A look inside Comcast’s fix for communications overload

Today’s workforce has four generations with a wide breadth of preferences and desires for communication. For internal comms pros, that means approaching each generation with different outreach strategies while simultaneously realizing generations aren’t monolithic.

At Ragan’s Internal Communications Conference this October, Darnell McAlpin, director of ambassadorship and 360 campaigns at Comcast, told the audience that his team found that its old approach of a one-size-fits-all internal comms strategy just wasn’t cutting it.

“About a year ago, my boss and I sat down and realized our engagement was dropping across every channel — newsletters, digital signage, email, huddles, you name it, McAlpin said. “Less clicks, less opens, less connection. Employees were even saying they no longer felt part of the business.”

McAlpin recognized that part of the problem was an overload of internal comms information with no particular sense of audience targeting.

“We wanted to make something for everyone — every generation and every role,” he said. “But what they experienced was, and I quote, ‘drinking communications from a fire hose.’ We were doing too much. In trying to make things inclusive, we overwhelmed them. They didn’t know what was important anymore.”