Masterclass: Building an Internal Comms Platform Business Case That Leaders Can't Ignore

Julie: Welcome everyone to our masterclass on building an internal comms platform business case that leaders can't ignore. I'm Julie Ford, the host of today's masterclass, I'm the Head of Content at Sparrow Connected and the host of the ICON podcast. Joining us today is Chris Izquierdo.

Chris is the founder and CEO of Sparrow connected, an award winning omni channel internal comms platform that boosts employee engagement by over 300% across 25 Plus industries. Chris has received numerous accolades including RBC top 25 Canadian immigrant, he's one of the of the 10 most influential Hispanics in Canada, and he also won the E&Y Prairies Entrepreneur of the Year award. His mission is to empower internal comms professionals with superior tools and ensure they are recognized as key members of executive teams. Chris also serves as a Board of Director for various organizations demonstrating his commitment to leadership and innovation.

Welcome, Chris.

Chris: Hi, Julie.

Julie: Hey, thanks for joining today, Chris. I'm really excited to have you here to share your insights on how to create a persuasive business case that leadership won't be able to turn down. So let's get started. On today's agenda, Chris is going to start by sharing real life examples from several business cases he has worked on with various companies, then he'll quickly walk you through the PowerPoint presentation template that you can fill out based on your business case document and present to leadership to win their approval. If you haven't downloaded the template yet, I'll share the link in the chat in just a couple minutes. After that, we'll get into a live Q&A session where you'll have the opportunity to get your questions answered by Chris.

Please submit your questions in the Q&A window at any time. Any questions we don't answer during the live session, we will answer by email afterwards. So make sure to include your email address with your question. We will also be sharing the recorded version of this masterclass by email following the event for you to rewatch and share it with your peers and colleagues. Let's get started.

Chris, before you dive into your business case, examples, can you quickly explain why a business case is so crucial for adopting an internal comms platform?

Chris: When you're in an enterprise and you're trying to make a purchase - a purchasing decision like an internal communication platform, you have to justify it. And justifying it from the point of view of business objectives, like what are the business objectives you're trying to accomplish with this purchase, why should the company spend thousands of dollars on a platform, then it has been installed and that has to be supported, that has to be used by the organization. That's where the business case come into play. You have to convince the C-suite that this is a worthwhile purchasing decision and something that is not only needed, but it's needed now. And create a sense of urgency, creating that sense of need is something that the business case accomplishes.

Julie: All right, well, thank you for explaining that. I wanted to ask you, are there any certain documents that should be used to create a business case?

Chris: Yeah, there's really two documents, and we're going to walk the audience through both of them today.

One is, you know, your typical Word document, PDF. That is the meat of the business case. It has all the details pertaining to the business case - it explains why, how, how long, what are the objectives, that sort of thing. And, that's necessary. And that's usually what you're going to share with leadership, they're going to invite you to present at some point during the purchasing process and you're going to have to present your business case to your audience. And that's where the presentation, the PowerPoint deck comes into play, and allows you to actually, in a succinct manner, simplify everything that you have put into a business case document that probably has about 20 plus pages into you know, a handful of slides, that gets to the highlights, gets to the key points that you want to convey.

Julie: Great. Now let's switch over and see an example of the Word document before we get into showing the actual presentation template.

Chris: Absolutely. Give me a second here. So are you able to see the Word document?

Julie: Yes. Now, I'm seeing all of the pages can you go page by page?

Chris: This is a business case template. This is what we use when we work with our clients on their justification when they need help putting together the business case together. So what do we have here? And the reason I have it smaller because I want to, I want to highlight the sections first. And then we're going to go deeper into each of the sections.

So the first section that is worth mentioning is the executive summary. You're looking at one or two pages of information that convey the essentials of the business case. We also have a problem statement, what problems are you trying to solve in the organization? We have a lot of examples there that we're going to walk you through. What are the objectives. So based on those problems, what are the objectives? How are you going to improve those problems? There's a ton here as well, then what are you proposing? What is the proposed solution? What are the benefits of that solution?

The next section, what's the implementation plan? Because you know, your audience is going to want to know, how long is it going to take? How much is it going to cost? And that's where cost analysis and ROI is. There's a return on investment on this platform. And that was, we're going to spend some time there, because that's a critical section where a lot of business cases fall short, and then they don't get approved.

Then, of course, you have risks, every implementation has risks. So what are those? What's the mitigation plan for each of them. And what that does is, it makes sure that your audience, your C-suite, knows that you have thought about this holistically, you're not going with the blinders on thinking that this is going to solve every problem that you have, that there's no risk involved, and so on.

Then finally, conclusions and recommendations. So those are the high level sections. Would you like me to start going through each of them, Julie?

Julie: Yeah, that would be great. If you can do that. And I'm going to keep an eye on the chat, the Q&A window, and I will ask some questions as you go through each section.

Chris: Yeah, but by all means, if there's questions in there, you don't have to wait till the end, you can shoot them my way. So let's start with the second - summary is blank, here is the last one.

So whenever I create a business case, this is the last section that I complete. I don't start here, start on every other section. And then I summarize all the other sections into here, right? And what you're looking for here is one or two pages, if you create if you write more than two pages, you're going to lose your audience. You just want to touch on any associated risks. What's the strategy, what's the proposed solution, the advantages, and the ROI. And that's really important. You want to really highlight the ROI prominently. That's what it's going to and even bolded. Like, I don't just leave it with the same text as the rest of the session, I brought the ROI so that they can see okay, there is a return on that investment. And that return on that investment happens in X number of months or years and so on. Right. Okay.

I'll move along into the next section, which is the problem statement. And this one, we do have a lot of examples. So we're going to spend a little bit of time here. So you need to as succinct as possible describe what are your communication challenges? You're buying a communication platform, why are you buying the communication platform? Well, it's because you have some challenges, some problems that you're trying to deal with. And then the other part of the problem statement session is what have you tried? Because that's going to be a common question that you're going to find. As an executive, when somebody brings me, hey, I need to buy a marketing tool. My first question to the marketing tool is, what have we done before? Remind me? And why did that be? That didn't work? And how is this going to be different? So all of this is going to make it into this document. But let's see some of the problem statements that that we find, right? So these are some samples from a myriad of different business cases that we put together.

One that is very common is reaching frontline employees. Acme Corporation has a workforce of about 60% of truck drivers and plant workers and they don't have email, corporate email address, there's no computer. So how do you disseminate information to the frontline, that could be a reason why you are purchasing a platform like Sparrow, then sometimes, or often there's a huge divide between head office and the frontlines. And, it doesn't matter whether they're located in the same building or across the street from each other. There is this big disconnect that leads into one or two cultural challenges. And there is, from an information perspective, the frontlines believe that they don't receive any information or if the corporation is relying on the manager to disseminate that content or that information. What happens - something gets lost in translation, or it doesn't even get mentioned. That could be another of the challenges.

We also have the potential for high turnover. Like that's a great one, if you work in our organization, and we have a client that was turning over about 25% of the workforce every year, and when you do that, obviously, in four years, you have 100% turnover, that produces a lot of problems for you in terms of productivity culture. So how do we change that? How do we improve via communication? How do we get those employees that usually were not communicated to, to identify with your organization. Cultural issues are usually around transparency and trust. Like the organization doesn't believe that you're transparent enough. And maybe you're being transparent, it's just the information is not reaching them. And in the absence of information, people make it up. We see this in social media all the time we see it in in corporations that we go into all the time.

Another one could be deficient in efficiency when it comes to communication and communication channels. So for example, if what you're using as bulletin boards, posters, or digital signage that creates a burden on you in terms of managing those communication channels, and most of them are actually not even efficient, when it comes to immediate communication, when you have communication, they have to communicate that you have to convey right away. They also lead into a lack of communication metrics. If you're putting posters up, the only way, or one of the often used ways, it's not the only one, but it's a common one is surveying. So you survey your employees once a year, and you try to determine whether their communication has been effective based on that survey. Unfortunately, surveying once a year, and you usually don't do it more often because of survey fatigue, so once you do it once a year, your employees remember the last three, four weeks tops. You do not have real communication metrics to change your strategy, you get those metrics to later accurate, and so on. Often, when we go to organizations, a lot of the communications is one way - you're just pushing content, top down into the organization without the ability for your employees to actually, come and react, engage in a conversation. That unidirectional flow of information is the problem as well.

The other ones are common inconsistent messaging. And a lot of organizations here on the call today will have this, especially if you have a decentralized model for communication. And I want to make sure I'm not advocating for a centralized model. Decentralized is okay, as long as you have the guardrails to approve content, as long as you allow certain people to only publish on certain channels on certain topics, and so on. So that governance model usually is in existence. And when that happens, then you start getting either too many messages on a topic that probably is not relevant to your employees, or inconsistent messages, and so on.

Often, we see a perceived lack of leadership communication, like when we run our surveys in organizations, what comes back usually is, I wish my leaders will communicate with me. My C-suite is not communicated. And I don't know what my president is doing. I don't know what he or she thinks. I don't know what my CEO thinks or does, and so on. That's an only one, I'm just gonna go a little bit faster here, because there's quite a few.

But we also have, duplication of efforts and lack of governance. As I mentioned, decentralized communication practices are somewhat related. A lack of communication prioritization, if every piece of content that you send to your organization has the same priority, then none of them have a priority. So you're starting to mix messages that could probably not be prioritized at the same level as maybe a CEO communication about a merger or acquisition or a snow storm hitting the area to tornado and so on with information that is less relevant. So we want to start to prioritize those methods. That's something common that we see.

What else do I have here? So it’s burden for reporting. That's another one that is that is quite common. Because you're challenged or not managed by a platform like Sparrow, what you end up having is this joint the metrics in each of your channels that, by the way, you're managing independently of each other. And that you have to rely on it to give you those metrics and convey those metrics and analyze those metrics that are cohesive, because a mobile app has different metrics, and a portal has different metrics that maybe Microsoft Teams and so on. So these are common, we see them often they might not be applicable to you. But what we can do is sit down with you and start through our discovery process, have a conversation about what are the real problems that we're trying to solve here.

Then as I mentioned, the next thing that we do is, how do we try to tackle with this before, and you have to pay attention into this is important, it is not only saying this is what we tried before, but this is why they work. Because how's it going to be different this time? It's going to be a question that is going to get asked, and you see some here in front of you, like, for example, some companies will use their HR system to post messages. The problem is, it's just not designed for communication, right. It's designed for HR management, and they're usually really good at it. But because they're not designed for communication, you barely get in and research on them, they lacked the plough, the polish that the communication platform needs to have to reach your organization at scale.

The other thing that is quite common is the deployment of an intranet. Like organizations are probably in their fifth or sixth iteration of an intranet. And you probably heard me say this before, Julie, but whenever an internet projects launch, what we're trying to do is use the same tool and expect different results. Internet's have evolved and become better, they're nicer looking. And they still reach the 15% of your organization, one five of the organization, like nothing has changed in the last 20 years in terms of reach for an intranet. So that's not the solution. If you try that before, it didn't work, don't blame the vendor, don't blame the product, the product is just the medium, it's just the channel. If you can only maximize the audience per channel, and, as much as this channel allows, something common as well, digital signage, as I mentioned, emails, especially, there's variants of this, like some companies just send it via outlook, all the ones use email software, to try to get some analytics.

The problem is that the analytics are highly skewed and inaccurate, especially with Microsoft, Apple, and some of the other providers automatically downloading emails. So you think, oh, people are opening? It's like, no, actually, it wasn't open, it was just automatically downloaded to the employees computer. They still don't know what's going on, they probably ignored the message or went to spam and so on. We even work with some clients that promote on local TV stations. They're hoping that somebody in the local TV station, somebody is watching the news early in the morning, and receive some corporate content through the local TV station. And then this is mainly about weather related events, like for example, snow days, and so on. You know, annual meetings, which are great to get a face. In fact, getting the C-suite in front of your organization, but they lack timely communication. Microsoft Teams, which is great. And if it's available, use it. But it's an instant messaging platform. In order to turn into a communication platform, you need something like Sparrow, in order to do that monitoring newsletter is quite common. Again, another great channel, but by itself is not going to solve your communication needs. Yeah, I've been talking for a long time. Is there any questions or anything there?

Julie: Well, Chris, you've definitely seen a lot of different problems and challenges, through all of the business cases that you've worked on. And I'm sure some are more relevant than others, to the people on the call. But thank you for giving such a comprehensive overview and sharing all of these. That's really helpful. Wondering what happens next. So after you've identified your problems, where do you go from here?

Chris: You have your problems, you have identified what have you tried before that didn't work, or that was only part of the solution. The next thing you need to talk about is, what are your objectives? How do you create your goals? We aim for a couple of goals, maybe three, no more than that, if you have 15 of them too much, you're going to lose your audience. If you have one, only one. Sometimes it's like, okay, we haven't dig deep enough into the problems in your organization that can be solved, we have better communication. The important thing is we make the goals smart. So we have to make them specific.

And you can see here on the screen, the first table that I have, what is it that you want to accomplish? Why are you wanting to accomplish this? Are there any constraints or any requirements and so on? The M stands for measurable. So we need to define how are we going to measure progress? And how will we know that we have accomplished that goal. If your goal is to reduce attrition, we need to make a mess measurable. So we need to say okay, we're going to reduce it by 10%. And we'll know because we have HR metrics in our HR system that indicates that attrition for the last 12 months have been reduced by that percentage. Is it achievable? What are the logical steps to achieve that goal is irrelevant, because another important one like, just because you have a goal doesn't make it relevant. So we need to make sure that it's worthwhile. And we're doing that at the right time, maybe there is another project that has to go first, we encounter this quite often. Like, an organization, for example, is migrating from Google to Microsoft. Before you roll a platform like Sparrow, why don't you wait till that migration is done, then roll out the platform.

And the last thing that we have here is that it has to be time bound - for us, integration by 10% without a timeframe in mind, it's just not a worthwhile goal because what you want to say is, we're going to do it in the next 24 months, in the next six months, 12 months, just give a timeframe to the goal. I do have some examples here. So for example, and, by the way, this is where it starts to get interesting, in my opinion, when it comes to business cases. The one goal that I have here is to improve safety metrics in the organization. So we are relating this goal to a strategy in the strategic plan. And that's critical as well. So when I talk to communication professionals, often the goals initially that we start talking about are I want to improve readership. And I want to improve engagement with content. And, for corporate communication for internal communication, I think that's a very, very valuable goal. But the C-suite will say then, so what we have done this, what what's the business objective that we're trying to accomplish here. And the best goals are the ones that accomplish a business objective that is related to the strategy that the organization has.

So for example, in this case, we want to improve the safety metrics by these three within given safety information to the entire staff. So you can imagine this is an organization where they cannot reach digitally, their frontline workers. And those are the ones that are in harm's way when it comes to safety. So what if internal communication could support this goal of an accident free strategy - be a better communication to the frontline staff be or enable women have a digital channel to talk to them? And then we start to get specific? I want a 10% reduction. Great, right? And how are we going to do it? Well, we're going to launch four comprehensive safety campaigns a year, right through the communication platform. And then we're going to measure the engagement and awareness that they're generating, we're going to see if they're moving the needle when it comes to frontline staff right. Now, how can we measure this goal, this is where you will have to get outside communication and the communication department to get some of this metrics. You can collaborate in this case with a safety team to track and analyze the safety metrics. They have all those metrics. And let's just measure the reduction of incidence over time. Is it achievable? Well, we can deploy this omni channel communication platform that can reach your frontline employees. Great, we will develop a content calendar, including the frontline safety campaigns, and we're going to measure the reduction. So yes, I think is achievable. Is it relevant? Again, this is where it gets interesting. How much does safety incident cost in this organization? Let's say it's 500,000 a year. So a 10% reduction will represent savings of 50,000 a year. And that's just on the cost side. They remind the human side, like that's something else that we can qualify here. Like, how many of those are employees that cannot return to work or that spend time outside of work recovering from an injury and so on. Or even worse. And, does it align with corporate objectives? Yeah, absolutely.

We have this axiom free strategy. And this is where it aligns. So now, you're starting to see that you're going beyond just internal communication into how do I support the business goals of the organization. And, we believe that it can be accomplished in 12 months, and so on. So that's an example of a goal I have. I have others here. I'm going to walk through couple more, and then just break through, you know, go fast through the other ones, just for the lack of time that we have today.

But another one, and this one is really interesting, because, again, this one is all about internal communications, how much time and effort does it take to create, distribute and measure communications across your company. And it's easy to quantify, you can find out how many people are creating content. You can ask them, How long does it take them to create content, how many hours a week, a month, a year, and so on. And then why is it taking that long? And then what can we do to reduce it? And if the answer is a communication platform like Sparrow,, where you create content in one place, you push a button, it gets distributed across multiple channels. So you're not creating content in multiple places. We're a platform where you can manage analytics across all those channels in one dashboard, without you having to rely on it to give you those numbers and you correlating them in Excel and so on, then you figured out what kind of reduction or that time could it take. And, in this organization, for example, there's 21 employees performing this. And, you got 21 employees creating content. And the way we're going to measure is, we'll use their daily logs as the baseline, compare six months, and what the reduction of the time is right with similar volume of communication, then do it as six months versus 12 months. So we have a baseline, before we start, we have another measurement point at six months, and 12 and then compare them. And then, here's some of the assumptions. So it takes them about four hours per week, for 21 employees, if their hourly salary is $35 an hour, that equates to a salary of 70k. For each of those employees, that translates to this much expenditure. Like this is just your math that we're doing in order to calculate this, if we estimate a 40% reduction, which by the way, we will measure, it will result in savings of $61,000 annually. So now you can see, if you're buying a platform that is worth 30k, annually, you get your ROI in six months. So all of a sudden, now you have this figured out when the goal can be accomplished and so on.

Another one is, a company has a vision of making life fun. How do we enhance communication with the frontline staff, so that they become more aligned with making lifetime because maybe the frontline staff, their lives in the corporate world might not be that fun. Maybe they're just doing packaging, they're part of this big machinery that makes a lifetime for the end customer. But for them, that might not be the case. How do we reach them? How do we do this, and so on. And, we can then use research. And this is important as well, you can arm yourself with research. And now a word of caution. Don't say too many studies. You want to find one, maybe two. And that's where you stick to, because there's so many studies out there and people are skeptical about them. So find a variable source like Gallup, and so on. And finally tell you that aligns with what your goal is and your objectives.

Here's another one about improving the corporation culture through better communication. And this one is interesting, because for them, this is an organization that has a lot of internal events and programs and participation has dropped in recent years, probably after the pandemic,, the people returned to hiring work environments. They were not as engaged with the events as they were before. And what they want to do is continue to increase their participation, because that's what drives their culture. So how do we do that? How do you know, in our case, Sparrow has event management capabilities. And that's how we're going to help them. But this is what we're trying to do here again, because another Gallup research and so on, on that cultivate pride and, you know, enhance frontline staff grasp of their work for worth global significance. And this was a priority for the organization. So the strategy for this organization called the cultivation of pride, and making sure that everybody in the line and the assembly line knew that their work is worthwhile and really important to the global significance of the organization. Right. So again, frontline workers, how do we do that? And so on.

There's a there's a ton here as well. Of course, with real communication, this one is interesting, like, retention. We talked a little bit about voluntary attrition, these are people are leaving organization, not because you want to, but because they want to write and what you want to do is, how can you review attrition, because this will reduce the hiring and onboarding costs, improve the team morale, and ultimately, do better productivity. And these metrics are readily available. You look at your HR system, you talk to your HR team, they'll give you a tradition for the last four months that you can use as a baseline and then compare throughout the year as you launch your campaigns. Now, and this is important attrition. And by the way, this is also true for most of these metrics communication by itself it's not going to fit like this metrics right there.

And that's why you have to align it with corporate objectives, because you need those departments to also care. You need HR to care about attrition and identify as a problem and your C-suite to do the same, you need safety to be important and be identified by the HVAC team as well as your your C-suite, and so on. Communication can empower the dissemination of content that allows you to run campaigns that are aligned with theirs. So in this case, the the other thing, though, that we can do is, hiring costs from HR. So how, you know, hiring costs for this fix? For this organization is 910 K, per employee. And that would include recruitment, advertising, training, right, like everything that they do to hire an employee. If the turnover is about 100 employees a year, it'll cost us 1.9 million. Again, pure math, these are data that you're going to get from HR. And you also then can use a study, here is the Gallup report that shows that a new employee takes about 12 months to reach their full performance potential. So with that in mind, let's say the first six months, you're losing 30% of the salary that you're paying that employee or the compensation package for that employee into training, because they're not as productive, they need to be trained. So as you can see here, now you start putting painting a picture that is quite compelling, like if you're hiring, pause a year is 1.9 million, and we can reuse that for even like five to seven plus and pay for itself every year. So that's, that's another example. Oh, yeah, I'll stop there. Because I've been talking for too long. But pass it on to you, Julie.

Julie: Thanks, Chris. Yeah, that was great. Thank you for sharing the SMART Goal Setting strategy. It sounds like that's something that could be very effective in convincing skeptical leadership teams. To get on board with an internal comms platform. The audience is really eager to learn more about a proposed solution. So what would they look for in a proposed solution? Could you walk us through that?

Chris: Yeah, for sure. In the proposed solution section, you're going to describe the solution. And this is reinforced paraphernalia, by the way, you can use it for other solutions. And the business case template is applicable for internal communication as it is for HR or marketing or anything else, this is a template for purchasing a platform to solve a business need. So then, in our case, and I'll talk about this parallel solution. These are three potential key objectives that you can have.

Like, one challenge, if you don't have the ability to target communication to your employees, one of the things the proposed solution can do is give you all the audience segmentation, so the ability for you to group employees into into audiences. And then when you're like, when you're launching your campaign, when you're sending your communication out, you say, this belongs to designs that nobody else needs to read about. So the goal of that from a communication perspective is to make sure that only content that is relevant to the employee reaches the employee. So that's one of the things that we can do.

The other one is, and this is very, very, very common, I'll venture to say about 90% of our clients will do number two here is reach and engage frontline staff. So how do you reach those workers that are on the frontlines that don't sit at a computer, likely don't have access to a computer. And also, they might not even have corporate accounts? So how can we facilitate that communication?

Another sub goal that is there in the write up is, how can you facilitate that communication in multiple languages? And this is quite important for frontline staff. Because a lot of them don't speak English, or English is not their first language. So how can you facilitate this communication and whatever, you know, Spanish, French, Tagalog, whatever the language is that your communication speaks. And also getting good analytics and insights. If we don't have data, you can now prove the value of this platform or any platform that you purchase. How do you know, when this comes down to renewal a year from now that the platform has been effective, that it should be renewed, that you should convince the leadership again, that this purchase is worthwhile? So that's something else that you can do. But what I'll do is I will target this section to whatever goals you have and talk about the features that are there. Are both solutions that match or enable those goals as well?

Julie: That makes sense. We have an interesting question from the audience. The attendee has asked, we're already using the Microsoft stack to communicate with employees. How can I justify Sparrow Connected?

Chris: That's an interesting one. About 95% of your customers, they are on the Microsoft stack. So they all have purchased SharePoint, Teams, and so on. What Sparrow Connected does, it sits on top of that stack and give you communication friendly capabilities that are not available on the stack. So we have better metrics, we have better integration between the frontline workers and the back office, we have the ability to have a conversation holistically with the entire organization. So we synchronize comments across all our channels, whether it is a portal for frontline employees that do not have a Microsoft license, or a mobile app, and so on. So from audience segmentation, to analytics to, to the synchronization of all those conversations in your organization. So there's no silos, all that is provided by Sparrow. What we do is we supercharge them, Microsoft 365 stack, that's something that we've been doing for a number of years. And we work closely with Microsoft to understand what feature they're launching. And then we figured out where are the gaps in what they're doing? And how can we add value and enhance their offerings.

Julie: Thanks, Chris. I have another question here from the audience. If I were to adopt Sparrow Connected, what would be the benefits that I would realize?

Chris: Our goal will be to convey those benefits. And align them with your strategy or business strategy and results that are of business outcomes, not just I can list benefits that are very interesting for communication professionals, they, for example, high reach and engagement. So 60 to 70% of your workforce will read your content. But that in itself is not an important enough benefit, we need to translate that into, lower attrition, safety, reduction, and whatever makes sense for your organization. So that's why we've worked together to craft this business case template. But in general, you will have a more informed workforce, you will have a workforce that knows what's going on, you're going to stop hearing that I didn't know about this type of comments that often we find out in surveys, or anecdotally, in the watercooler or in events and so on, you're going to have high participation in events and, better metrics overall from a communication perspective.

Julie: Those all sound like benefits that I think every company would love to realize by adopting Sparrow Connected. Now, I do have another question here about implementation. Can you walk us through what implementation looks like at Sparrow Connected? How long does it take? Who needs to be involved? All of those different factors?

Chris: Yeah, I think that's a little bit outside the realm of the business case. So I'm just going to spend a couple minutes on that, if you would. So implementation, we can go as fast as you can go, this is our only job, do you have another job as a communication professional in our organization. But we've done rollouts, in a matter of a week, but our typical implementation will take about 90 days, and that includes working with it to integrate the platform into your IT ecosystem, setting up configuring our platform and training you and then rolling out the platform internally. So it sounds like it's pretty simple.

Julie: Yeah, implementing inside, not a heavy lift from it. So we talked a little bit about the benefits. Do you want to share any of these in a little bit more detail? Or do you want to jump ahead to, you know, the one thing that is like, in most people's minds, cost and ROI?

Chris: Yeah, I got the benefits here. And by the way, if you contact us, of course, I can sit down with you and walk you through this, but the benefits will be related back to your goals and what you're trying to accomplish, obviously, and here's a little bit of the implementation plan as well, but let's just move to the cost analysis and ROI for the sake of time here.

This is something that I personally initially struggled with when I started my career - how do you translate benefits, communication into benefits. I think it will give you the thought process because it's a methodical thought process to get you to quantify benefits, and then the ROI of the implementation.

So let's talk about the first one attrition. So you have attrition costs. And, we have that example before it was 1.9 million annually, if we can enhance the communication, improve operation, and reduce it by 10%. That will be 90 $190,000 of savings. Now, that's one metric, the other one that we can take is, you know, how long does it take for that employee to reach the same level of productivity as their predecessor. And that's typical 12 months. So if the average salary for an open employee in your organization is 50,000, a 10% reduction will save you 90,000, if you're assuming 20%, productivity drop, and lots of numbers, but this is all you can use in a calculator, you can really easily come up with this. So then the total cost of savings for attrition is about $280,000. So as you can see, that's a very compelling case, especially if the platform for this organization, let's say is 90,000. Well, it pays for itself in a matter of months. So you don't have to wait a lot to get to a return on that investment. So that's one way now. And this might be one of the question is, well, I'm skeptical that through better communication, you can really use attrition rates by 10%. And that's one of the conversations that we get into with the C-suite often.

What I'll do is one of two things, one, either find studies that demonstrate that that's possible. And we have some of those, we also have data from our clients that we can anonymize for you. And then you can present. Or I would challenge that executive to say, do you agree that better communication will create happier employees, more connected employees, and that will result in they're not leaving as often as they are? Now, He or she will say, Yes, of course. And they say, Okay, what number can we attribute? Do you think to communication? If it's not 10%? Is it 3%? Is it 2%, and so on. Because you can tell that when you have a challenge that is $1.9 million, whatever percentage you come up with, is still going to be a meaningful number, it's still going to show you a positive ROI. So, that's an example.

Another one is, you know, I have one here about quality problems. You have quality issues, costing the corporation about $2,300, for quality issue, and the quality team can give you those metrics, they have them. And if you know, in 2023, they experience 100 quality issues, the total cost would be what 1.8 million again. So if we anticipated and percent reduction in those issues, or 5%, or whatever the case might be, here's the savings for the organization. And as you can see, what we're doing is even them quantifiable metrics, and not just better engagement, better communication on our let's quantify this.

Here's the other one that you're probably more familiar with. If you have 21 content creators, and each estimated salary of 60k, and they spent four hours, you know, one hour per week, now getting a lead into some process implemented in your file platform will save them four hours per week and so on, how do we calculate this, the number comes up to 131 31,000. Again, just pure math, what you need to know in this case is how many content creators you have, what will be the average salary of them, you don't even need to know how much each of them are making, how much time they spent per week, and then estimate how much you're going to save with a better platform. To calculate that, then the next thing we do is, we say the platform that you're purchasing, in this case, Sparrow, how much does it cost? You feel this list table here? And then, you know, what's the anticipated ROI, a month. And the interesting thing is that for every single business case that we put together, the ROI is usually within six months, which is really, really good for any organization on any purchasing decision.

Julie: That's really good. Thanks for sharing these, Chris. I see that if internal comms pros are sharing ROI like this with leadership, it would be really hard for them to ignore and say no to that proposal. So thanks for sharing that. Question from the audience - as a CEO yourself, do you have any insider tips on how to successfully communicate the ROI to leader leadership?

Chris: There's yes I am always skeptical of our eyes that look too good. So we have to make a real. And that's why we have to go and get metrics. And by the way, maybe once you get the metrics, you realize, this is not going to be the way we're going to justify the platform. Because the metrics don't align. Or maybe it's just partially that we were going to justify the platform, we need to find another issue that the platform will help you with. That's certainly a possibility. But for me, make it real and justify with numbers. Don't just tell me we're going to save you hundreds of thousands of dollars without a proper justification, because that's not going to pass my test. And I'll just ignore, and actually, I'll think back to get the proper numbers.

Julie: All right. Thank you so much, Chris. I know, we have a couple more sections in your document. I think we have risk and mitigation. And we have conclusion and recommendations. But I think for the sake of time, we should go back to the PowerPoint and just give a quick overview of the presentation template that we've provided and explain, how someone would use that to actually present the business case to leadership.

Chris: So risk mitigation to identify the proper risk. Again, they show that you have thought about this holistically, input an impact, the probability, and a mitigation strategy for that risk. And if you do this when this C-suite reads your risk and mitigation section, they'll go, Okay, you really have put a lot of thought into this, I can see how we can mitigate each of this risk and ensure the success of this platform, and it's not going to happen, whatever happened in the past. Because we all have failures in the past with platforms, it doesn't need to be a communication platform, it could have been an intranet, it might have been an email, blogging and things like that. So, that's one of the sections.

And then the last one is the conclusion, relevance, to say, here's what we're proposing here. So we're proposing it and so on. Julie to your point, let's just move into the back, into the presentation, and go from there. So once you've done that, you now have a template that can be approved by your boss, can be approved by the C-suite. They can review it, hopefully you have a mentor inside their organization that will provide some feedback on that document. And the reason that's important is because there's the strategy that the company releases, and then there's insiders that know more about the strategy and details on the document that you have received, present. And if you have those insights, then you can target your business case to those insights. But once you have done that, you're going to have to, at some point, create a template, and their business, the presentation template, and that we have put together for you that you can download from our website for free. And, as you can see, it's just going to, once you have the other document, once you have the Word document with the details, it's a matter of copy and pasting here and changing it a little bit. So, you're going to put together a business case for internal communication, you're going to talk about strategic alignment, you're going to talk about problem identification, and then the financial justification or ROI. Very similar to what we have in the other one. And again, similar thing that you've seen, so I'm not going to spend too much time here, but you're going to talk about the introduction, the problem statement, the second summary objectives, and so on. Again, what you're doing here is highlights, it's a PowerPoint presentation, don't turn it into a document, it's not a document, it's a presentation, you're going to the highlights, you're going to have notes that then you can speak to, and you're going to present this to somebody.

But here's the second, the summary, so succinctly describe, why are we doing this? Why is this important? What's the goal that we that we're trying to build on so on, then introduce your product problem statement, there's some samples there. But anyway, you're going to come up with your own. Then moving to the objectives, here's the different objectives that we have. Again, you define those already. So simply copy and paste in here, then here's the proposed solution. So we're proposing this solution. Here's and here's why we're proposing it. Here's the benefits of that solution, what we're proposing, what we're suggesting we do from there, then you're going to jump into the implementation plan.

The implementation plan is often overlooked, but it's important as part of rounding up your business case. If you have a proper implementation plan, it shows again, that you holistically thought about the problem that you know what you I know that you want to accomplish. So that's important to have here, ROI, probably the most important slide, and nothing gets done in an enterprise unless there's an ROI to it. And for the right reasons. This is important, so justify the ROI in this slide. Talk about risk mitigation strategy that you have. And the conclusion at the end.

I went fairly fast through this presentation. But just keep in mind that what you're doing because you have created that other document is simply copy and paste, summarizing big font, big letters, the importance of each section are, the key points of each section are.

Julie: 50:47

Yep, just to reiterate what Chris is saying, we've designed this to align with the Word document that he shared. So it should be very easy for you to copy and paste from the Word document into the presentation. And that's going to come across, a lot more well prepared and professional than just sending out a Word document. So the two really, really worked well together in order to get your proposal approved.

So thank you so much for that, Chris. This was very insightful, and you shared some really good helpful tips and advice that I hope will help our audience develop their own business cases that their leaders won't be able to ignore. We're going to open the floor to questions now. If you have any questions for Chris, that you haven't submitted, please do so by entering them in the Q&A window. As I mentioned earlier, if we don't get to answer your question, during this q&a, we'll follow up with an answer by email. So please enter your email address along with your question.

Before we jump into the Q&A, I just wanted to mention that Chris has offered to do one on one business case sessions with the attendees of this session. So if you would like to book that, please put your email address and your name into the Q&A window and someone will get in touch to book your session.

Jumping over to our audience Q&A. I have a question here. How does Sparrow Connected help with getting announcements to decentralize teams such as those working in warehouses who don't have laptops or devices?

Chris: That's a great question. So lack of connectivity is one of the challenges that we aim to address with with Sparrow. And if they don't have laptops, obviously, an internet isn't going to be a proper proper channel for communicating with those employees. Most of employees in North America in particular will have a cell phone. And that's got to be the conduit for digital communication into those employees. Now, I know that they're not corporate phones and I understand that one of the ways we do it is we have a number of channels that target your cell phones.

One of them is a mobile app, not every employee wants to download a mobile app, they'll say no, I don't know play on my phone. Another one that we have is a mobile friendly portal, that they can access the information without having to install anything, we can communicate with them also via email, using their personal email addresses, we also have text messages, such as an opportunity for, for communication. And what I always tell organizations is with all that power comes responsibility. So let's not use text message for things that are not urgent and important less now. Let's make sure that we divided the communication into what should go via what channel to make sure that we don't overuse channels that is not meant to for General Communications like texts.

But if you have an emergency, like for example, tornado off to shoot or snow storms, inclement weather, in general you might. If I'm one of your employees, I would like to be reached via text message to let me know, here's how we're going to keep you safe, here's what you need to do, here's why you have to address. So we have all those channels, all those channels work again in unison together. And each of them will reach a percentage of your frontline employees. And we integrate them with the back office. So the other thing that we prove to those employees is the value of receiving this communication, because this is important. The communication is targeted. So it's targeted by role, by location, by interest rate, so it's a personalized conversation with that employee. And when you do that, they start to see value.

You're always going to have skeptics, usually around 25% of your frontline employees will say no way, how I'm going to install anything I don't want. I don't want this information at all. But what starts happening is the other 75% that actually do download the app or they do go to the to the portal or they do use their email address for communication starts talking to the 25% at the end, and one of two things happen at that point one while you at least relay the information back to them. So even if they continue to insist that they don't want to install the app or download anything, that's fine. They're getting consistent messages from their co workers. But to oftentimes, they're convinced that there's value and in doing what they never thought there was value. Because people don't want to do it, not because they don't want to, because they don't see the value.

So once they start seeing the value via the conversations that everybody else is in the loop, and they're not, they start to pay attention, and they start to tune in into into one of those channels, whichever channel they prefer.

Julie: Thanks, Chris. I have a similar question. Now, this question is, do you have any tips on how to engage remote employees? I'm guessing they're not necessarily deskless remote employees? So wondering if you can shed some light on that question for me.

Chris: It's tough without a little bit more context. So to understand the organization's particular makeup, what tech tools are available for those remote employees are doing? Are they desk bound or deskless, and so on. But assuming they may challenge with, let's assume they're desk bound employees, and then talk about this like, so if they're that town employees, they may challenge what they're missing is the watercooler talk. They used to be opportunities for casual conversations in the workplace. When we were all working out on office and you know, Sparrow in particular, we are remote only. So everybody's working from different places, throughout Canada and the US. And the key thing here is how do you establish that sense of culture, in the absence of those casual conversations in the absence of going together for lunch, or grabbing coffee together, and so on. And there's a ton of value when I used to happen, so the way we do it is you need to be intentional about creating those coalition's, you need to be intentional about creating coalition's that are beyond a meeting on a webinar like this, where, you know, somebody's talking, and it's only business, there's no casual conversations.

So a lot of our clients will roll out some fun channels, if you will, and you know, better home or my pet and people started sharing pictures of this is just an example, people can start sharing pictures of their pets and start to get engaged with each other.

The only thing that we tried to do is force an introduction to somebody that you didn't know, like, create a connection between two people in their organization that wouldn't necessarily talk to each other, because they're in different departments that would never be in a meeting together. But you know what, they work on the same company, and they probably can find something in common to talk about based on those introductions. It can be a little bit more difficult with introverts, obviously. But there's strategies that we can also use to help with that. So that's for this employees, you know, like frontline employees and so on, the main challenge is their work rhythm is different than for the desk bound employees, that's a desk, we can always take five minutes in between emails or meetings to do something discretionary, like for example, read communication, when you work in an assembly line, you usually don't have that.

So communication has to be a little bit different. It has to be more to the point, it has to be more strategic. And they don't have time to read long communication memos on things like that. So you have to keep it very succinct, and highly targeted and relevant in that situation.

Julie: Thanks, Chris. That was great. Now we're out of time for today. So if anyone has left a question in the Q&A, we will reply with an answer via email. But we do need to close things off for now. Thank you, Chris, so much for your insightful presentation and to everybody who joined us today. As the next steps, we are offering today's attendees a free 30 minute session with Chris to build your own business case. If you're interested, send us a message in the Q&A or you can use the link that I put in the Q&A window. Don't forget to download the business case presentation template, if you haven't already. I've already put that link into the Q&A window as well. And finally, make sure that you share the recording of this masterclass with your peers. You will see the recording in your inbox over the next couple of days. Thank you again, everyone for taking the time to join us today. And thank you, Chris, for all of your amazing insights. We really hope that everyone found this masterclass, very valuable. Have a great day.

Chris: Hey thanks everybody

Speaker		Host

Chris Izquierdo CEO, Sparrow Connected Chris Izquierdo is the founder and CEO of Sparrow Connected, an award-winning omnichannel internal communications platform that boosts employee engagement by over 300% across 25+ industries. Chris has received numerous accolades, including RBC Top 25 Canadian Immigrant, one of the 10 Most Influential Hispanics in Canada, and E&Y Prairies Entrepreneur of the Year. His mission is to empower internal communication professionals with superior tools and ensure they are recognized as key members of executive teams. Chris also serves as a board director for various organizations, demonstrating his commitment to leadership and innovation.		Julie Ford Head of Content, Sparrow Connected Julie Ford has developed and overseen internal and external communications strategies for various B2B tech companies in Canada and the U.S over the past 15+ years. Julie is the Head of Content at Sparrow Connected and hosts the ICON Podcast, which challenges conventional thinking about internal communications.

Masterclass: Building an Internal Comms Platform Business Case That Leaders Can't Ignore

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