We were appointed to work with national building products distributor CCF on a full-service brief, covering both internal and external communications. One of the first internal communications projects we undertook was to completely refresh its quarterly all staff newsletter to give it a new ‘magazine style’ format and broader appeal.
CCF, part of the Travis Perkins Group, has more than 700 staff based at 37 branches all over the UK as well as its head office in Northampton. With many staff employed in non-desk based roles including drivers, regional sales and warehouse colleagues, the challenge was ensuring the newsletter reached and appealed to all staff.
Previously CCF’s print only, broadsheet-style newsletter predominately focused on important top-level company updates. But its size made it unwieldy and awkward to read, and the text-heavy design was off-putting for time-poor colleagues. Following a survey of almost 100 colleagues, the newsletter scored highest in terms of awareness and engagement, so it was crucial to get the redesign right and build on its popularity as an internal comms channel.
We worked closely with CCF’s internal communications team to create the new newsletter design, drawing on research with colleagues which sought to understand what they wanted from their newsletter. Our vision was to take a completely new approach to make it more like a magazine in style to soften the corporate tone and centre the content around CCF colleagues. This drove us to make a number of fundamental format changes including reducing the size, increasing the number of images, adding more colour and encouraging people to flip through and read the whole newsletter. We also changed the tone of the newsletter, and by introducing regular features, such as a careers focus ‘Moving on up’ and a competition in each issue, made the newsletter more relevant and accessible to all CCF staff. The company values were integral and even inspired its name – We’re better together.
From a practical perspective, we reduced the newsletter to a more compact, manageable size and significantly reduced the word count on each page. We also introduced more photos of CCF staff to make it more appealing and encourage colleagues to dip in and browse stories on their breaks.
With the template agreed, we’ve since taken the lead on each subsequent issue as well as introducing a digital version which is emailed out to all staff. We work closely with CCF to research and write the copy, create the design and arrange print and delivery to all branches and head office staff.
We’re better together is designed to connect CCF’s different teams and highlight the company’s core values and priorities in an accessible and engaging way and the new approach has been widely embraced by CCF colleagues. A digital version emailed out to non-branch desk-based colleagues, alongside the hard copies delivered to all branches, was well received with a high open rate.
Hayley Rogers, Communications Manager – CCF & Keyline, said: “Through my research into the effectiveness of our internal comms channels I found that our colleagues valued the newsletter as a way to keep up to date with news across the business, but they didn’t always feel it was relevant to them personally. The reimagined newsletter strikes the perfect balance between colleague updates and corporate, business-led news to give it a wider appeal. It’s great to see the open rates reflect the anecdotal feedback about the newsletter to know that it is landing with people company-wide in the way we’d hoped. The new approach to the newsletter has given us an effective way to showcase our company ethos and values.”