Measurement and strategy. They were the two subjects that really jumped out of Poppulo’s Inside IC Global Survey last year, for all the wrong reasons. We expected measurement to be an issue, a consistently stubborn problem, for internal communicators because it always has been. However, now more than ever it’s an absolutely critical element of any effective communicators job. But it’s so often perceived as being too difficult. And that ill-founded perception exists despite the emergence of powerful and easy-to-use software developed specifically for the internal communications industry by Poppulo, which not only measures and analyzes communication outputs, but also outcomes. Nevertheless, we were still taken aback at the scale of the problem when the results of our survey came in. On the positive side, over 95% of the 700+ IC professionals from around the world agreed that measuring their activity was important, but rather alarmingly, more than half admitted it was the activity they “spent least time on each week”. Tellingly, two out of three said they felt communications “difficult to measure”. As a result of these findings we decided to commission one of the world’s leading experts in organizational communication measurement, Angela Sinickas, to create The Ultimate Guide to Measuring Internal Communications, which we published earlier this year, to a tremendously positive response. It has prompted us to focus similar attention to the second standout issue from our Global Survey, strategy. Successful companies share one common trait, they spend a lot of time and energy making and executing plans to insure they continue to flourish. Yet, when it comes to internal communications there rarely is a strategy. In fact, our Global Survey showed that ‘only one in three internal communications departments (35%) has a long-term strategy in place for internal communications”. This, regrettably, is in line with other international research. The one-in-three ratio is even more alarming as even in the minority of cases where strategies do exist it’s reasonable to assume that not all are as good as they should be. This is the backdrop to our decision to create the Ultimate Guide to Internal Communications Strategy, and why we commissioned Gregg Apirian and Mike Lepis of Vignette, the Employee Experience Agency, to write it. This accompanying infographic has been extracted from the strategy whitepaper. the accompanying infographic has been extracted from the strategy whitepaper.