How to get deskless workers to engage with newsletters

While newsletters often contain important and useful information for employees, they can sometimes prove difficult to get employees to engage with. This is particularly true when you’re charged with getting through to deskless workers. But communicators needn’t despair or move away from this method of employee outreach — there are ways to breathe life back into your internal comms newsletters.

At Ragan’s Employee Communications and Culture Conference in Chicago this April 9-11 in Chicago, Mary Beth McCloy, director of corporate communications at Goddard Systems, will share her experience in overhauling her organization’s approach to newsletter creation and distribution. With the knowledge that most of her company’s employees are deskless, McCloy and her team reconsidered their outreach methods and committed to finding a way to present newsletters in a way that isn’t just informative but also engaging and enjoyable.

Overcoming newsletter complexities

McCloy and her team realized their newsletters needed an overhaul once they took stock of their audience. She told Ragan about two complicating factors that led to the rethinking of the strategy.

“Over 80% of the global workforce is deskless and they often lack consistent access to traditional communication channels,” she said. “The challenge becomes even more complex when communicating with franchisees, who aren’t corporate employees but independent business owners.”

McCloy added that her team undertook an audit to figure out what exactly was needed to drive people to their newsletter content. With Goddard Systems as the manager of the Goddard Schools network, the team needed to reach out to teachers and other education employees.

“We conducted a one-year benchmark analysis of our employee and franchisee newsletters,” she said. “We started with very little.”

Deskless workers and effective timing

Since Goddard Systems is the manager of the Goddard Schools network, the team needed to reach out to teachers and other education employees. McCloy said that while Goddard has an app to help employees with their curriculum in the classroom, it doesn’t have a dedicated one for employee communications. This required some creative thinking on her team’s part, and they drew inspiration from TikTok’s short-form videos.

“We redesigned the newsletters with a mobile-first focus, using shorter, visually appealing content to drive attention,” McCloy said. “We also leaned into video content inspired by social media trends, which made the newsletters more fun and relatable.”

McCloy added that her team had to consider timing on all of their newsletter releases. This included working to get comms sent out during break periods (including nap times for little ones at Goddard Schools) and travel days for employees. In this way, the team maximized engagement potential.

“Our team works in early childhood education, so we know that fun is the best way to get people to learn and engage!” McCloy said.

Gamification and innovative design

McCloy’s team knew that the more facets of engagement they could add to their newsletters, the better chance they had to keep Goddard employees coming back for more. McCloy said that her team used gamification tactics, including inspiration from video games with “Easter eggs” laden throughout the newsletters to drive interest.

“By adding these hidden rewards and findables throughout our newsletters, we aimed for another facet of engagement to keep people reading and interacting,” McCloy said. “We’ve done puzzles where each week we release a new puzzle piece to encourage people to try to identify future event locations. We’ve also done guessing competitions for raffles for Goddard School swag. All of these incentives are designed to drive interest in content or to build excitement for upcoming events.”

The team also added a new section to each newsletter featuring Goddard employees, encouraging them to share news from their schools and wider communities. McCloy said this played into both the culture of friendly competition and shared goals of different Goddard franchisees and educators.

“Tailoring content specifically for franchisees and employees while keeping it concise and mobile-friendly also helped make the content feel more valuable and relevant,” she said. “We know that people like to see and read about themselves and their colleagues, so this strategy capitalizes on that desire.”

McCloy added that after the newsletter overhaul, the metrics revealed that newsletter engagement went up nearly 30%. She chalked this up to her team’s ability to get creative and lean into methods that might not traditionally be ascribed to newsletter distribution in years past.

“For us, informal and funny content tended to perform better and drew people in,” she said. “By taking inspiration from social media trends, we’ve been able to build engagement and camaraderie in our culture.”

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