From communication silos to a Corporate Newsroom

Corporate Newsroom + Change Management

How we established the roles, processes, routines, and tools needed to communicate with +500,000 people

Initial Situation

A public-law entity had well over 500,000 members to communicate with. To this end, she had a large communications department at her disposal.

The executive board wanted to set up a modern integrated communications department. Therefore, it hired a viadoo Guide to set up a Corporate Newsroom.

Challenge

The top-down change generated the expected emotions. The plans led to great unrest and resistance.

Executives (middle management) were particularly concerned about the loss of privileges.

Among employees, the plans caused fear of additional work, among other things.

Solution

Due to the challegenes, our initial focus was on a detailed discussion with the team on the necessity of a Corporate Newsroom and the timing. The works council was also involved.

In order to make a quick progress, we established together with the change team a new meeting structure among the +40 team members.

After that, the governance, central roles and processes of the Corporate Newsroom were defined. Specially established working groups dealt with key issues.

One team, for example, started checking suitable software tools for joint topic planning, for a collective digital image archive, for a joint and cross-channel content management system (CMS), for a joint monitoring system.

In the following months, those involved were able to familiarize themselves with the selected tools.

Results

In the now regular meetings, the Corporate Newsroom team exchanged ideas on planned topics and developed multimedia stories and messages for each topic.

By sticking to existing content production sites and modernizing their hardware and software, the change team was able to alleviate the concerns in the Corporate Newsroom setup.

At the end of our engagement, the Corporate Newsroom had been designed and the key measures for its successful implementation had been rolled out.

As we naturally take the confidentiality of our clients seriously, we anonymize our success stories. However, the cases are real.