From siloed to aligned communications - how Lincoln Financial Group increased employee engagement across the organization

The Challenge

Lindsey Sofia, Sr. Consultant, Corporate Communications and Channel Management at Lincoln Financial Group, said the organization’s internal communications were decentralized, and working in business unit silos. The legacy comms systems in place were not fit to accommodate success: and communicators found these difficult to use, lacked branded templates, and could not personalize and target to audiences across the organization. Plus, no metrics were generated – so there was no insight into campaign strategies going forward.

As a result, Lincoln’s communications culture was unclear and overlapped in messaging – creating clutter rather than engagement in the inbox.

The Solution

Lincoln Financial Group brought in a Vice President of Internal Communications, who immediately centralized communications. They then set the agenda for building efficiency by having teams communicate in an aligned fashion to employees across the organization.

To support that shift to aligned communications, Lincoln then selected Poppulo, because the platform gave them one central tool that empowered team members to easily create, send and measure communications.

Results

Poppulo has removed the stress of creating, sending and measuring our internal email communications. What was once an arduous task is now a pleasant experience.

Lindsey says a big win in centralizing communications was bringing in Poppulo to manage the flow of communications.

“Not only has the quantity of our communications decreased, the quality of the messaging has increased by being more targeted, timely and relevant to each employee. There has been a dramatic enhancement in the effectiveness of Lincoln’s internal communications.”

Key Benefits of using Poppulo

• Ease of Use: “There’s so much flexibility with uploading photos, tables, and links – everything involved in putting content out there is now easy.”
• Branded templates: “All Lincoln team members have a selection of branded templates for events, newsletters, and town halls, depending on the audience and campaign.”
• Consistent formatting: “Our legacy systems such as Outlook made formatting unreliable. Poppulo gives us the confidence that what we send is exactly what the employee receives. This has really been a big win for us.”
• Time savings: “Poppulo reduces the time it takes to create and send campaigns. Features such as ‘clone email’, have built efficiency into the creation process. We just lift and shift instead of spending time reinventing the wheel.”
• Personalization: “Survey after survey employees were sharing that they wanted more relevant information, that was personalized to them – and helped them do their job better. With Poppulo, we are now customizing and targeting our audiences better than ever before.”
• Event management: “We use the event template to encourage registrations for events such as Town Halls, and it gives us an idea of numbers. The functionality of the event module lets us see accept, declines, and non-responses so we can target follow up reminders.“
• Metrics: Lincoln has gone from no metrics or reports to a dashboard offering insightful metrics and measurement – by campaigns and audiences. “We particularly like seeing delivery stats, indicating if people have actually received the email. Confirming delivery is very important in the financial sector because of some of the sensitive and timely information we are sending.”

The role of IC has shifted from administrative – pushing information out – to a consultative relationship with our internal partners. We now help their communications drive employee engagement.