A big part of internal communications is engaging, informing and aligning the organization’s employees but it’s equally important to get buy-in from your executive leadership. Our ROI on Internal Communications Series focuses on how to make a successful business case to get sign off from your organization’s leadership team on key initiatives.
How do you calculate the return on investment (ROI) of a modern intranet?
Teams advocating for a new intranet are often the ones who feel the most day-to-day pain. When Simpplr Research meets with internal communications (IC) and intranet practitioners, ROI conversations usually gravitate toward one or more of the following:
- Time spent administering systems or creating content
- Frustration with clunky or hard to use applications
- Lack of employee logins
- Low employee readership
- Poor employee engagement scores
While these are the most common pain points, it’s critical to understand why your organization’s decision-makers may see these as mere vanity metrics.
To make a successful business case, you need to accomplish the following:
- Show that this challenge is an organizational problem, not isolated to only you and your team. It sounds crass, but your organization is likely indifferent to the fact that your processes are laborious, your systems are clunky, and nobody is reading corporate communications’ updates.
- Map the initiative to a tangible business priority instead of trying to create a new one. The biggest competitor is other conflicting priorities, and unfortunately, intranet projects are notorious for being delayed. The best bet is to show how this will help improve something that’s already top of mind. The good news is that there are many examples of how to do this later in this eBook.
- Show that the status quo is actually worse than doing nothing. This is the only way to establish a sense of urgency.
- Get alignment across departments and leadership. Intranets are built to bring organizations together across departments and locations. A successful intranet business case will need alignment across the organization.
- Formulate a logical justification for how a modern intranet helps the organization. We’ll discuss multiple ways to show how a modern intranet provides business value and ROI.
The ROI on IC blog series aims to (1) share ways to address both your specific pains while showing how an intranet can address broader business challenges and (2) help meet your organization’s most pressing challenges.
