Energy company fills staff magazine with in-depth features

“There’s definitely a place for online, and I’m a big fan of online, but there’s a place for print,” says Russ Peters, senior strategist for executive and employee communications. “We figured if we’re going to do print, then we’re going to do print really, really well.”

The goal of Link, winner of the 2011 Ragan Employee Communications Award for best employee magazine, is to “really try to make it about people and about the strategies of the organization in a way that people could really dig into, in a way that wouldn’t work online,” Peters says.

Enbridge pulls that off by taking its time with each issue—”We aspire to be out three times a year,” Peters says—and reaching outside its corporate bubble, hiring freelancers to put together stories and a design firm to package its content with just the right look.

A big shift

About four years ago, before Peters’ arrival at Enbridge, the company started looking at ways to spice up its print employee publication.

“We used to publish it as a fairly standard corporate newsletter,” Peters says. “It was templated and the usual fare you would see in a corporate newsletter. We decided to make it a little more useful for the readers and for the organization.”