8 impactful ways to promote your employee ideas campaign

So you’ve ticked off the first few items from your campaign planning checklist. Compelling question, great brand, clear place and process for employees to share their ideas – check, check, check!  But what is your employee engagement strategy? 

As the clock ticks closer to launch day, it’s time to spread the word about the campaign and spark excitement throughout the organisation. Engaging your workfoce is the not-so-secret ingredient for a successful employee ideas campaign, and promoting your campaign is the first step towards this goal.

Level-up on the basics... 

Now, before you get started, ask yourself 'does my team even know what idea management is?'. Might seem obvious but before communicating en masse, make sure your core team is on board and that starts with a basic understanding of what you're trying to do. 

How will I reach my audience?

Shouting about your employee ideas campaign is one thing, but getting your audience to listen and absorb the message is a very different challenge. When you’re competing with a whole host of other company updates, emails and initiatives, even the best promotional content can fall on deaf ears.

There are a few steps you can take to prevent this from happening:

• Leverage multiple channels to increase your brand presence and give employees plenty of opportunities to notice the campaign
• Combine digital and traditional promotional methods to reach every corner of the organisation
• Convey a consistent message across all promotional material
• Garner support from executives to raise the profile of the campaign and push it up the priority list
  

8 methods for campaign promotion

Here’s eight of our favourite promotional channels and methods to help you get the word out about your employee ideas campaign:

• Video
• Printed Assets
• Email
• Company Events
• Team Meetings
• Digital Signage
• Microsites
• Enterprise Social Networks

We’ll explore each channel in more detail below.

1. Video

The holy grail of digital communications.

Versatile, shareable, visually engaging - there are countless benefits of using video as a medium for campaign promotion. A video can capture even the shortest of attention spans and convey a message a lot more effectively than text; if you want to launch your campaign with a bang, harnessing the power of video is a no-brainer. And with the integration of modern tools like online video editors, a multitude of possibilities emerge. Features like  video to text, or adding automatic subtitles ensures your content is accessible to all. More recently new AI voice cloning technology also allows for a variety of voices and accents, potentially personalizing the content for global audiences. There really is no excuses NOT to use videos these days. 

A good launch video should introduce the campaign, provide clear instructions on how employees can get involved, and explain why you are asking people to share their ideas in the first place. It should be informative and inspiring in equal measure.

As much as we all wish for an unlimited comms budget, the reality can often be very different. However, a great launch video can exist in many different forms and we’d like to share a few examples from all ends of the budget spectrum:

High Budget (circa $5,000)

Hiring an agency to produce a professionally tailored launch video can be a worthwhile investment, especially if you plan on running numerous campaigns or opening an ‘Always On’ innovation channel.

Nestle’s InGenius video is a stellar example of this. Their outstanding video really captures the magic of the InGenius Innovation programme and demonstrates the impact of employee ideas on the wider business: 

No matter who you are or what you do, if you are passionate about solving a problem or creating an opportunity, you can submit an idea. InGenius is a way to allow our employees to find a voice and a platform for their ideas.

-----  Nick De Blasio - Employee Innovation at Nestle  -----

Medium Budget (circa $500)

If your budget is somewhere in the middle of the spectrum, an animation-style video might be the answer. Check out this short and snappy video from our friends at Mars, which was used to promote their “Home in time for dinner” campaign:

Simple yet effective…who wouldn’t want to improve their work-life balance?

Low Budget (circa $50) 

Don’t let a modest or non-existent comms budget put you off making a launch video for your campaign. A smartphone and a little bit of imagination is really all you need! 

At Sideways 6, we like to practice what we preach when it comes to listening to employee ideas. When the UK went into lockdown earlier this year, we asked ourselves the most frequently asked question of 2020: “How can we make remote working better for everyone?”

Our DIY launch video for the ‘QuaranTEAM’ campaign is proof that you don’t need any fancy equipment (or even very good bandwidth) to create something memorable:  

And yes, including pets in the video is always a winner!

2. Printed Assets

These days, printed marketing materials are often put on the back-burner in favour of more modern, digital methods. However, producing some tangible assets alongside your digital promotion can really help to boost your employee ideas campaign.

Brochures, magazines and newsletters have a long shelf-life and tend to get passed around from one person to the next. A shiny new poster is often more eye-catching than a page on a website and a physical flyer on your desk is impossible to ignore.

Planning on promoting your employee ideas campaign at an event? If you are, good old printed materials are your friend! Giving attendees something tangible to hold and take home as a memento can help keep the campaign at the front of people’s minds, even after the event is over.

This was the exact approach taken by AstraZeneca when promoting their global AZ2025 campaign. AZ2025 centered around a landmark crowdsourcing campaign, designed to immerse 64,000 employees across 120 countries in the company strategy.  

The campaign was launched with a series of roadshows and town halls, supported by an impressive array of communications including printed assets. AZ2025 received 77,000 ideas, comments and likes over the course of three weeks, so it’s safe to say those promotional materials did the trick!

AZ2025 Printed Assets

There are countless options at your disposal when it comes to printed assets, but here are some of our favourites. Dress them up in your campaign branding like AstraZeneca have and you’re good to go:

• Posters
• Brochures
• Magazines
• Desk Flyers
• Business cards
• Newsletters
• Loyalty cards
• Postcards

3. Email

The words ‘email newsletter’ probably make you think of the collection of unread, uninspiring automated emails clogging up your inbox from companies you don’t remember signing up to.

Therefore, it’s unsurprising that innovation teams are often hesitant to use this method to promote employee ideas campaigns.  

However, when used correctly, email can be great way of sending out campaign content to a targeted audience - as you can see from this fine example from the MAGIC team at Centrica:

HubSpot have put together some helpful tips on keeping mass email communications effective, summarised below along with our best practice advice:

• Use an email builder - create your own set of templates specific to the campaign
• Include visuals and imagery – let your campaign branding shine through!
• Add an appropriate call to action – include a link to the campaign group and instructions for employees to share their ideas
• Design for all devices – make sure the email is readable on desktop, tablet and mobile

If you don’t have the resource to create a specific email newsletter for the campaign, why not leverage the wider company newsletter instead? A guaranteed audience awaits.

4. Company Events

There’s nothing like a town hall or company event to get everyone into a room (or more likely a Teams or Zoom meeting!) at the same time. With a captive audience ready and waiting, these occasions are a golden opportunity for campaign promotion.

One of the best ways to promote your employee ideas campaign at large-scale company events or meetings is through the mouthpiece of your executive team. If senior stakeholders are the ones creating a buzz around the campaign, the excitement is far more likely to trickle down through the organisation.

Getting senior leadership buy-in ensuring they viewed the campaign as something important, was paramount to success.

-----  Scott Wilkins - Enterprise Innovation Director at AstraZeneca, reflecting on AZ2025  -----

AstraZeneca’s AZ2025 campaign was promoted at a series of company events

5. Team Meetings

Have you ever signed up to a course, talk or webinar because your teammates or manager were going? Did their excitement rub off on you?

Thought so. Herd mentality is a surprisingly powerful concept which you can use to your advantage when promoting your employee ideas campaign. The chats around the water cooler can carry a lot of influence and word of mouth can certainly help increase engagement. Informal team meetings are a great place to plant these seeds.

We’ve already discussed the importance of executive sponsorship. This will have a guaranteed positive effect on how employees perceive the campaign and their willingness to share their ideas. Equally important are the middle managers; they are the perfect candidates for promoting the campaign in more informal meetings and encouraging their teams to get involved.

Another tactic is to create a network of ‘champions’ to help you promote the campaign at events. Find a group of people who are passionate about employee ideas and empower them to spread their enthusiasm to others.

'Lunch and Learn' sessions are a great way for your champions to promote the campaign in a structured, yet informal setting.

6. Digital Signage

The modern-day billboard. We see them in airports, bars, shops, waiting rooms, you name it.  

Besides displaying flight times and happy hour menus, digital signage has become a popular communication tool for companies needing to reach employees across multiple locations. A big, eye-catching message displayed across a TV screen is pretty hard to miss!

Mars Digital Signage for "Home In Time For Dinner" Campaign

The flexibility and customisability of digital signage makes it the perfect option for campaign promotion. You can switch up the screen content and tailor different messages for different audiences, keeping your communications fresh and interesting.

The benefits of digital signage are not limited to office-based employees. Most of the big players on the market have extended their functionality to cater for the ever-increasing remote workforce, enabling companies to share real-time updates to all screens big and small.

So rest assured, your audience will be able to enjoy your beautiful digital displays no matter where they are working.

7. Microsites

Good things often come in small packages.

Bigger than a landing page but smaller than a website, a microsite is the perfect one-stop-shop for delivering focused content and information around your campaign.

Generally speaking, a microsite can help you achieve a number of things:

• Highlight a specific campaign
• Target a specific audience or personas
• Tell a short story
• Inspire a specific call-to-action

Source: HubSpot

Nestle’s InGenius microsite does all this and much more. As the InGenius employee ideas programme has flourished, the microsite has become the home for Nestle’s buzzing innovation community. Perfectly packaged in a user-friendly and engaging layout, the site is brimming with big-picture stats and stories that demonstrate the power of employee ideas:

Nestle InGenius Microsite 

When a new challenge is launched, employees know exactly where to go to find out more and get involved:

Nestle InGenius Microsite Challenges Page

KITKAT Ice Cream Challenge… don’t mind if we do!

8. Enterprise Social Networks

And last but by no means least, the place where the magic happens: your Enterprise Social Network. The home of employee ideas.

The campaign promotion tactics discussed in this article are all about driving your audience to Workplace, Viva Engage, Teams or wherever you are asking them to share their ideas. The ideas group itself is often seen as the destination, rather than part of the journey, and is commonly overlooked as a channel for campaign promotion. 

Don’t fall into this trap! Enterprise Social Networks were literally built for companies to boost collaboration and engagement, so we encourage you to make your ideas group as attractive and exciting as the campaign itself.

Besides covering the group from top to toe in branded comms, there are a few nifty features in Enterprise Social Networks that you can leverage for campaign promotion:  

• Group description – include the campaign question and clear instructions on how you want people to structure their posts e.g. “please post the problem and your solution in 50-200 words”
• Pinned post – create a rich formatted post in the ideas group to highlight the goals for the campaign, attach an eye-catching image and pin it for everyone to see!
• Supporting files – attach any useful documentation and reference these in your pinned post
• Banner image – give your group a clear identity with a branded banner
  

Our friends at Discovery used all these tricks and more to promote the launch of their employee ideas programme ‘Spark Innovation’. Every inch of the Spark Workplace group was covered in bold and beautiful branding to get employees excited about the campaign:

Spark banner image

The Spark group description set out a powerful mission statement and made the purpose of the campaign really clear for employees: 

Spark group description

The Spark Workplace group was the perfect platform to highlight key campaign information and instructions for submitting ideas: 

Spark idea submission journey

Many posts featured the 'Spark Heroes', the group of champions responsible for driving campaign engagement. What better way to make a call for ideas? 

Spark Workplace post

Take a leaf out of Discovery’s book and make your Enterprise Social Network the front and centre for campaign promotion.

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Feeling inspired? Pick your favourite promotion methods from this list (or use them all!) and watch your employee ideas campaign go off with a bang.

Our integrated idea management software brings all the above together under one roof, and so could be a great solution for promoting the ideas from your employees.