St. Elizabeth Healthcare partnered with Cerkl Broadcast more than five years ago to improve employee engagement with personalization. They also wanted to start measuring employee engagement statistics. Over time, they have embraced more and more Broadcast features, effectively continuing to improve their internal communication strategy.
12,200+ Employees
Healthcare
Kentucky, Ohio & Indiana
Founded as a small hospital in 1861, St. Elizabeth has grown enormously. Today, St. Elizabeth Healthcare has six hospitals that operate throughout Northern Kentucky and Southeastern Indiana. There are also 170 St. Elizabeth Physicians specialty and primary care offices located throughout Kentucky, Ohio, and Indiana. With more than 11,000 associates and a medical staff comprising approximately 1,200 physicians and advanced practice providers, St. Elizabeth is firmly entrenched in the Greater Cincinnati communities it serves.
These numbers represent an immense, ongoing challenge. St. Elizabeth is proud to deliver the highest quality of care, which is why effectively engaging and retaining this workforce is a top priority.
St. Elizabeth Healthcare Communications Manager, Chad Schwalbach, told us more about their communication challenges, highlighting how Cerkl Broadcast has provided effective solutions.
Engaging with employees in different locations was demanding and time-consuming.
Employees work different shifts, covering a wide range of occupations, from cafeteria staff to neurosurgeons.
St. Elizabeth wanted to create content that would resonate more with each individual associate.
The logistics of engaging with so many people spread across the state in different locations was demanding and time consuming. Employees work different shifts, day and night, covering a wide range of occupations from cafeteria staff to neurosurgeons. Unsurprisingly, internal communicators found it extremely difficult to develop unified messages for all these people. However, it was vital to improve staff engagement.
Before working with Cerkl, St. Elizabeth communicators relied on PDF documents that were attached to emails.
We couldn’t measure this. We didn’t know who was clicking on what. It simply wasn’t effective communication. It didn’t matter whether you worked at our St. Elizabeth Edgewood location, you would be getting information about what was going on at St. Elizabeth Fort Thomas and other locations that didn’t apply to you, said Chad Schwalbach.
Furthermore, different people wanted to get newsletter content at the end of the week, on Friday. Others wanted it first thing when they got to work on a Monday morning.
The internal communications team realized they needed to take this challenge head on. Ultimately, they wanted to be able to create content that was not only easier for the team to produce but that would resonate more with each individual associate.
What attracted us to Cerkl Broadcast was the personalization aspect.
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.
Replacing their PDF format Employee Newsletter
Personalizing Messaging for Every Employee
Tracking & Measuring Employee Engagement
Aiming to boost employee engagement and increase personalization, the range of goals and objectives of St. Elizabeth included:
The primary solution for St. Elizabeth was to migrate from emailed PDFs to highly personalized, AI-generated News Digests. Not only do they provide staff members with the news and information they need and want to read, they also boost engagement and morale, drive participation, and improve communication. A key feature is that New Digests can segment a diverse workforce using specific criteria allied with personalization. Another is the ease at which they can track metrics in real time. This helps to understand employee needs and preferences.
Rachel Folz, Cerkl’s Director of Product, outlines why Broadcast is perfect for a diverse workforce like St. Elizabeth’s.
The first step in the implementation process was to get the Email Blast tool into place. This is what they would be using to send everyday emails aA main factor is being able to bring communications around the entire organization. Everyone’s involved. This is especially true for St. Elizabeth because they have so many locations, together with a really interesting workforce that covers everything — cafeteria, janitorial staff, nurses, assistants, all the way up to busy surgeons who are operating at multiple hospitals.nd newsletters. They also worked on audience integration, defining their audience and focusing on important employee data to build Dynamic Segments. Then they worked on implementing the new personalization process. That’s where My Paycor News came in and where they could integrate their intranet.
With Cerkl Broadcast, they have been able to design a net of communications that reaches all those people with the important messages that matter to them and their work and keep them connected to the St. Elizabeth mission.
Additionally, Cerkl Broadcast integrates with Microsoft Teams, Microsoft SharePoint, intranet, and pretty much any channel that St. Elizabeth uses. A great benefit is that support is second to none.
Chad Schwalbach describes how Cerkl Broadcast makes segmentation and personalization so much easier for internal communicators at St. Elizabeth.
“It helps us to deliver specific information to specific people. I click on a title, and then I add a short summary that they will see in the newsletter. I add a picture, put in the content, tag it, identify different types of categories, and then segment it to identify who it needs to go to. Does this need to go to this campus? Does it need to go to St. Elizabeth physicians or St. Elizabeth healthcare associates? If so, which one? Maybe both.” It doesn’t take long, and then, in an instant, with one more click, that story’s ready to go.
54
%
46
%
6500
+
Measuring the outcomes of an internal communication strategy is crucial for any organization. Monitoring results and metrics helps ensure communication efforts are effective, while also highlighting areas for improvement to better align with organizational goals.
By getting rid of the static employee newsletter PDF, St. Elizabeth’s internal communications team was able to produce actionable associate communications metrics. Previously, they weren’t able to gather these statistics. However, innovative news digests encourage greater engagement and simplify the flow of information.
St. Elizabeth uses Broadcast News Digests in two different ways — one for their employees and the other for medical staff and physicians. In 2024, after publishing more than 6,500 content items, their open rate for employees was 54%. For physicians and medical staff, it is currently 46%. It is worth noting that they have high personalization rates in both sectors.
The St. Elizabeth’s internal communications team has identified many benefits. For example, Chad Schwalbach says that since they started using Cerkl Broadcast, their open enrollment engagement has continued to increase.
He also highlights that introductory email is a way they now welcome new associates to St. Elizabeth. “We’re able to engage these new hires, establish a conversation, and have them become acquainted with our voice and culture.”
Chad Schwalbach, Communications Manager
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