Our client, a global leader in international marine terminal operations, came to the Loop for help in getting their employees engaged with their underused intranet site.

The brief was to increase traffic to the site, improve internal recognition of the brand globally and to enable people to easily get hold of the right information. The main thing was to make the site a relevant and useful tool for all employees.

First we reviewed the current site and advised on how to improve the general layout – the best solutions in terms of structure, functionality, content and design. It was clear that extending the site by developing regional and function pages would make the site more attractive.

We then provided design templates, guidelines and a selection of applications such as “Twitter feeds” to enable global, regional and function managers to create their own pages. And we developed a framework to help them generate stories to keep the Intranet regularly updated with fresh content.

It is early days, but we believe that our solutions will swell visitors to the site, raising the visibility of leaders and the brand.

How important is an internal brand in supporting your business objectives? What does a strong internal brand really add to the everyday working life of your employees? And what are dangers /pitfalls that you need to avoid?

These questions and more have been buzzing around the minds of Loopers these last few months, as we have been supporting the development of a suitably robust internal brand strategy for the power sector of a global engineering company, which has recently gone through a restructure.

We have been helping to map out a process for developing the internal brand, including developing brand models to fit the needs of the organisation, conducting desk research to understand the key brand aspirations and developing materials to engage not only other communications professionals in the articulation of the brand, but also senior leaders.

We’ve moved! Much to the relief of our Business & HR Manager, Jen Gill who has worked tirelessly over the last few months to ensure everything went like clockwork on the day. A mammoth task we’re sure you can imagine …but so far, touch wood, we’ve been glitch free…

After seven years we were sad at the thought of leaving our lovely central Bristol spot, next to the beautiful Georgian Queen’s Square, around the corner from the bustling docks and a stone’s thrown from the eclectic food and shopping of St Nick’s market….happy days!

Luckily for us we’re only moving to the building next door but one!

We’re sure we’ll be very happy in our new home – and you’re welcome to visit anytime.

Our new address is:

Unit 302 QC30
30 Queen Charlotte Street
Bristol
BS1 4HJ

PS Our phone/fax and email addresses remain the same.

Last week we were delighted to receive an invitation to one of the events we’d helped to create for an international insurance company. The events are touring Britain and beyond, but we visited one in Gloucester, UK which was a great opportunity to see our theme and tools in action – and to gauge the audience reaction for ourselves.

The overall theme was ‘weather’ …this year has been stormy for most of us, but this company is looking forward to a brighter outlook and the events reflect that. They’re not complacent though…there’s always room for improvement and we created a giant magnetic weather map for an activity to get the audience to rate their feelings about core strategic issues. They place weather symbols representing their mood, from ‘stormy’ to ‘sunshine’ on the map as well as writing their thoughts on cards that will be collated later. This activity is followed by a debate about the issues.

The weather themed presentation is delivered by a mixture of senior leaders supported by two films. The first has a serious message – in ‘View from the Floor’ Senior Leaders interviewed employees about their opinions on the positives and negatives of working for the business and their hopes for the future. The second is the grand finale –a celebratory music video in which loads of employees from across the company dance, sing and generally ‘rock out’ to Katrina and the Waves ‘Walking on Sunshine’ – we saw for ourselves what a big hit it is and the hope is that it will spread virally to any employees who missed it and may even be used as a recruitment tool!

We enjoyed ourselves, but the best thing is receiving positive feedback from our client who says: ‘The weather theme was a great concept and well received by everyone… We were pleased with the final result…and the ideas and support we received from the Loop. We look forward to working with you again.’