15 ways customers used Sparrow in 2020

Internal communications became dramatically more important in 2020, and Sparrow was there helping our customers connect with their workforce in ways that made a substantial difference.

“[Sparrow] has proven invaluable during our response to COVID-19. It’s the recognized spot for getting valid info”
Patrice Cloutier, Hamilton Health Sciences, Manager of Corporate Communications

1. Saving time, and making it easy, to communicate across many channels at once
Sparrow clients are communicating with their workforce via multiple channels including email, intranet, MS Teams, and brandable mobile apps. They are pushing their content out to all those channels with the push of a button. Sparrow is taking care of formatting, notification, cross-posting, and delivery. They focus on the content; Sparrow takes care of the rest. This omnichannel approach has allowed Sparrow clients to reach field workers that are notoriously difficult to engage with. Field workers have several choices to engage with your content from our brandable mobile apps, the MS Teams mobile app, to a responsible Intranet. The choice is theirs.

2. Sending push notifications for crucial, breaking and time-sensitive announcements
Sparrow supports push notifications in our mobile apps, through a chatbot in Microsoft Teams and via email through our personalized email newsletter. Push notifications can considerably enhance your employee experience. They are less intrusive than other forms of user engagement and can effectively drive attention and engagement by providing useful information. Use push notifications to message your employees when they might need a reminder or alert about something. Employees find great value in receiving push notifications that alert them of updates or new policies, and other time-sensitive topics.

3. Creating trusted company, regional and department news feed
Sparrow supports segmentation of your workforce and your content via a simple couple of clicks. This allows you to bring corporate trusted information to different channels including company, regional and departments. This segmentation can happen across many channels including MS Teams, your Intranet and the brandable mobile apps. For example, bring a trusted company news feed to your “All Company” Teams in MS Teams.

4. Sharing public information from relevant sources (Your country’s COVID-19 taskforce, WHO, regional and federal governments, etc.)
Sparrow supports sourcing of content from external sources via RSS feeds. This is automated to simplify our client’s workflows. You choose the information you find relevant and Sparrow brings it into your administration screens for approval and distribution. Simple and effective.

5. Getting active acknowledgement from employees about changing protocols and policies.
Sparrow supports compliance posts that require active acknowledgement from employees. Our clients are sending updates to their health and safety protocols such as social distancing, hand washing, office employee limits, car pooling, etc. Sparrow tracks which employees have acknowledged the communication as well as those that read it but did not acknowledge it. This information is easily accessible through a dashboard and report.

6. Delegating content creation to leaders in their organization
Our clients have been able to move away from being the sole contributor of content to create an effective content creation ecosystem. Employee communication is still their responsibility, but ultimately, they can delegate to other leaders in their organization content creation while retaining supervising and approval responsibilities prior to content being officially published. As COVID-19 continues to significantly reduce the size of workforce communication teams around North America. Sparrow clients have leveraged content delegation functionality to continue to produce the same output of content with less resources.

7. Sharing videos with tips to increase productivity while working from home
Sparrow support rich media content including pictures and videos. Our clients are sharing videos with tips on how to be productive while working from home. These videos can be sourced from external sites via our RSS functionality or manually added to the communication.

8. Fostering a great company culture
Employee communications supports your organization’s culture. A properly implemented communication strategy will bring your workplace culture to life. COVID-19 has made it more difficult than ever to maintain a great culture. Employees are stressed, working remotely and fearful of an uncertain future. Sparrow clients are using our platform to foster a great company culture by:

• Employee spotlight: Highlighting employees in their organizations. Empower employees to build meaningful connections and conversations with their colleagues near and far across any device and channel. Give employees a voice to share their stories with their colleagues.
• Anniversaries, birthdays and more: Automatically send out anniversaries, promotions and birthday announcements.
• Feedback and continuous listening: Support a culture of feedback and improvement. Collect ideas, listen to employee concerns and more.

9. Communicate important information in the language spoken by their employees
Our clients have come to the realization that their workforce is global even when their organizations are not. Sparrow is helping them eliminate confusion and automatically translate their communications to 170+ languages so their workforce can understand and act on them.

10. Targeting messages to localized employee groups
Our clients have been able to target different messages to different regions. COVID-19 responses and rules have been regional in nature with different states and provinces enacting different measures. Sparrow allows the dissemination of targeted messages to each region to ensure your employees are aware of the latest rules and measures.

11. Providing a feedback channel
Effective workforce communication is a dialog, or conversation that goes back and forth. Our clients are deploying feedback channels across their Intranets, MS Teams and the brandable mobile apps.The Sparrow notification engine makes sure that communicators and the leadership team is kept up to date on feedback so it can be promptly addressed.

12. Easily creating and executing employee polls
Continuous listening has never been more important. Our clients are using the Sparrow polls functionality in many ways including:

• Take a pulse on the wellbeing and happiness of their workforce
• To automate the COVID-19 Symptom Daily Self-Assessment
• To understand their reaction and gather feedback on new policies and procedures

13. Keeping their employees safe during a crisis
Unfortunately, COVID-19 has not been the only crisis we have faced this year. From riots, to natural disasters, Sparrow clients are leveraging our crisis management functionality to track employee safety and communicate with their employees during emergencies. Sparrow can send emergency alert notifications and monitors employee safety via Microsoft Teams. Our clients are using this functionality to account for employees during and after a safety incident. They have maintained two-way communication with employees or employee groups during a crisis.

14. Reducing the workload of employee communicator
From removing or reducing time consuming tasks such as cross-posting, sending notifications and reformatting content for multiple channels, to enabling content delegation to supporting content curation via RSS feeds. Sparrow is allowing our clients to do more with less. Something that has been imperative this year.

15. Tracking the impact of their communication.
Sparrow clients have been measuring the impact of their communication across all their channels. Sparrow is showing them how their employees are interacting with their content by channel, across your entire organization in real time. They have been able to visualize, filter and group data without needing to involve their IT team.

If you’re looking for a platform to help make your life easier and connecting you with all of your workforce, give Sparrow a look. We’ve lived the pain, we understand the hopes, and we built a platform for communication professionals that delivers. From Intranets, to Microsoft Teams, to newsletters, and mobile, we know how important corporate communications is. Sparrow – Built for Communicators. Book a conversation with us today.