{"id":13813,"date":"2024-03-18T14:44:35","date_gmt":"2024-03-18T21:44:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/insidetrack\/blog\/?p=13813"},"modified":"2024-03-18T14:44:35","modified_gmt":"2024-03-18T21:44:35","slug":"delivering-communications-internally-at-microsoft-with-microsoft-viva-amplify","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/insidetrack\/blog\/delivering-communications-internally-at-microsoft-with-microsoft-viva-amplify\/","title":{"rendered":"Delivering communications internally at Microsoft with Microsoft Viva Amplify"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"MicrosoftKeeping your people well informed is something every organization, manager, and executive needs to do, including here at Microsoft Digital (MSD), the company\u2019s IT organization.<\/p>\n

We need to let our employees know about new product rollouts, important system updates, new policies, and much more.<\/p>\n

Viva Amplify is really exciting because it fills that need. It\u2019s the first internal communications platform that\u2019s intentionally designed for internal communicators to do their best work.<\/p>\n

\u2014Diana McCarty, principal group content program manager, Microsoft Digital<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

But for the people sending those internal communications, it was difficult to find tools that served the purpose. That\u2019s because there are lots of tools designed for external marketing, but not so much when it came to internal comms.<\/p>\n

That changed with the advent of Microsoft Viva Amplify, one of the first communications platforms designed for internal communicators.<\/p>\n

\u201cViva Amplify is really exciting because it fills that need\u2014it\u2019s intentionally designed to help internal communicators do their best work,\u201d says Diana McCarty, a principal group content program manager in MSD and the leader of Microsoft\u2019s IT Communications team.<\/p>\n

Before Viva Amplify, internal communicators used multiple tools that didn\u2019t fit quite right. In an audit, McCarty\u2019s team found that they used more than 25 tools to strategize, execute communications strategies, collect metrics, and create reports\u2014and all those functions required different tools that were not well connected with each other.<\/p>\n

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

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.<\/p>\n

\u2014Sam Crewdson, principal program manager, Microsoft Digital<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\u201cWe adopt as much of the feature set as we can,\u201d McCarty says. \u201cAs new features come out, we incorporate them into our workflows.\u201d<\/p>\n

[<\/em>Explore Viva la Vida! How work life is better at Microsoft with Viva.<\/em><\/a> Discover getting our internal IT communications right with Microsoft Viva Amplify.<\/em><\/a> Unpack how Microsoft Digital improves its own Employee Experience\u2014and yours\u2014as Customer Zero.<\/em><\/a>]<\/em><\/p>\n

The power of an internal communications platform<\/h2>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe 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,\u201d says Sam Crewdson, a principal program manager in MSD and the MSD lead for Viva Amplify. \u201cYou can send it to email, 10 different SharePoint site collections, and up to five different Teams channels.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"Collage
Early adopters who helped test Viva Amplify include (l-r) Diana McCarty, John Cirone, Amy Morris, and Sam Crewdson.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The second important feature is that it gives you a consolidated view of your metrics, which Crewdson calls \u201ca second superpower.\u201d In the past, it wasn\u2019t easy for communicators to access rich metrics for SharePoint sites, Viva Engage, and email. There were no metrics for Microsoft Teams.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou had to go four places to get four metrics that didn\u2019t overlap and had to manually stitch them together,” Crewdson says.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cNo matter which distribution channels you use, you get a consolidated set of analytics,\u201d Crewdson says. \u201cYou can get per-application metrics if you want to see whether email or SharePoint was more effective for your communication.\u201d<\/p>\n

You also you get what communicators care about most\u2014the 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.<\/p>\n

Helping all communicators<\/h2>\n

Viva Amplify helps many types of internal communicators, not just people with \u201ccommunications\u201d in their job title.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019re able to onboard people at the same time, proactively test these things out and pilot certain scenarios.<\/p>\n

\u2014John Cirone, senior director of communications, GEEC community<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe great thing about GEEC is we can scale these tools [including Viva Amplify] to a whole function at one time,\u201d says John Cirone, a senior director of communications who manages the GEEC community. \u201cThrough a partnership with MSD, we\u2019re able to onboard people at the same time, proactively test these things out, and pilot certain scenarios.\u201d<\/p>\n

Another powerful Amplify feature that\u2019s 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\u2019re sent out. Having a centralized tool where they can review, edit, and publish in one place will reduce the time for review cycles.<\/p>\n

\u201cToday, 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,\u201d says Amy Morris, a senior communications manager on the GEEC team. \u201cSome 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

The road forward<\/h2>\n

Shifting communications work to Viva Amplify will simplify things for our internal communicators, but they\u2019re only getting started\u2014most have only had access to it since it became generally available in October.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve got high hopes for Viva Amplify because it directly targets people like me. It\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

\u2014John Cirone, senior director of communications, GEEC community<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\u201cRight now, we\u2019re 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,\u201d Crewdson says.<\/p>\n

As promising as the beginning of Viva Amplify has been, teams are looking forward to more features in the future.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ve got high hopes for Viva Amplify because it directly targets people like me,\u201d Cirone says. \u201cIt\u2019s 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.”<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cViva Engage is now our primary channel in a lot of ways; we use email for more specific reasons. When we\u2019re able to publish from Viva Amplify to Viva Engage, it\u2019s going to unlock a whole new world of possibilities,\u201d McCarty says.<\/p>\n

With such a strong demand for it, adding Viva Engage is on the radar for the product team.<\/p>\n

\u201cToday, 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,\u201d Crewdson says.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u2014Amy Morris, senior communications manager, GEEC community<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\u201cI\u2019m super interested in its usefulness as a place to send newsletters from,\u201d Cirone says. \u201cWe 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cBeing 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,\u201d Morris says.<\/p>\n

These features are on the roadmap.<\/p>\n

Based on my team\u2019s experience so far, I would say Amplify is one of those technologies that is good to adopt early. It\u2019s based on SharePoint, so there isn\u2019t a huge learning curve if you\u2019re familiar with SharePoint. So far, we\u2019ve only seen upside to being involved early.<\/p>\n

\u2014Diana McCarty, principal group content program manager, Microsoft Digital<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\u201cOur 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,\u201d Crewdson says.<\/p>\n

If your team is considering using Viva Amplify, there\u2019s no need to wait for all these features to be deployed.<\/p>\n

\u201cBased on my team\u2019s experience so far, I would say Amplify is one of those technologies that is good to adopt early,\u201d McCarty says. \u201cIt\u2019s based on SharePoint, so there isn\u2019t a huge learning curve if you\u2019re familiar with SharePoint and the value and feature set is only growing. So far, we\u2019ve only seen upside to being involved early.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Key<\/h2>\n

Consider how utilizing Microsoft Viva Amplify could improve your team\u2019s communications:<\/p>\n