Transforming the Internal Communication Function at St. Louis Children’s Hospital

The Challenge

John Twombly works at St Louis Children’s Hospital, a 280-bed teaching hospital with more than 3,000 employees. He is the sole internal communicator on a communications and marketing team.

We have a simple and compelling mission, ‘Doing what’s right for kids.’ Our challenge is to share what our hospital team is doing to achieve our mission and where we’re heading as an organization.

— John Twombly, St Louis Children’s Hospital

Prior to becoming a Poppulo customer, John faced some challenges that stood in the way of effective IC:

Information overload: “Our employees received too many emails, so we created an annual comms plan to tackle information overload.”

Tools not fit for purpose: “Prior to Poppulo, we were trying to work with an outdated intranet platform.”

Limited staffing: “Our leaders recognized the importance of IC, enabling me to transition to a full-time focus on IC.”

The Solution

Since St Louis Children’s Hospital started using Poppulo to send internal emails, the results have been impressive. John now uses the platform for:

A weekly employee newsletter: “Our weekly Children’s Chat newsletter goes to all employees, and this has been well received.”

Single-topic hospital-wide alerts: “Poppulo is the preferred channel of our employees when we have important updates to share.”

Information for managers to share with teams: “We use Poppulo to deliver messages to our line managers, who then pass on the information to their teams.”

Leadership communication: “Poppulo has been fantastic for increasing the visibility of our senior leaders – we can deliver videos or podcasts that are embedded directly in the emails we send.”

Company-wide surveys: “We use the Poppulo tool to survey our employees on important topics. And it’s great because we can even segment the results by department.”

Capturing employee comments: “We enable staff feedback on every communication, without screening comments in advance. We use that feedback and Poppulo Analytics to make sure communication is connecting.”

When staff know what’s going on and their voice is treated seriously, they feel more connected to our hospital, our goals and our mission” Twombly says. “Good employee communication enables better organizational performance. And Poppulo is helping us to transform our employee communication.

— John Twombly, St Louis Children’s Hospital

The Results

Employee comments up more than 1500%: Since using Poppulo, John has seen employee comments increase from an average of 50 (annually) to about 1,000.

Above-average click rates: St Louis Children’s Hospital enjoy an average email click rate of 38%, far exceeding the industry average, despite their workforce being mostly non-desk staff.

Employee engagement increase: While many factors contribute to employee engagement, internal communication plays a part. The hospital’s overall employee engagement ranks in the top 10% nationally among major health care providers and is up 5 points from 2013.

“When staff know what’s going on and their voice is treated seriously, they feel more connected to our hospital, our goals and our mission, Twombly says. Good employee communication enables better organizational performance. And Poppulo is helping us to transform our employee communication”.

Note: This article does not reflect BJC or SLCH endorsement of a product or service.