, relevance and timeliness are king in effective communication.

On a more fundamental level, let’s take a step back and look at the state of employee communications pre-COVID. It’s our view that even before the pandemic increased the pressure on employee communications, there were already serious challenges to communications efficacy.

• The sheer volume of communications being pushed to employees is staggering—very few are taking the time to sort through the mountain of untargeted and consequently irrelevant email that is being pushed to them.
• There are so many channels employees are asked to monitor with so many different departments pushing messages to them, it’s hard to keep up—and few are trying to.
• Much of the communications being pushed are generalized to meet many sets of needs across large groups of people—requiring employees to sift through the volume of emails to find the specific information.
• With so many generalized messages across a disjointed array of channels often communicators are adding to the noise issue. Those that are technology connected often suffer from too much communication and those that are not connected, the harder to reach, suffer the opposite.

Consider these challenges, and now add to them a distributed workforce where some are in the office and some are not. Add to that a reimagined office environment, where functional teams are mixed together across various office locations based on the tasks they are currently working on. The communications headwinds just became a lot stronger—this is the present situation we find ourselves in.

So, how can businesses effectively communicate with their employees in this new environment? We need to focus on hitting the following targets.

1. Employ a set of communications tools that are easy to use, and allows the communicator to specifically target which audience they plan to communicate with based on attributes like location, language, business unit, title, and function.
2. Create the ability to engage any target audience across multiple channels to ensure that the message is received and internalized, without having to switch between communications tools to do so
3. Provide the ability to measure the impact of communications efforts so they can be improved as data indicates what is effective and what is not

Enter Poppulo. As you know, Poppulo was one of the first companies to focus specifically on making employee communications effective. We enable enterprise leaders to create the clarity every employee needs to embrace change, and drive business results.

With respect to the challenges above in creating successful employee communications, We created a cloud-based application that delivers in four key areas:

1. Personalization. Messages can be precisely personalized to the particular audience grouping, across business unit, geography, and many other dimensions to create the necessary clarity and meaning to drive business outcomes.
2. Scale and control. Poppulo provides the kind of control that organizations need around enabling communicators across the enterprise to contribute, publish and approve content using a suite of company branded templates in an agile way. This enables scaling up to securely send over 2 million messages per hour.
3. Measurement. Poppulo provides metrics by audience, channel, and content type in real-time to understand what impact is being created.
4. Noise reduction. Poppulo helps organizations send LESS communication with MORE relevance, resulting in increased engagement and organizational productivity.

Here’s where things get even more interesting. Many corporate offices have already had the realization that digital signage is a great way to amplify communications and drive increased retention in their intended audiences.

Considering the above requirements to make corporate communications efforts successful — targeting, personalization, multi-channel delivery, and measurement— the combination of FWI and Poppulo brings together the best-of-breed global players in digital signage and email/mobile, delivering an unrivaled omni-channel platform with unmatched functionality and unique scale.

Both companies combined have 6,000+ customers, connecting with and serving content to over 35 million employees in more than 80 countries, creating a definitive employee communications category leader.

Your business, to effectively engage your employees, needs the omni-channel approach that only Poppulo and FWI together can provide. This combination of functionality creates the most robust one-to-many employee communications platform on the market, giving businesses the ability to reach their audience with relevant content—whether in the office, at home, or somewhere in between.

We look forward to working with you to make great things a whole lot greater – to creating an exciting and even more successful future for you and your organization.

Andrew O’Shaughnessy - Founder and CEO, Poppulo

David Levin - Founder and CEO, FWI

Read the Press Release announcing the Poppulo-FWI merger here: Poppulo and Four Winds Interactive combine to create a global employee communications powerhouse for the new world of work.