News Portal & App
Launch Success
Internal Communications Manager, Accenture, 2016 -17
One of my key achievements at Accenture was managing the successful UK and lreland (UKI) launch of a new Intranet portal that transformed how the business would communicate. The portal targeted slick, personalised content, and phased out the use of newsletters in the UKI.
My role was two-fold:
- to engage with the employees and feed their thoughts back to the designers while the portal (and mobile-app version) were in development phase.
- to develop a new and original content plan that would ultimately replace all email newsletters within the business, migrating all content to the new portal.
The Result Of
Building Focus Groups
My decision to test the portal and the content plan within Focus Groups was key to a successful launch.
Based on the key performance indicators of employee readiness (pre-launch), employee adoption (launch week), and long-term engagement (tracked weekly), the roll-out I led in the UK and Ireland was the most successful regional roll-out after the US.
Key to this success was how I ran the Focus Groups.
I built a 30-strong Focus Group, with representation across all functions, age groups, job levels and more - ensuring we had a diverse group.
I then divided employees into three personas within the Focus Groups.
1. Commercially Aware
2. Emotionally Invested
3. Quick Readers
The aim was to assess how they felt towards the platform (versions one, two and so on), and the style of the news stories we would push out on the portal (branding, image selection. tone etc.).
We then wanted to gradually improve how they felt about the content and new platform by tailoring what we were creating and building based on their regular feedback.
The Focus Groups ran fortnightly for three months, and as this Exec Report shows (with permission from Accenture to share), the platform and content increased in popularity across all three persona groups.
A truly agile approach.