Optimizing Internal Communications at Flagger Force: Challenges and Solutions

Flagger Force partnered with Cerkl Broadcast to enhance their internal communications, streamline information delivery, and maintain brand consistency within the company.

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Company Size

2000+ Employees

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Industry

Transportation

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Location

US, Across 10+ States

About Flagger Force

Flagger Force is a traffic control company committed to education, innovation, and technology. They aim to improve work zone safety for every motorist, pedestrian, and worker traversing our roadways. The company manages over 1,000 job sites daily throughout the eastern United States.

Flagger Force’s top priority is ensuring everyone makes it home safely. This includes their employees, clients, and sometimes even an impatient motorist! Flagger Force’s Tamara Palmer, Internal Communications Manager, and David Rosati, Internal Communications Coordinator, told us more about their communication challenges and how Cerkl Broadcast has provided solutions.

Company Challenges

Creating a Unified Employee Experience

Communications content was different for their in-office and in-the-field audiences.

Measuring the Impact of their Communication Efforts

The company needed a system that enabled them to measure their communication efforts.

Managing their Rapidly Growing Audience

Ensuring the right audiences received the right communications at the right time.

When the Flagger Force team of over 2,000 employees reached out to Cerkl, they were engaged in more than 10 states. These dispersed employees form the backbone of their company’s operations. Flagger Force communicates with, and connects this diffused workforce with their custom mobile app. Launched in 2018, their award-winning communication channel enjoys a 98% voluntary activation rate, with more than 60% of employees logging in daily. It is the go-to source for field communications and resources. However, their successes with app-based communications for these dispersed field employees did not translate one-to-one with their office team. Compared to communications within the field, they stated, “Our office communication channels had been standardized and relied on the benefit of in-person interactions.”

Additionally, email was the primary communication channel. Most office staff needed to check their email to retrieve information. This meant that they sometimes missed the rich content, visually stylized, and on-brand messaging curated and published via the employee communication mobile app used by Flagger Force. It was important to offer a mechanism that would activate high levels of office employee engagement, supporting their informational needs and augmenting company culture, regardless of size and scale.

As a result, the company’s internal communicators searched for a new solution that would allow employees to receive information (via email) in the office.

Communicators within the company had been doing their best to produce good, relevant content as quickly as possible. They were acutely aware of the need to focus on critical issues that would help to keep up with the company’s success and growth. But without a system that provided data on open, read, and click-through rates, they were missing a key aspect of measuring their efforts.

“Other than office-based in-person socialization, it was difficult to know if people were reading and enjoying our content.” Additionally, the internal communications team email campaigns relied on previously created Outlook email groups populated with employees according to their assigned departments. The team needed the flexibility to rapidly create distribution groups based on communication objectives, greatly enhancing their ability to send targeted messaging.

“We needed a better source of truth for our communications. Good communication first starts with knowing your audience, and despite us having great relationships with others in the office, it was difficult to know whether our contact lists matched our rapidly growing and scaling company. Often, we would find that individuals had promoted or had moved entirely out of our previously used set of communication groups, and we just couldn’t keep up.”

They figured this was a good problem to have for the company, but it presented challenges in making sure the right audiences received the right communications at the right time.

Goals and Objectives

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Create Consistently Branded and Professional Content

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Track Communications and Measure Open Rates and Click Rates

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Deliver Content to the Right People at the Right Time

The Flagger Force goals were relatively simple. They wanted unmistakable branded and professional-looking content that they could ensure was delivered to the right people on time.

Their decision-makers considered all the other features included in the Cerkl package a bonus. “Our core focus was on the organization, the look, and the system’s communication capabilities.”

Ultimately, as Flagger Force increased its employee count and expanded its footprint into new states, it needed to disseminate on-brand messaging efficiently and scalably to all office staff. Communications needed to be trackable to measure open rates and click rates, allowing them to define KPIs and make analytical data-driven decisions.

It was essential that their brand identity was present within all their communications.

Getting it done

The main features Flagger Force has utilized to resolve their challenges include:

Email Blasts
Dynamic Segments
Analytics and Insights
Audience Management
Image Gallery

We asked Tamara and David to elaborate on how these Broadcast solutions have helped to solve their challenges.

Email Blasts

“The Blasts editor solves the issues we had with generic formatting in Outlook. Designing around Microsoft’s unknown formatting boundaries and accommodating readers on mobile devices, laptops, and tablets was not ideal. The Broadcast editor allows for great formatting and impeccable design and gives you every opportunity to wow an executive team.”

Analytics and Insights

“Analytics & Insights benefitted us when we first dug into the data, especially when it came to sending data. Not only were we trying to see at what times we were getting the best read/open rates, but also for the kind of content. For example, we are pleased to see very high open rates for Broadcasts sent by members of our leadership team. It’s important information for the office to be consuming. Reporting back to the leadership team builds confidence in the tool and the trust between leadership and their direct reports.”

Dynamic Segments

“Dynamic Segments are there for me as an admin to ‘set and forget,’ he explains. He goes on to say, “They really are dynamic and do a great job of organizing your contacts if you’re inputting good metadata. Gone are the days of forgetting someone was promoted, or you forgot that Janice, who was in accounting, is no longer in accounting and didn’t need the latest message about two-factor authentication for Power BI users.”

Audience Management

“Audience Management is self-explanatory. We didn’t have a reliable email system for keeping our office audience up to date, and we wanted something we could control internally.”

Implementation of Broadcast Solutions

Flagger Force has integrated Broadcast into its human resources (HR) team, which has been primarily where they’ve had the most seamless transition. Additionally, their public affairs team, which operates separately from HR, sends updates to the leadership team.

Their internal communications team recognized Broadcast as the primary “tool” in delivering impactful, up-to-date information to Flagger Force decision-makers. By collaborating with the public affairs team, updates on company-impacting legislation are delivered promptly to bolster the executive team’s strategic planning.

Ultimately, the Flagger Force internal communications team recognizes Broadcast as a “tool” that helps to keep their decision-makers up-to-date on legislation that impacts their company. From here, they are training the technology team to utilize the hardware-related system better and improve the account preparation done by their teams when onboarding new employees into the growing company.

Outcomes

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Open Rate

%

Click-Through Rate

Cumulative Benchmark*

It’s vital to measure the results of any internal communication strategy. Keeping track of results and metrics ensures that communication efforts are effective and identifies areas for improvement to achieve organizational goals.

When Flagger Force decided to implement the Cerkl Broadcast platform, it had minimal email communications data about its internal communications outcomes. Now, it has “a lot of data.”

In little over a year, they’ve sent over 85 internal communications via the Broadcast system. Because they lacked a baseline of email open and read rates data, “We haven’t been able to measure a statistically accurate increase. But I can tell you we aim to have our internal communications achieve a minimum of 50% open rates. Beyond that, click-through rates are even more important for internal communications. We try to meet a 20% click-through rate threshold.

“So far, our data shows that out of all our communications, we have a 58% open rate and a 68% click-through rate.”

How Do These Results Align With Expectations?

“Our goal was to have a more engaging system that could create communications that are seen as the face and voice of our company and brand. We recently began expanding how much and of what kind of content we distribute via the platform which has brought much more engagement from our executive team.

“We have not yet gathered the insights of the company employees who receive these communications. Gathering the sentiments of the recipients is the next step in the evolution of our data analysis.”

*Average outperformance is calculated by adding the rate at which each goal is met and dividing by the number of goals

Commendation

The Flagger Force internal communications team has found Cerkl Broadcast easy to use, especially for “an engaging content creation process.”

Tamara Palmer, Internal Communications Manager

“As someone who writes many communications in a given workweek, the platform lends itself to intuitive and engaging content creation with a ‘have it your way’ mantra in the manner in which you can design your communications. It covers most bases for the process from start to finish. Drafting, scheduling, and sending are easy and allow for planning at all scales.”