Writing for internal comms: there's gold in that intranet

Your employees are a valuable source of company news, but they are not trained writers.

Be honest, have you ever stuck a success story written by Steve in IT onto the company intranet, tech-speak and all, just to fill the space?

If you don’t adapt a story for a company-wide readership, no one will read it. You also risk overlooking a wealth of information that is both engaging and useful for your workforce.

There’s gold in Steve’s writing and I’m going to show you how to find it by taking a journalistic approach to editing internal comms stories.

But first, a little exercise:

Internal comms intranet challenge

You work on the internal comms team for Big Bank. The IT team has responded to your call for success stories and submitted the following for the intranet. It seems quite technical, but there are four news stories hiding in the text that would be great for a wider company readership. Can you spot them?

The Client Data IT team has recently completed the first phase of the bank’s strategic client data consolidation project.

Client information used to be stored in completely separate systems. The data has been consolidated into a single global data repository that gives the customer services team a single client view across mortgages, insurance and savings. 

We have also built a new microservices architecture with APIs, allowing the data to be used programmatically by other systems in the firm. 

The architecture is highly resilient with multiple microservices running at any one time, so in the event of any hardware failure, there would be minimal impact to consumers of the data.

Initially, the new system will be hosted in our datacentres, but the next phase of the project will focus on moving the system to run on AWS (Amazon Web Services).  This will result in significant infrastructure cost savings.

Did you spot them? I’ll reveal the answers in the following guide.

How to write and edit company news like a journalist

1. Identify your reader(s)

Before you write a company news story, identify your readership (there may be more than one).

In the above example, we might have:

• The Customer Service team

• The entire company

• Heads of business

• Other IT teams

2. Figure out the news angle

For each group, ask yourself why they should care about Steve’s story. Better still, ask Steve what difference his project will make for each of your audiences, why should they care?

These are your news angles.

Here are the four angles from the example story (one for each readership):

Customer services

Customer service operators will have a full view of the customer’s interaction with Big Bank, creating cross-selling opportunities across all business areas, following an IT upgrade.

Heads of business

IT has completed the first phase of a project that will bring significant cost savings to the business.

All employees

IT outages will be reduced significantly following an systems upgrade, which will allow the support team to seamlessly fix problems.

IT management

Steve’s original story is perfect for this audience, so we’ll leave it as is.

3. Write for your audience

If your system allows you to target news to different audiences, you might end up with four different stories. That’s a big upgrade from just one that nobody read.

For each audience, re-order your story, so that their bespoke news angle appears in the top line.

Make sure any jargon is accessible to your intended readership. I’ve reduced Steve’s efforts to an ‘IT upgrade’ for the customer services team, they really don’t need to know about microservices architecture.  However, his original copy is spot-on for other IT teams in the bank.

An apology to IT teams

I’ve picked on IT teams for this blog, but the premise is the same for any department. Employees tend to write about their successes within the narrow scope of their own field. It is your job to tease out why their achievement matters to the wider business.

And if your computer crashes while doing it, be nice to Steve.

Next topic, you decide

I started this series after providing copy editing services for various communications teams and noticing common pain points. I aim to ‘go micro’ on a given topic each week, such as how to structure a news story, how to simplify your writing, and how to write for different audiences. What else would you like me to cover? Let me know in the comments below.

About me

I am a copywriter and communicator who helps companies of all sizes – from tech start-ups to global consultancies – with all things copy-related. My services include bespoke training, content strategy, copy editing, and, of course, my favourite thing, writing.