Putting people first: How World Vision transformed its employee engagement

About World Vision

World Vision is a global Christian relief, development and advocacy organization dedicated to working with children, families and communities to overcome poverty and injustice. With over 37,000 team members and working in 90+ countries worldwide, getting the internal communications strategy right is challenging.

Honestly I don’t know what we would be doing now without Poppulo. Poppulo has allowed us to turn on a dime to reach our employees on the device of their choice. And, our ability to analyze what content resonates with employees has helped us maintain and even increase our engagement levels.

— Christine Head, Global Internal Engagement Communications Manager

The Challenge: Limited agility, analytics and mobile access for communications

World Vision is a global Christian relief, development and advocacy organization dedicated to working with children, families and communities to overcome poverty and injustice. World Vision has over 37,000 employees located in 90+ countries, spanning six continents targeting the most vulnerable through:

• Short-term emergency relief, such as providing food, shelter and medical care to survivors of natural or man-made disasters.
• Long-term sustainable community development focusing on helping communities meet the legitimate needs its members identify, such as clean water, education, healthcare, agricultural improvements and sanitation
• Working with policymakers and the public at the national, regional, and global level to build awareness around poverty and to address the unjust systems that help perpetuate it.

Yet, while the agency excelled in delivering a lasting impact on communities, its distributed organizational structure of offices around the world created internal communication struggles. Reaching employees in a timely manner was difficult. They could not easily access content on their mobile devices, often the only viable channel. Nor could they respond to or share feedback related to the information.

We want our field offices to be empowered to proceed quickly so we moved away from a command and control approach in relation to operations. Yet we needed to reach about 37,000 individuals, with more than half of them located in the field, to share important updates, messages and operational changes.

— Christine Head, Global Internal Engagement Communications Manager

The Solution: Delivering customized content that engages employees across multiple channels

The Poppulo platform has given the World Vision Communications team multiple ways to create and deliver personalized content that more effectively engages colleagues across the organization – with content easily accessible on laptops and mobile phones.

“Poppulo’s detailed analytics and A/B testing of subject lines and headings lets us identify what resonates best with employees, allowing us to improve the relevancy of our content. We can look at the top three pieces of content for the week and adjust our upcoming messaging based on that data. Not only that, but the greater insights from the two way communication and employees’ feedback through likes and comments, is helpful in developing our content strategy” said Head.

One important finding was that leadership videos, especially those from the president, are the most popular form of content. “The analytics showed us that employees want to hear from their leaders. Our president’s videos are far and away the most popular. We also saw that people want to hear about what their peers are doing to be successful. It is motivating for them.

Poppulo’s Event functionality is driving greater attendance at the monthly strategic Leader Talks, a virtual meeting over Zoom where leaders share information about their functional areas. In addition to raising the visibility of these events, the communications team uses Poppulo’s analytics to identify people who have not responded and resend messages to just those individuals.

“We’re able to share high-level metrics with our leadership and use that data from countries not impacted by GDPR to analyze ways that we can boost open rates and also know where we need to do a better job of engaging staff”, said Head.

Poppulo’s platform is designed specifically for rapid, high quality employee communications that can be tailored to each organization’s needs. The World Vision Global Brand team customized the communications format to give it an open look and feel that aligned with the agency’s guidelines for color, font types and imagery.

The Results: Clarity and agility for scalable, data-driven communications

The World Vision communication team is experiencing growing success including:

• A 75% or higher open rate for leader targeted communications.
• Improved event attendance with more targeted message distribution.
• Increased employee engagement with sharing of authentic, moving stories and videos from the field.

The agility provided by the Poppulo’s platform proved to be invaluable during the recent pandemic. The communications team pivoted quickly from sending out three monthly newsletters to a bi-weekly communication to all employees. Additionally, executives receive, two monthly Ignite Global Leaders newsletters from the World Vision International President, and a monthly newsletters to leaders from Global Marketing & Communications.

We more than doubled our communications. There is no way we could have done that without Poppulo. During this time it was especially important for staff to hear from leaders and see them on videos. Our global president uses part of his biweekly video series called Window to Our World to share stories from field and funding offices.

— Christine Head, Global Internal Engagement Communications Manager