B2P: how to get 3,000 news in 5 years for a corporate publication in an IT company of> 100 people

    The Internet does not answer the question “How to collect corporate news in IT companies for Business to Personal publications?”. Meanwhile, he is very interested in PR specialists and eychars. It is obvious to everyone: employees need to be informed about what is happening in the company, to tell them news from neighboring projects, development plans, somehow convey to the bosses' expectations about corporate culture, goals ... But how to collect this information? Who to ask? How to present it?

    For 5 years, we at EastBanc Technologies IT company wrote 3,108 news in our corporate wall-paper called “Summary”. Approximately 2.5 news daily. In this article we will explain how and why we do it. In the course of the narrative, we will show the results of a survey devoted to the summary, in which 54% of the employees participated.



    For reference:EastBanc Technologies is an IT company from Novosibirsk with more than 100 employees. We are engaged in the automation of business processes ( one , two , three ), the development of mobile applications ( one , two , three ) and the design ( one , two ). We have been blogging on Habré since 2013.

    When and how EastBanc Technologies began publishing a B2P newspaper


    On Monday, September 10, 2012 (5 years ago!), The first issue of the bulletin came out, consisting of 1 sheet filled with four news items. Since then, we haven’t slept a single Monday and issued almost 250 bulletins, which we have been posting all five years at the same time, in the same form, on the cork board in the corporate kitchen.







    “You are such advanced IT specialists all yourself, why on paper?”


    The format of the wall newspaper is discouraging to many. Immediately answer the top 5 questions:

    1. Yes, we have a corporate portal and corporate mail.
    2. No, we are not going to move the summary there.
    3. Yes, there are people who don’t like it.
    4. Yes, most like it.
    5. And finally, yes, we are ready to improve this format, provided that it helps us communicate information more effectively to people.



    Why is the question of such simplicity and unpretentiousness important for us?


    The need to publish a corporate combat leaflet appeared when the company saw rapid growth: in 2012, the leadership changed, the processes were put in order, and the intensive attraction and hiring of new employees began. There were more people and projects, information passed on by word of mouth did not reach other departments and even neighboring rooms. When the number of employees grew to 50, and the number of projects - up to 20, it became clear that we need to launch fast and transparent information.

    And since one of our corporate values ​​has always been “To hell with everything, take it and do it!”, Without any hesitation, meetings and editorial boards, we created such a wall format, with A4, buttons, layout in Word, an informal language and style.

    The reports always had a lot of humor, colloquial words, memes, slang, Englishism - language purists would not like it.

    Over time, people, time, resources appeared, but the summary remained emphasized ascetic and informal.

    What tasks does the summary solve?


    1. Summarizes the results of work and translates corporate values ​​of the company.

      Our values ​​are simple: to be experts, to be able to solve any technical issue, but at the same time not get off the ground and delve into business processes so as to create information systems that not only automate the processes of organizations, but solve real tangible problems for living people. We are trying to drag this long thought through the canvas of the narrative of each weekly report. The summary gives each of us an understanding of what global business we are involved in. So that a person does not see the company through a narrow window of personal tasks.

    2. Informs about everything that happened in the company:

      • project news
      • new employees
      • office news: new furniture, cabinets, the emergence of a corporate library, upcoming corporate events ...
      • news of personal life of colleagues: weddings, homelands, anniversaries, graduations ...
    3. Helps overcome geographic fragmentation.

      The company has offices in Novosibirsk and Washington, both issue reports and exchange them. Office employees are working on joint projects, and it is important for them to understand the agenda of their colleagues and maintain a common informational background despite 12 hours of difference. The Russian bulletin is also translated into English for English-speaking colleagues.
    4. People stretch their legs, standing in front of the board and reading a summary. And what is relevant for programmers :) More than once we were asked to send it by mail or transfer it to the portal, but the editors always answer - physical exercises combined with information perfectly affect our health!
    5. It maintains the oldest corporate tradition - every Monday morning to receive the news of the past week with coffee and immediately discuss it with colleagues.




    4 years ago we added buns to this tradition, which exactly at 9 in the morning of every Monday brings our director. How it affected the perception of information was not measured, but according to the sensations - everyone is happy with the supplement.

    How many people write?


    Writes 1 PR man. He begins to gather news on Thursday at lunch, and finishes writing by Friday evening. The director’s review is summarized and monitored until Monday, pending printing and posting.

    How do we collect news?


    The summary consists of 5-15 sheets. The largest report had 23 news. Sometimes it all fits on one cork board, sometimes it does not fit on two - it depends on the season.

    This news collects PR. There is skype chat, which consists of 16 people - all the newsmakers of the company (team leaders, project managers, directors, project office employees). On Thursday, they start throwing their news items in 1-2 sentences there. Then the PR man reaches everyone with his feet and asks more in detail.

    How to get news from a programmer / PM'a / team lead


    Often, more than half of the chat participants are silent. Mostly technical colleagues like to be silent. We must go to them and get the news in a fair battle.

    Every PR man in an IT company knows this problem: you go to a technical colleague, ask what new, great, important for mankind he made in a week, and he tells you that RELEASE THROUGH, WE ALREADY WRITTEN ABOUT IT WITHIN PREPARATION, AT ALL DID NOT HAPPEN. Is it familiar after all?

    But the old wise PR man knows that any enterprise can be viewed from different technical angles, and it’s never too much to talk about it again and again, share new designs, and interview different project participants. So we advise you not to be excused, but to act as follows:

    1. First, collect a weekly feedback from sellers, and on its basis, drive it to PM. During this time, the customer could heartily thank for something, tell a story related to UX, or, on the contrary, swear, on the basis of all this it will be possible to catch a PM in a word and talk about interesting news.
    2. To collect new designs with new functionality, come with a printout, poke your finger and ask: “And what is this? What is this for? How did you do that? ”
    3. Start asking questions specifically about projects.

      For example:

      - Well, on Leroy Merlin's “Negotiations”, didn’t they do anything at all?
      - Yes, they did so, one trifle.
      - Come on, tell me about a trifle.
      - Yes, improvements. Then they screwed the button, there the scroll was removed.
      - Why did they remove the scroll?
      - Not all users guessed to scroll.
      “And what happened?”
      - The negotiation rooms were incorrectly booked.
      “And what of that?”
      - The confusion was with the reservation.
      - Well, now, correctly booked?
      - Now, it seems, complaints no longer come.

      So, unnoticed by the victim, you cooked porridge from an ax, and you have a posh life story about how, with the help of your company, thousands of people will now be able to easily use the meeting rooms.

      But the trick is that when you ask the manager about all his work at once, and he leads, for example, 5 projects, he certainly will not immediately realize which things are outstanding and which are really routine. You need to have a good understanding of his projects and ask specific questions.


    What do we write and how do we illustrate?


    Usually the most difficult thing is to write news about the project. It is important to observe sufficient technical detail, but not to overdo it so that the reader does not wilt in the middle.

    At the beginning of the news, we are sure to give a retrospective, recalling what the project is about and for whom, what it has already been written about, what events took place on it. Because not everyone remembers the details of large long projects.

    If this is a successful release, be sure to thank all the participants. If not successful, carefully explain why the fail happened, and tell the plan of salvation.

    If the news is about negotiations with a potential customer, we tell you where he came from: on recommendation, from Habr, on Google request, from a conference ... It is very important to explain to people how our external communication channels work, because they themselves help us write news and cases on a site, articles on Habr and speak at conf.

    There are always a lot of photographs in the summary: application screenshots, photos from business trips, from customer offices, a new souvenir - it is very rare when we have nothing to illustrate the news because: 1. A PR man walks around the office and takes pictures of everything that suits. 2. For five years, newsmaker employees have also been trained to send proofs to a special chat.

    Even our customers know about the bulletin, read it when they are in our office, and habitually pose at the end of the meeting so that they can not only tell, but also show their colleagues how everything went. New customers are also positive, and even give their internal corporate publications. For example, here we presented such a newspaper to VSK, there is an article about a mobile application that we developed for them.



    For 5 years we have placed 3,293 pictures in the bulletins!

    What do not write?


    Hard with bad news. We do not like to bring them, we do not like to scold anyone in the report. We’ll be careful, for which sometimes accusations of agitation and embellishment of reality come from colleagues. Working on it.



    Custom Report Formats


    Sometimes we publish reports in the format of infographics, such as this one, dedicated to the decade of the company:



    There are also annual reports with totals that are posted on the board on the last working day of the year. Special reports fully dedicated to one interesting project or past corporate event. Photo reports consisting of solid photos (for example, when everyone goes to work conditionally on January 14 or May 10, a summary with photos from the Instagrams of our colleagues hangs on the board, telling who spent the holidays):



    Sometimes we release a humorous summary, for example, by Friday 13:



    And once they even released a bulletin dedicated to bulletins. In honor of the anniversary two hundredth. They collected the accumulated facts and figures and hung such corridors with such posters:



    What are the problems


    In five years, the company has doubled, there are already more than a hundred people.

    1. In fact, we have two fractions - a weekly summary, which finely subdivides the picture of life in the company, and annual, covering it over a long time period.

      As a result, employees often don’t have an understanding of the intermediate results: weekly news updates like “Advance to Release”, “Finished Sprint” and “Sent Comprom”, and annual ones are immediately dumbfounded by global results. We probably need more quarterly summaries of news on the scale of “Released release” so that an understanding flag appears in the minds of colleagues at some important milestones.
    2. The people do not fit in the kitchen. You may need to hang up the summary in several strategic places.
    3. At times cheers-patriotic tone. At some point, protecting employees from stress, we were very interested in it. Although at the beginning the reports were extremely honest, and those who failed the release, for example, were listed by name. Obviously, there is a middle ground, and we will find it.
    4. Opaque heading. News is now distributed roughly as follows:

      • Weddings, homelands.
      • New employees.
      • Projects, project, projects, here in a bunch of training.
      • Office news, corporate events.

      As a result, on the third point, readers are dizzy, because the news of long large projects for S7, Leroy Merlin, Ingosstrakh, VSK is mixed up there, there are a lot of these projects, and it’s hard for people who have no relation to them to understand structure.

    These problems became clear simply in the course of life and according to the results of a simple audit that we conducted to clarify the question “How to improve reports?”

    How did the audit


    We decided to simply interview people in Google forms. The results were not shocking and even pleased in some places. The editors knew about the problems that were identified by colleagues in the survey, but the percentage of positively perceiving reports was so high, did not guess and was pleasantly surprised.

    54% of the company’s employees participated in the survey. 92% of respondents find the summary useful:


    What will we do according to the audit results


    Apparently, we will succumb to the fashion of editorial policies and (with the help of Maxim Ilyakhov’s advice ) we’ll write our own, as applied specifically to the summary. It is necessary to formulate the idea of ​​the summary (once again taking into account the results of the survey), determine the topics and headings, their sequence, structure of notes depending on their content, rules of illustration. Based on the fact that many people don’t understand from the reports what goals their departments are facing, it’s up to them to figure out how to communicate this.

    In addition, we will solve the problem of a small kitchen, we have generated several comic options:

    • Copies of the summary in strategic places: above printers, in front of sofas in the hallway.
    • Snap-in system: a new summary sheet appears in the same place for exactly 24 hours, then it disappears and the next one appears Whoever didn’t have time didn’t get informed.
    • In the morning, promoters give out a bulletin in the corridor, shouting the most interesting news through a megaphone.
    • Let's get a second kitchen, finally!

    This is all, of course, jokes, but we are seriously thinking about every component of the truth in them.

    If this post seems interesting to the audience, we’ll publish the second part and tell you how we improved readability and what we did for this. Take the survey!

    Only registered users can participate in the survey. Please come in.

    Do you want a continuation in which we will describe how we wrote the redpolicy and how this affected the information content and readability of the summary?

    • 90% Yes, write another article 9
    • 10% No, no longer interesting 1

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