Case Study: Internal Program Promotion

I have years of experience promoting internal programs and initiatives. I focus on knowing the audience, and working with experts to create clear calls-to-action and mechanisms to measure ROI. Below is a more recent example resulting in record sign-ups working with my Learning & Development colleagues at the USO, a non-profit that supports military families.

Email Content

Empowering Your Professional Development:
Tools and Opportunities at the USO 

As our greatest asset, empowering our people to succeed is a top priority. But how can we do that?

Sure, you need to bring the passion and talent, but wherever your career might stand today, everyone needs an ecosystem of coaching, tools and experiences to reach even higher.

Champions are never forged alone.

But, where do you start?

What opportunities and tools are available?

How can you personalize a development plan just for you?

Get Stronger With Our Experts and Resources

Join the Empower Hour Webinar:
Put These Tools to Work for You

Soon you will receive invites to three different options to attend an interactive webinar with our HR team, where they will introduce the USO's new People Development Strategy, to include ALL of the growth offerings available, and most importantly, how you can leverage them to succeed.

Training and Professional Development Webinar Series

The Empower Hour is just the kickoff of an entire series. Whether you join them all or drop into the sessions that interest you, these interactive webinars utilize shared best practices and interactive, unscripted exercises to drive your growth. Topics include:

  • Collaboration at Work

  • Practical Productivity

  • Best Practices for Interviewing

  • Motivate, Recognize and Energize Your Colleagues

Dive Deeper: Learn, Plan, Win

You don't have to wait to get started! Build abilities within your specialty or sharpen your soft skills with resources like USO University, Coursera or Education Reimbursement. Need structure? Start building your Individual Development Plan or view our full webinar series schedule.

It's all on the recently upgraded Training & Development site on USO Connect.

Notes About My Approach

Click the dropdown arrows below for more on the decisions that drove each element of this newsletter. I believe engaging internal audiences requires all of the deliberate strategy that reaching new external audiences does, and everything we do has a reason.

  • Our weekly newsletter was called Three Things, with a variety of stories centered around the three benefits of inspiring, informing and connecting. But I also created a One Thing edition, creating a separate channel for a deep dive into a single topic. This trained audiences over time as to expectations when they opened an email and gave stakeholders more options to reach people based on the messaging needs.

  • While I can always appreciate an artful headline, often in internal communications leading with audience benefits and driving straight to the “so what?” factor is crucial to reach hyper distracted workforces.

  • Every piece of content real estate is an opportunity to get closer to your audience. Upon joining the USO, I facilitated several focus groups about internal communications. From new hires to long-tenured high performers, words like “stuffy, old school and cold” were used to describe the content our employees were seeing from the organization. The GIFs in this communication reflect our approach to changing that. With nearly 70 percent female employees, I loved the Hillary Swank GIF but looked to appeal wider while keeping the sports themes of Rocky (for Gen X) and Ted Lasso. Everything should have a reason.

  • “People Development Strategy” is language coopted from the Strategic Plan that our board saw. Whenever possible and appropriate, I like to link everyday comms with plans and language from the highest level, to help build understanding and unity on all spans and layers of the organization. You can also see this in the initial copy, where we refer to our people as our greatest asset. This, and other paraphrased language was an effort to complement our AI communications, as we found deep concerns that organizational focus on AI would make us lose our human touch, a central piece of the USO brand. So we took any opportunity to remind our people that they were our best asset.

  • In our research we found that the three areas that gave the audience pause in joining L&D were not knowing where to start, program depth and worrying that pathways were cookie-cutter and not applicable to their work. We addressed these objections directly in the copy.

  • Mentioning an Outlook invite or any other related content is always good for distracted audiences. When I hear someone say “I am sick of hearing about…” I almost view that as a sign of success. Duplicity on target is a best practice.

  • Whenever possible it is always helpful to use plain language to describe what you want people to sign up for. They know what is expected of them as well when you use short descriptors such as “unscripted and interactive.”

  • Rather than dive deep into a topic or two or publish an exhaustive list of all offerings, we hit our top interests and best classes providing several doorways of interests for audiences to walk through.

  • By this time we had built a good infrastructure on SharePoint so audiences expect to always have the hub link to comprehensive information on our intranet site USO Connect. This also provided my internal comms team with another point of analytics.

  • I thought about the personalities of our L&D team and together we realized a Ted Lasso reference was the perfect feeling to leave our people with. It leaves audiences with a promise that their experience will be genuine, approachable and fun.