Snackable content: How doughnuts proved a newsletter’s effectiveness

It’s National Doughnut Day, and what better time to discuss the waistline fortifiers so beloved in American workplaces?

So let us consider the case of Walker Sands, a Chicago PR agency that used doughnuts as a lure to test how its employee newsletter was being read and shared.

Walker Sands recently emailed staff members to let them know they could grab a ring of the sugary fried dough in a conference room, the company reports in a Doughnut Day-themed study.

“Every week we send out an employee newsletter, and it contains a lot of important and semi-important information, and we just wanted to see if anybody was reading it,” company president Mike Santoro said in an interview.

The announcement drew 40 of Walker Sands’ 65 employees. (The rest were presumably trampled in the stampede to the conference room.) When they showed up, they were welcomed not only with the free treats, but by a colleague with a clipboard who asked, “How did you hear of the doughnuts?” Santoro says.

Heard it through the grapevine