How 90% adoption in digital employee experience drove and aligned Moffitt Cancer Center’s growth initiative

At Moffitt Cancer Center, we come face-to-face with cancer every day, but we also see courage. And it inspires us to be the safest and best place for cancer care – to bring greater hope to every patient we serve. As the only National Cancer Institute-designated Comprehensive Cancer Center based in Florida, Moffitt employs some of the best and brightest minds from around the world. Moffitt is the top cancer hospital in Florida, according to U.S. News & World Report, and has been nationally ranked since 1999. Working at Moffitt is both a career and a mission: to contribute to the prevention and cure of cancer.

“Moffitt’s mission is to contribute to the prevention and cure of cancer,” said Katie Kyne, Moffitt Cancer Center’s director of communications. “We have a strong culture and mission to make a difference in people’s lives.”

However, aligning the workforce behind Moffit’s mission and vision became increasingly harder as the organization grew. Physicians, nurses, specialists, labs and others involved in patient care did not have a way to stay connected with organizational announcements and critical information, such as Moffit’s growth initiative to expand a life sciences campus. That led Moffitt to evaluate their communications strategy and proactively seek out a comprehensive modern intranet solution to support their growth.

“We needed to put in place a single source of truth for communications and engagement, so team members feel connected to what we do — regardless if you’re moving to a new state,” Katie explained. She recognized the need to reinvent the internal communications strategy, leveraging technology to effectively target and communicate with all team members to manage change. Katie focused on forming partnerships with human resources and information technology for collective buy-in, which she knew was one of the keys to digital transformation success.

With HR and IT support, she identified a single, unified platform to connect end-user devices and mobile to streamline communications and create unified digital employee experience for the Moffitt community. “Digital tools are important,” Katie said. “They can enable employees to hear from our immediate leaders and help them get the information they need. It takes the guesswork out of things people need to know.”

With excitement, Katie led the intranet and digital transformation project and defined governance to ensure the right resources for a successful launch. Early HR involvement was critical because they are one of internal communications’ biggest customers as a content partner. Likewise, with IT as the technology partner.

Katie took a quantitative approach — she surveyed groups across the organization in addition to leveraging rudimentary analytics from Moffitt’s outdated SharePoint instance. She then used the data to guide her launch strategy, starting with a soft launch that would target the nursing and research groups. From there, her team worked with leaders to reduce the number of intranet sites from 400 to 100.

“For the first month, we sent daily newsletters using Simpplr to drive people to the intranet. This was an effective transition since they were already familiar with receiving newsletters everyday, believe it or not.” Using Simpplr’s analytics, Katie prioritized targeted launch campaigns to the employee groups who were the most active and engaged. “Not surprisingly, the newsletter became the highest referral source, with the carousel news coming in second.”

The new digital hub, MoffittNet, provided the one source of truth and connection the organization needed to grow and manage change more effectively. “MoffitNet affords us the ability to steer good communications practices and connect with employees and support programs in ways we could not before,” Katie said. “Our IC team can support managers and provide them with the resources and tools they need to drive change.”