Delivering communications internally at Microsoft with Microsoft Viva Amplify

Keeping your people well informed is something every organization, manager, and executive needs to do, including here at Microsoft Digital (MSD), the company’s IT organization.

We need to let our employees know about new product rollouts, important system updates, new policies, and much more.

Viva Amplify is really exciting because it fills that need. It’s the first internal communications platform that’s intentionally designed for internal communicators to do their best work.

—Diana McCarty, principal group content program manager, Microsoft Digital

But for the people sending those internal communications, it was difficult to find tools that served the purpose. That’s because there are lots of tools designed for external marketing, but not so much when it came to internal comms.

That changed with the advent of Microsoft Viva Amplify, one of the first communications platforms designed for internal communicators.

“Viva Amplify is really exciting because it fills that need—it’s intentionally designed to help internal communicators do their best work,” says Diana McCarty, a principal group content program manager in MSD and the leader of Microsoft’s IT Communications team.

Before Viva Amplify, internal communicators used multiple tools that didn’t fit quite right. In an audit, McCarty’s team found that they used more than 25 tools to strategize, execute communications strategies, collect metrics, and create reports—and all those functions required different tools that were not well connected with each other.

The IT Communications team has been using an early version of Viva Amplify as Customer Zero since last year. Their role was to provide business requirements and feedback on its features to help create the best internal communications platform possible.

The huge superpower of Viva Amplify, at least here in V1, is that it allows you to create a communication once and publish it in many places without having to rewrite it. You can send it to email, 10 different SharePoint site collections, and up to five different Teams channels.

—Sam Crewdson, principal program manager, Microsoft Digital

“We adopt as much of the feature set as we can,” McCarty says. “As new features come out, we incorporate them into our workflows.”

[Explore Viva la Vida! How work life is better at Microsoft with Viva. Discover getting our internal IT communications right with Microsoft Viva Amplify. Unpack how Microsoft Digital improves its own Employee Experience—and yours—as Customer Zero.]

The power of an internal communications platform

Viva Amplify has two key features that help internal communicators do their jobs. The first is that it allows you to write a message once and publish it to multiple endpoints, called distribution channels. This saves time and provides consistency.

“The huge superpower of Viva Amplify, at least here in V1, is that it allows you to create a communication once and publish it in many places without having to rewrite it,” says Sam Crewdson, a principal program manager in MSD and the MSD lead for Viva Amplify. “You can send it to email, 10 different SharePoint site collections, and up to five different Teams channels.”

Collage of portrait photos showing McCarty, Cirone, Morris, and Crewdson. — Early adopters who helped test Viva Amplify include (l-r) Diana McCarty, John Cirone, Amy Morris, and Sam Crewdson.

The second important feature is that it gives you a consolidated view of your metrics, which Crewdson calls “a second superpower.” In the past, it wasn’t easy for communicators to access rich metrics for SharePoint sites, Viva Engage, and email. There were no metrics for Microsoft Teams.

“You had to go four places to get four metrics that didn’t overlap and had to manually stitch them together,” Crewdson says.

But now, Viva Amplify gives you a one-stop shop to understand the effectiveness of your communications by seeing open rates, read rates, sharing, and sentiment analysis for a campaign.

“No matter which distribution channels you use, you get a consolidated set of analytics,” Crewdson says. “You can get per-application metrics if you want to see whether email or SharePoint was more effective for your communication.”

You also you get what communicators care about most—the total number of eyeballs that have seen your content. You can also track social gestures like thumbs-up, comments, and whether people forward or re-share the message.

Helping all communicators

Viva Amplify helps many types of internal communicators, not just people with “communications” in their job title.

During the dogfooding stage of deploying Viva Amplify, three main types of communicators were identified: Executive communicators (executives and those who write for them); corporate communicators who explain our company-wide impact, mission, and culture; and functional communicators who send messages about new processes or tools for a function such as HR or IT.

The great thing about GEEC is we can scale these tools [including Viva Amplify] to a whole function at one time. Through a partnership with MSD, we’re able to onboard people at the same time, proactively test these things out and pilot certain scenarios.

—John Cirone, senior director of communications, GEEC community

We have a large group of executive communicators who are helping us test Viva Amplify through an early adopters program: our Global Employee and Executive Communications (GEEC) community. It includes more than 1,000 communicators, including senior leaders and their chiefs of staff, executive assistants, communications directors, social media managers, and others.

“The great thing about GEEC is we can scale these tools [including Viva Amplify] to a whole function at one time,” says John Cirone, a senior director of communications who manages the GEEC community. “Through a partnership with MSD, we’re able to onboard people at the same time, proactively test these things out, and pilot certain scenarios.”

Another powerful Amplify feature that’s important to communicators is the ability to manage the review cycle for communications. The GEEC community has a number of corporate and executive communicators who need to review messages before they’re sent out. Having a centralized tool where they can review, edit, and publish in one place will reduce the time for review cycles.

“Today, we do a lot of it in Word, and we have people with varying levels of how deep they want to edit, or how much they want to skim and copy-paste into an email,” says Amy Morris, a senior communications manager on the GEEC team. “Some executives send from their own inbox, and others provide delegate permissions to their communications lead. Amplify supports both the exec who wants to be the one to press the Publish button and the comms lead who publishes with delegate permissions.”

The road forward

Shifting communications work to Viva Amplify will simplify things for our internal communicators, but they’re only getting started—most have only had access to it since it became generally available in October.

I’ve got high hopes for Viva Amplify because it directly targets people like me. It’s meant to bring together campaign management into one single solution where you can publish to multiple outlets through one tool. It promises to provide all those metrics in one dashboard, which has been the Holy Grail of employee communications for years.

—John Cirone, senior director of communications, GEEC community

“Right now, we’re focused on getting our first round of adopters to not only keep using the product, but also to provide us with feedback that we can use to improve it,” Crewdson says.

As promising as the beginning of Viva Amplify has been, teams are looking forward to more features in the future.

“I’ve got high hopes for Viva Amplify because it directly targets people like me,” Cirone says. “It’s meant to bring together campaign management into one single solution where you can publish to multiple outlets through one tool. It promises to provide all those metrics in one dashboard, which has been the Holy Grail of employee communications for years.”

Support for more distribution channels is one of the features that the IT Communications team is looking forward to. While working from home during the COVID-19 pandemic, people came to rely on Viva Engage to connect with each other at work.

“Viva Engage is now our primary channel in a lot of ways; we use email for more specific reasons. When we’re able to publish from Viva Amplify to Viva Engage, it’s going to unlock a whole new world of possibilities,” McCarty says.

With such a strong demand for it, adding Viva Engage is on the radar for the product team.

“Today, Viva Amplify can send messages to email, SharePoint, and Teams. In the first half of 2024, we expect to be able to publish to Viva Engage as well. Viva Engage has been a huge success for us in IT, and we see that as an important future milestone for communicators,” Crewdson says.

Viva Amplify early adopters are also looking forward to improved Outlook formatting, both for the templates that the GEEC team distributes and for sending newsletters.

Being able to share templates through the Amplify tool would be an awesome feature because it would be right there in the Amplify campaign when we communicate about key company news, learning programs, or events.

—Amy Morris, senior communications manager, GEEC community

“I’m super interested in its usefulness as a place to send newsletters from,” Cirone says. “We send a lot of newsletters now and currently use a third-party tool. This is something every Microsoft communications lead will be leveraging and celebrating.”

Another valuable feature is support for communications toolkits. The team supporting the GEEC community sends out guidance across the company to help others tell a connected story and speak from the same narrative in their own communications. To do this, the team creates templatized toolkits for communicators to use with different audiences.

“Being able to share templates through the Amplify tool would be an awesome feature because it would be right there in the Amplify campaign when we communicate about key company news, learning programs, or events,” Morris says.

These features are on the roadmap.

Based on my team’s experience so far, I would say Amplify is one of those technologies that is good to adopt early. It’s based on SharePoint, so there isn’t a huge learning curve if you’re familiar with SharePoint. So far, we’ve only seen upside to being involved early.

—Diana McCarty, principal group content program manager, Microsoft Digital

“Our future vision is that we continue to extend Viva Amplify to include more distribution channels, to enrich it with the power of AI and Copilot, to bring other aspects of Viva and M365 to bear in creating the best communications tool possible,” Crewdson says.

If your team is considering using Viva Amplify, there’s no need to wait for all these features to be deployed.

“Based on my team’s experience so far, I would say Amplify is one of those technologies that is good to adopt early,” McCarty says. “It’s based on SharePoint, so there isn’t a huge learning curve if you’re familiar with SharePoint and the value and feature set is only growing. So far, we’ve only seen upside to being involved early.”

Consider how utilizing Microsoft Viva Amplify could improve your team’s communications:

Viva Amplify saves time because you author a communication just once; then you can use Amplify to publish it to multiple places, known as distribution channels.
Organization is easy. A campaign in Viva Amplify is a container, so you can group communications as part of the same campaign.
Viva Amplify helps team members coordinate authoring by providing a place for notes about the goals for a campaign, key messages, taglines, key phrases to re-use, and information about tone of voice.
Viva Amplify also supports approval workflows, which is useful if someone is ghostwriting and wants the executive to approve a message before it goes out. You can also route a message to someone to check grammar, tone, and spelling. You can combine that with scheduling, like “Send this out at 8:00 AM.”
Viva Amplify provides a centralized location for all your analytics about the campaign’s performance.