How Western Union used mobile to reach its global workforce

Creating iPhone apps for employees who all favor BlackBerries or failing to test internal videos to make sure they work for people with low bandwidth pretty much ensures that your fledging mobile employee communications campaign will do a belly flop. Before the first mobile newsletter or text alert goes out to the workforce, you need to do some solid research on exactly how and where employees can receive and respond to these messages.

Western Union took this approach long before launching its pilot programs for mobile employee communications in January. This past December, Raul Duany, Western Union’s VP of corporate affairs for global workplace communications, oversaw a large-scale survey of the company’s 7,000 employees. Most are based in the United States, but many others are in Canada, Lithuania, the Philippines and Latin America.

Even before embarking on its mobile communications program, Duany, who shifted to the employee communications department of the Englewood, Colo., company a year ago, sought insights on the employee mix.