Top tips to nail your internal memos

Internal memos don’t have to be boring lines of staid text that appear in employees’ inboxes every so often. When you construct them the right way, they can bring your employees closer to your leaders and serve as a cultural unifier.

Mary Beth McCloy, director of corporate communications at Goddard Systems LLC, told Ragan that rather than approaching a memo as a news dump, comms pros should lean into their storytelling instincts to build intrigue and increase engagement.

“Look for a way to infuse stories into your memos,” McCloy told Ragan. “Memos are often very fact-based, but sometimes adding in a testimonial or relatable example can take a memo from good to impactful.”

Getting your memo together

McCloy said that a deep knowledge of the organization’s tone and voice is the first step to cover in the memo-drafting process. Employees will be able to sniff a lack of authenticity from a mile away, so keep it within the company’s values and cultural language.

“For example, you may be able to infuse fish puns into an organization memo to drive employees to an online phishing training,” McCloy said. “But for memos about leadership shifts, it is best to keep the tone understanding and professional.”

McCloy gave Ragan a few best practices for constructing a memo that’ll hit home with an employee audience.

• Humanize leaders with your memos. In many cases, memos bear the signature of a company’s leadership at the bottom. The content within an internal memo is a golden opportunity to humanize leaders to an employee base and strengthen shared cultural ties around shared values that are mentioned in the memo. “Memos that have worked well for us include messages from leadership that tie in their personal experiences or anecdotes to help relay business information,” McCloy said. “One leader shared a great story of an influential leadership training program he participated in to help drive home the importance of teamwork and strategic thinking.”
• Consider bullets when applicable. McCloy said that these can bring focus to the major points — that’s especially helpful when you might only get someone’s attention for a few seconds as they work through their emails. “These draw the eye and help keep content organized and easy to read,” she said.
• Follow the metrics. McCloy said that keeping track of how memos perform once they’re published can provide invaluable communications intelligence going forward. She shared that a deep dive into what employees do and don’t engage with can help adjust everything from formatting to wording. “By checking metrics on click rates, you can decipher if your audience prefers links as buttons or hyperlinked text within a story,” she said. “Additionally, you can see which messages are driving more audience engagement by checking open and read rates. This may impact who you list as the sender.” She added that memo metrics can help inform timing on a message as well. “If you know that your audience really cares about compensation information, you will want to send that memo when you know a large majority of your audience has access to their email or intranet content,” McCloy said.
• Learn from misfire memos. Not every internal memo is going to resonate the way you hope. The ability to learn from less-than-desirable reception is key to gaining the knowledge that’ll help you build ironclad memos going forward “We recently revamped some IT processes within our organization,” she told Ragan. “We heard from our audience after the fact that our communications were too dense and it was hard to find the most important information. We did a reset where we built a timeline visual to include in all communications going forward. We also worked to edit with a very critical eye to make project updates simpler and more concise.”
• Lean on assistance when you needed — even if it’s virtual. McCloy recommended that once a memo is drafted, communicators should look to colleagues who can help deepen the context of the material. “Reach out to a subject matter expert to get any factual information you may need to infuse into the message.” For example, for a memo about changing benefits offerings the memo can include a section with commentary from an HR leader.

For deeper insights and prime examples of newsletter comms, join Ragan’s Communications Leadership Council.

Sean Devlin is an editor at Ragan Communications. In his spare time he enjoys Philly sports and hosting trivia.