St. Elizabeth Success: From PDFs to Personalized AI News Digests

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.

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Company Size

12,200+ Employees

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Industry

Healthcare

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Location

Kentucky, Ohio & Indiana

About St. Elizabeth Healthcare

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.

“We will lead the communities we serve to be among the healthiest in the nation.”

St. Elizabeth Healthcare Communications Manager, Chad Schwalbach, told us more about their communication challenges, highlighting how Cerkl Broadcast has provided effective solutions.

St. Elizabeth Healthcare was founded as a small hospital in 1861

Company Challenges

Engaging a Dispersed Workforce

Engaging with employees in different locations was demanding and time-consuming.

Developing Unified Comms for a Diverse Workforce

Employees work different shifts, covering a wide range of occupations, from cafeteria staff to neurosurgeons.

Personalizing Employee Newsletter Content

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.

That’s why they joined forces with Cerkl to deliver AI-powered email and intranet personalization.

“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

Replacing their PDFformat 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:

Replacing the PDF-format employee newsletter that was emailed to everyone
Focusing on analytics by tracking and measuring employee engagement
Ensuring that internal communications were more effective and time-efficient
Personalizing messaging for each employee based on individual interests
Enabling AI-powered news digests and intranet personalization
Increasing efficiency with automated content creation and distribution that saves time and resources
Improving communication by reducing email clutter
Providing the opportunity for positive employee feedback
Creating a content strategy that enables data-driven insights

Solutions

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.

A 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.

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.

Implementation of Broadcast Solutions

Implementation can be a super stressful phase when adopting new software platforms. Having identified their challenges as well as goals, objectives, and solutions, St. Elizabeth was able to turn to Cerkl’s implementation team to ensure seamless configuration and integration with Broadcast.

“We’re an extension of your team.” Cerkl

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.

Results and Metrics

Open Rate for Employees

Open Rate for Medical Staff

Content Pieces Published

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.

Commendation

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

“The biggest thing we’ve noticed, since implementing Cerkl Broadcast, is that our readership, our clicks, and our opens, are all up — and they’re all above national averages. And so, not only is it satisfying for me as a communicator, to know that, we’re reaching people, we’re giving them information that engages them, and it makes it easier to go up the chain. It’s easier to go to our VP, and we can go talk all the way up to the CEO and say, ‘Hey, our communications are getting through. It’s breaking through to the people that we need to reach’.”