Christian Aid – How to get every employee onto Viva Engage

Christian Aid provides long-term development support and humanitarian relief worldwide and has been highlighting suffering, tackling injustice and championing people’s rights since 1945. For an organisation that works across the world – in Africa, Asia and the Middle East, Latin America and the Caribbean, and Europe – having a tool for effective internal collaboration is essential.

That’s why at Christian Aid, the internal communications team has ensured there’s an almost universal readership of Viva Engage, and why not engaging is not an option.

How do you get every employee to read Viva Engage?

The main reason everyone reads Viva Engage is that Christian Aid made a conscious decision to make it the primary communications tool. Leaders and staff are banned from sending all company emails, and instead must communicate through announcements on Viva Engage.

As a result, they have helped to connect leaders to staff (and vice versa) to every announcement. Every person has a voice to share their perspective, and the number of emails is drastically reduced.

As well as stopping all-staff emails from leaders, Christian Aid has ditched news pages on its SharePoint intranet, replacing news with links to key messages from Viva Engage in “All Christian Aid”, the name for Christian Aid’s All Company Viva Engage community, as well as from other communities.

The result is a thriving Viva Engage network across all communities. Christian Aid ranked No.1 in SWOOP Analytics’ 2023/24 Viva Engage benchmarking analysis for small-size organisations across the world, and No.2 globally from all 97 organisations benchmarked.

“The key thing for Christian Aid’s success is it’s a corporate communications tool,” said Peter Berry, Global Internal Communications Manager at Christian Aid.

Peter Berry, Global Internal Communications Manager, Christian Aid.

“All our leaders have to communicate and announce through Viva Engage, they can’t email.

“And so we get almost universal readership of messages through Viva Engage because that’s the only tool they can use to communicate to all our staff. If staff do email, it won’t get readership in other channels because we can’t link to it.”

If, for example, there is a humanitarian crisis somewhere in the world and a leader announces it on Viva Engage, everyone is encouraged to read and join in the conversation.

“We can give staff a voice so they can respond and they can comment,” Peter said.

“It becomes a conversation and that connection between leadership and staff is greatly enhanced and reduces that disconnect you get when you can hide behind an email and press ‘send’ and then that’s it.”

It’s been a gradual process to get to this point where all 750 Christian Aid employees are at least reading Viva Engage. It’s also worth acknowledging that not all Christian Aid’s leaders have always been convinced that posting on Viva Engage, and formerly Yammer, was the way to go.

Relying on data to guide decisions

Peter and David Millar, Global Internal Communications Advisor at Christian Aid, continually presented Christian Aid’s leadership with data from SWOOP Analytics to show they were reaching people. Peter and David wanted to demonstrate how they were improving employee engagement and knowledge sharing across the charity.

“We use data driven insights and while we get lots of engagement from our staff, we like to know exactly where that is coming from and exactly what people are interested in, and why,” Peter said.

“This is really helping us to improve our internal communications as a function, using data to prove what we do in our internal comms. It’s there to drive us forward but also to highlight gaps.”

What the data has uncovered is a high level of engagement across UK-based employees but more passive readership across much of the rest of the world.

“What we have unpacked from our data is that all staff are engaged, it’s just that they engage in different ways,” Peter said.

“So using the data is really, really powerful for us.”

Using the announcement feature to amplify messages from leaders

David and Peter said the decision to ban all-staff emails from leaders in favour of a Viva Engage post was initially met with concern that not everyone would read their post. The compromise was to use the Announcement feature, whereby every member of the community where the announcement is made receives an email notification.

“We could say; ‘Well yes, all staff will be alerted to this message. All staff have got access to Microsoft systems, there’s no reason they won’t read the message. They will get the alerts and they will be able to read the message’,” Peter said.

David said not every leader was initially enthusiastic to restrict all-staff emails to Viva Engage but there was more social pressure to do so over time.

“A couple of our leaders really bought into it from the get-go, but others were more cautious,” David said.

David Millar, Global Internal Communications Advisor, Christian Aid.

“But as soon as others were posting and getting lots of traction, they did the same and got fantastic results.”

He said when senior leaders post on Viva Engage using the announcement feature there are a lot of reactions but; “it takes a certain kind of personality to reply publicly”.

However, posts from middle managers get much stronger engagement levels.

“It’s less intimidating, I think,” David said.

“There can often be a lot more conversation on Viva Engage when it’s sent out by somebody less senior, and this also provides opportunities for less senior staff to play important roles in decision making and communicating updates.

“One of my favourite implications of the shift from communicating via email from senior managers, to using Viva Engage, is its easier for those who actually did the work to get the recognition, as everyone has an equal voice on the platform”.

Tapping into the most influential people

An example of SWOOP Analytics’ Influencer Risk Score and Influential People measures. Please note: this is not Christian Aid’s data.

With these results in mind, Peter said Christian Aid is now trying to move to a less centralised approach to communications across Viva Engage by tapping into the organisation’s most influential people. Peter and David use SWOOP Analytics’ Influencer Risk Score and Influential People measures to identify influential people across Viva Engage and work with them to amplify the messages from senior leaders.

“Although the senior leaders will still communicate announcements from All Christian Aid, we also work with leaders in other teams to communicate so we can increase the number of influencers,” Peter said.

“If there are people who influence globally in different regions and countries, we will work with them to communicate. We can amplify their voices so they’re more likely to encourage their audiences to participate, rather than it being a centralised, top-down approach.”

Using the Influencer Risk Score highlighted that much of the engagement on Viva Engage was limited to UK-based employees.

“We exported the Influencer Risk Score and we could see it was quite UK-centric so that was what influenced us to change our approach,” Peter said.

“Then we were able to think; ‘How can we increase the number of influencers globally?’ We could work with our countries to improve that level of participation and engagement by using your (SWOOP’s) influencer score and trying to improve over time”.

Curating key messages

Peter said one of the biggest challenges faced by Christian Aid’s Viva Engage network is that messages can get lost. One way the humanitarian aid organisation addresses this is to curate key messages and announcements into a weekly newsletter which is then emailed to all employees, with links to the Viva Engage conversations.

“So if staff are really short on time, if they’re working in an emergency situation and they haven’t got time to read through Viva Engage, David puts together a really good newsletter and curates all the best bits from the week in all areas of our work so those things can then be found,” Peter said.

“We also ensure that really key messages also point to SharePoint (intranet) pages as well, so you’re able to refer back to long term information easily.”

On the SharePoint intranet, news items have been replaced with each employee’s bespoke Viva Engage feed so the news people see on the intranet is, in fact, posts from the Viva Engage communities they have joined.

“Doing this with the Viva Engage feed gives customisation,” Peter said.

“We don’t use the news items in SharePoint at all, we only use Viva Engage because we think it creates too many channels and confuses staff.”

Goodbye to Storylines

A feature of Viva Engage that Christian Aid does not use is Storylines. In fact, Storylines has been disabled across the Christian Aid network.

“The only people that used Storylines were people that didn’t use Viva Engage very much because they didn’t know how to use it,” David said.

He said prior to the introduction of Storylines, people who didn’t use Viva Engage often would post in the All Company feed because it was the default community. Once Storylines was enabled, those posts defaulted to their Storyline. Because these people don’t use Viva Engage often, they also don’t have many followers so their posts were lost.

David said the feature might perhaps become more useful in the future, but for now Christian Aid has decided Viva Engage is more effective without it.

The importance of governance across Viva Engage

One of the keys to Christian Aid’s Viva Engage success is the governance implemented by Peter and David to ensure people are posting in the correct communities and messages are being heard.

“People would post in Storylines and they might get 10 likes but also you can’t move a post that’s a Storyline,” David said.

“So I’d have to make a judgment call - is it worth moving? If it is, I’d have to tell them and then they’re already not that keen to use Viva Engage because they don’t know how, and then I’ve got to talk them through how to do it and it would take ages.”

Peter said when Storyline posts from leaders were reposted in the correct Viva Engage community, readership increased by 10 times.

So, the decision was made to disable Storylines because in a small organisation like Christian Aid there isn’t a culture of following individuals online but rather one of community membership.

Peter and David also rely on the topics feed in Viva Engage to track conversations and ensure they are posted in the correct communities.

For example, posts relating to the Türkiye and Syria earthquake will be posted in the Humanitarian community, but also need to be shared in a Fundraising community. By using topics, the conversations can be tracked and also linked to the intranet homepage.

Devastation from the Türkiye and Syria earthquake.

“Because we’re only a team of two people, we have to minimise the number of channels we have,” Peter said.

“If we just use Viva Engage, David and I can control it. It does need to be managed and that’s how we get around it.”

Peter and David have also reduced the number of communities across Christian Aid’s Viva Engage network, ensuring each community has a specific purpose in line with their corporate priorities. The result is often larger communities, which also means lots of eyes on each post.

“We’ve tried to reduce the number of groups (communities) and also control how people create Viva Engage groups so we create a very much corporate internal collaboration tool so it’s geared around our key areas of work,” Peter said.

“We have quite large audiences so when people do post there’s more likely to be traction and they’re more likely to be seen by an audience, rather than have lots and lots of Viva Engage groups, which is what we started with and we’ve just slowly merged them.”

Working this way also means Peter and David can see where there are gaps and where improvements are needed to ensure true global engagement.

“Although there are key staff using it actively, I think I’d like to see more line managers use it as well to improve even more our global representation and I think using SWOOP is the way to improve that,” Peter said.

He said to have such a successful Viva Engage network, governance has been the key.

“You have to be quite controlling actually,” Peter said.

“You can’t be laissez-faire about it and let it go and just hope staff will use it. You have to manage it properly and push it hard to get it working. That means getting that initial and regular buy-in from the top table, mass inviting group stakeholders to each pre-defined community, integrating into other internal communications channels and making sure all the corporate messages go through Viva Engage.

“Once you get that, then you’re more likely to get a collaborative culture built through Viva Engage which is what we’re looking for. We can them demonstrate engagement through SWOOP and amplify voices globally.

“It’s always a work in progress, there’s still lots of things we can do to improve it, but you have to really go for it. We’ve been fortunate that leadership have supported it.”