Content + Swag Keeps Employees Engaged and Informed

Donna DeMarco, co-founder and vice president at Viddler, Inc.

If you’re a big, distributed health network with multiple locations and thousands of employees, how do you make sure your employees keep you top of mind when they’re out in the community?

“We’re a large 10-hospital network — soon to be 12 — with over 15,500 employees,” says Mary Beth Golab, director of internal communications at St. Luke’s University Health Network in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. “It’s a little daunting to get information out to every single employee, just based on the breadth of our Network.”

To tackle the problem, St. Luke’s chief marketing officer, Ken Szydlow, convened a group of hospital leaders to brainstorm ideas on how best to communicate good news across the enterprise and engage and enlist employees to become brand ambassadors.

Szydlow introduced Donna DeMarco, co-founder and vice president at Bethlehem-based Viddler, Inc., to the group. Viddler provides online, on-demand video technology and content delivery services for health care organizations. “What eventually came out of it was utilizing these short, fun videos that our employees would watch and share,” Golab says.

The rationale for keeping employees in the loop with what’s happening at St. Luke’s is to give them more context, so that when they see marketing out in the community, they make the connection with the videos they’ve watched. If they just viewed a video about the organization’s four new orthopedic surgeons, for example, they might be more likely to mention it to a friend who needs a knee replacement, notes Golab.

When employees watch the videos, they earn points that can be redeemed for St. Luke’s branded gear. Neither Golab nor DeMarco anticipated how popular the incentive program — Star Points — would become, or how quickly.

Read the full article now: Gamifying Internal Communications: St. Luke’s University Health Network Employees Earn Branded Gear by Staying Informed

Best regards,
Matt Humphrey
President