Now that we have your attention: ThoughtFarmer’s new Broadcast feature

Imagine you run a construction company, and you’ve just learned of a chemical spill. You have a few minutes at the most to quickly convey critical time-sensitive information to your onsite workers.

Or maybe you are a communications professional and you have been tasked with ensuring employees are fully aware of new COVID-19 protocols before returning to the office.  

How do you get everyone’s attention? And how can you be sure your workers have access to important news and information?   

Our new Broadcast feature was designed for scenarios like these; scenarios where you need to cut through the noise to get employees’ immediate awareness. 

How is this different from notifications? Or the Required Reading feature? 

Notifications can be a great way to keep employees informed about updates to the pages they follow. However, when we get many notifications, sometimes it is challenging to keep up.  And because of this many of us choose to turn off notifications.

Broadcast alerts are intended to be relevant and not overwhelming. It’s about empowering communications professionals with an easy, efficient way to send quick all employee alerts about important news.

The Required Reading feature, launched earlier this year, allows you to designate essential content on your intranet as a mandatory read. So if you really want to ensure a message is read, you could use Required Reading in conjunction with Broadcast. A scenario could look something like this: 

You are renovating the office, and will require everyone to move their desks prior to the renovation work beginning. You would add the floorplan and seating document to the intranet, and mark it as required reading. Once published you would have the option of broadcasting it to the relevant recipients. 

How does it work? 

Thoughtfarmer administrators can access this feature by simply opening the broadcast center within their ThoughtFarmer intranet. From there they can create a new broadcast (and input the title of the alert, the text, and potential link to a page). Administrators then have the option of broadcasting to both intranet and email channels. The announcement is then ready to send. 

All recipients are then notified on email and in their intranet pages (as a banner). In a dynamic situation like this, the administrator can expire the banner whenever the “all clear” signal is given.

In the example above of a chemical spill, the benefits are clear: instant emergency communications over multiple channels, clear banner display on intranet, email alert, dynamic expiration, employee safety and well-being.

Administrators can later view statistics for the broadcast to discover how many people viewed the banner and how many clicked through the email. This becomes a great source of feedback to improve future content publishing and better audience targeting.

As many of us have come to learn the hard way, there is no such thing as over-communicating critical information. Unexpected office closures, inclement weather—and as we’ve seen this year—a pandemic can all disrupt business. The best way to reduce the potential negative impact of these events is to disseminate information in a time-sensitive format. 

Interested in learning more about our new Broadcast feature in action? Contact us for a live demo.