3 ways to make affinity month messaging more engaging

Over the last few years, affinity month messaging has become harder for internal communicators to navigate. Employees still want to see themselves reflected in internal messaging as much as they ever have, but the political and social environment has led many organizations to scale back on DEI-related messaging. Internal campaigns like affinity months are often under more scrutiny.

At Southern New Hampshire University, the strategy surrounding affinity month communication stays true to the institution’s mission: It all starts with education.

Kathryn Lapierre, assistant director of internal communications in the Office of External Affairs and Communications at Southern New Hampshire University, told Ragan that SNHU treats affinity month comms pushes like an ongoing employee comms system as opposed to separate static campaigns. It’s a comprehensive process that includes everything from building educational resources to making sure relevant content shows up for employees where they’ll actually see it.

“Our process begins with creating and gaining approval for what we call toolkits,” Lapierre said. “They’re essentially one-to-two-page fact sheets, and they’re generated for educational purposes. What they do is they provide resources and talking points for leaders to use with their teams and for all of our audience to learn more.”

She added that the comms team at SNHU also uses a custom-built template for affinity month stories across platforms, including the intranet and email.

“We follow that template every month and customize that based on what fresh and top-level content we get in from our ERGs, our communities of interest, our communities of connection and everybody from across the institution,” Lapierre said.

With Pride Month coming up in June, that process offers a practical model for communicators trying to recognize observances thoughtfully while DEI-related messaging faces heightened scrutiny. Here are three steps you can take to build effective affinity month messaging:

Before you figure out what kinds of content might support an affinity month, you first need to determine what the audience should learn from a basic overview. At SNHU, Lapierre said the comms team starts by mapping affinity content across the year, then narrowing each month down to the specific observances and employees will encounter in internal messaging.

1. Start with the educational purpose of the content

Lapierre said the team lists out a calendar for the affinity month stories on the school’s intranet, with observances carefully organized and linked back to educational fact sheets.

“The observances are featured in chronological and then alphabetical order, and that’s of course done with equity and equality in mind,” Lapierre told Ragan. “Each one includes an overview or a purpose section, and each section in that story also links to those one-pagers or one-to-two-pagers fact sheets.”

That structure does two jobs at once. It helps employees understand the meaning behind each observance when they see it on the internal platform, and it gives team leaders a resource they can use when they’re talking with their teams.

For internal comms pros, the goal is to make education lay the groundwork. Before moving into more specific employee stories, the overview should answer a few basic questions:

• What is this observance and why is it being recognized?
• What should employees understand after reading the overview?
• What resources can employees use to keep learning?
• What would a manager need in order to talk through this with their team?

The more specific the overview is about its educational purpose, the less the overall campaign has to rely on broad statements about belonging or inclusion. That’s especially important in an environment that’s not always friendly to DEI-related content.

“We publish those resources to make people aware that they exist and to show employees how they can get involved,” Lapierre added. “Those employee networks are designed to create spaces where employees can feel a sense of belonging through social inclusion. We want to tap into that audience as much as possible with these stories.”

2. Get employee voices involved during the drafting process

Once they’ve got the educational purpose of a specific piece of affinity month content figured out, Lapierre and her team seek out employee groups to help them form it. At SNHU, that includes ERGs and affinity groups.

These partnerships help identify events and stories that provide employee perspectives that the internal comms team might not otherwise find.

“Each month, I partner with our manager for people experience to gather additional topical content related to each observance,” Lapierre said. “That can include events, polls generated in partnership with our ERGs and affinity groups, e-cards to share and blogs where we solicit and allow people to share more personal, employee-centered stories.”

She added that her team gathers these stories by asking employees carefully written prompts to elicit the best responses, intending to show the experience of one member of the SNHU community as opposed to a monolithic view.

“That can look like asking, ‘What does Juneteenth mean to you personally?’” Lapierre said. “That helps elicit stories where you really get that genuineness and employee-to-employee connection. During Women’s History Month, for example, we asked how employees are recognizing and uplifting women who inspire them.”

The key is to ask for personal reflection with prompts like these:

• What does this observance mean to you on a personal level?
• Who are you recognizing this month?
• What’s one thing you wish your colleagues understood more about this observance?

These prompts should invite a personal perspective from employees without putting pressure on one employee to represent a whole community.

“The idea is to prompt employees to tell their stories and share them alongside our informative and educational content,” Lapierre said. “That helps us provide a fuller picture of what belonging means at SNHU, while helping everybody learn and feel seen.”

3. Build your channel plan around people who might miss the message

At SNHU, affinity month content is shared through its intranet site, The Source, and promoted via The Weekly Source, a weekly email newsletter that drives readers back to the platform. But Lapierre said the team also has to account for employees who don’t use those channels.

“Not all of our employees have access to The Source and The Weekly Source,” she said. “We have a vibrant and robust adjunct faculty audience who have a separate SharePoint site, so we also curate and post similar content there for that group.”

Internal communicators don’t need to reinvent affinity month content for every subset of every audience, but they do need to consider gaps in outreach. If access gaps aren’t part of the plan, affinity month content can miss the employees it is meant to include.

In addition, Lapierre said that affinity month fact sheets are stored in a way that makes them easier to access and share across platforms.

“The fact sheets are saved externally in Box,” she told Ragan. “Those can be linked to and accessed by any audience from any platform, so we try to make those available to everybody.”

Employee networks also play a role in getting the content into smaller communities where employees are already engaged.

“We encourage and empower our employee network officers and ambassadors to work directly with their groups,” Lapierre said. “They share content regularly through their communities of connection and ERG Teams channels.”

For Lapierre, the clearest impact comes when affinity month content helps someone learn something new or recognize themselves in the message.

“When you can point people to the right resources and see them learn something new, that’s really powerful,” she said. “And when people see themselves reflected in content we’re sharing across the institution, that’s really meaningful.”

Sean Devlin is an editor at Ragan Communications.