How Comcast rethought its intergenerational communications personas

In a workplace with numerous fragmented channels, it can be challenging to determine which channels and methods are most effective for communicators when engaging employees across generational lines. However, the more you can personalize messaging for specific demographics and groups, the more likely you are to get the response you’re looking for.

At Ragan’s Internal Communications Conference in Seattle Oct. 14-16, Darnell McAlpin, director of 360 Moments and Ambassadorship at Comcast, will share insights on how communicators can optimize their comms strategies to garner engagement among their colleagues, regardless of their generation or employee persona group. He’ll walk attendees through how his team reimagined its outreach methods along more refined lines as opposed to a catch-all comms strategy.

McAlpin said that Comcast’s overhaul of its internal communications outreach strategy began with an audit.

“We started with an employee pulse check survey to see how our communication channels were landing or not landing, and where different employee groups preferred to go for content,” McAlpin said. “Comcast has a wide range of generations and job types, from people driving vans to those in construction or corporate offices — we needed to understand how each wanted to be communicated to. The data showed a huge variation across generations. That’s when we started using the data to inform decisions and built out personas for each generation to make our strategy more real and actionable.”

Intergenerational comms and channel choice

Depending on the generation or employee persona, communicators may need to provide the same information to certain groups in different ways. McAlpin told Ragan that a major part of his team’s audit focused on the channels each generation preferred for obtaining internal information. He said that the data showed three major channel preferences — email, Viva Engage, and Comcast’s intranet platform.

Email was still king, especially for Gen X and Boomers who wanted information that was simple, direct, and didn’t require a bunch of clicks,” McAlpin said. “Viva Engage was our most polarizing platform. Some loved it as a social space and others wanted nothing to do with it. And Comcast Now— the intranet platform —was where our more tenured employees went for updates and company news. So we stopped guessing which platform to prioritize and started using data to understand where content actually lands.”

Drilling down into employee personas

With lots of frontline and corporate workers alike, Comcast has a wide swath of employees to reach.

“Someone in the field is probably more mobile-centric — they want quick, scannable emails,” McAlpin said. “Someone in the office might prefer more long-form content on the intranet.”

He added that his team thought geography might make a difference in how teams preferred their communications. But instead, the amount of time an employee has spent at Comcast proved to be an interesting difference-maker in terms of persona creation.

“What made the biggest difference was tenure,” he said. “A newer employee might use tools differently than someone who’s been here for 30 years, regardless of age. So we layered those insights to make our personas more realistic and useful.”

McAlpin also said they worked hard to make each persona feel relatable to the team.

“We picked the most popular name from each generation,” he explained. “So we said, ‘This is how Bob likes to be talked to, this is how Jake likes to be spoken to.’ It helps make the strategy real.”

But while generational personas did make up a major part of the revamp process, the end-all be-all. Not every employee age group will have the same preferences — some from different generations may share traits based on job type.

“A Gen-Z field tech might behave more like a Gen-X manager when it comes to communication,” he said. “So the goal became to match the message to the work style, not just the birth year.”

Repackaging the message based on the persona

Putting together effective employee personas can make the difference between blasting a message out with little hope of engagement and truly getting the audience engagement you need.

“We realized early on that the same story can’t sound or look the same everywhere,” McAlpin said. “On Comcast Now, we write in a more traditional, long-form tone because that’s where our more tenured employees go when they want detail.”

He added that for younger employees, the comms team adjusts its strategy to a more quick-hit style of content delivery.

“On Viva Engage, it’s completely different. That’s where our Millennial and Gen Z employees live, so we go short-form — sometimes even TikTok-style videos — to grab attention quickly.

He also said that newsletters have become a content unifier of sorts for all the personas.

“Newsletters have become our push mechanism,” McAlpin said. “They connect all worlds, nudging people toward the platform that fits them best.”

Even when you’ve got a singular message to share with your employees, you can adjust it based on the audience demographic. McAlpin said that Comcast uses that strategy by taking persona, channel and tone into consideration each time an internal message needs to go out.

“We might post the same announcement in multiple places, but we adjust the tone every time,” he said. “We meet employees where they scroll, not where we wish they would scroll.”

Register for the Internal Communications Conference here.

Sean Devlin is an editor at Ragan Communications.