Best of CASE District VII Award
 

Institution: Stanford University

Title of entry: StanfordMed Pulse drives employee engagement

About this entry: The Stanford Medicine Office of Communications’ Internal Communications team publishes a digital internal newsletter called StanfordMed Pulse. The newsletter, created at the beginning of the pandemic, is emailed each weekday to ~50,000 people across Stanford Medicine and shared on our newest internal communications channel, StanfordMed TODAY.

The pandemic highlighted the need to push out critical information to the Stanford Medicine community (staff, physicians, faculty, medical students, and managers), many of whom were experiencing serious burnout and information overload. There are also many workers who don’t have regular access to email. We realized that to help build a stronger, more resilient Stanford Medicine community after the pandemic, we needed to engage our staff, providers, faculty, and students with content beyond the day-to-day operational information.

The average monthly open rate for Pulse dropped from a high of 50.5% in April 2021 to a low of 27% in October 2021. This alarming downward trend confirmed what we suspected – that Pulse in its current state was too long, confusing to navigate and hard to consume.

(Please refer to Figure 1 in Attachments PDF)

We saw an opportunity to refresh the Pulse newsletter so that it remains a primary source of critical organizational news and reinforces Pulse as the primary push mechanism to our newest internal communications channel, StanfordMed TODAY.

Our multi-pronged strategy resulted in a steady increase in engagement with Pulse. The average monthly open rate was 44.8% as of December 2022 and the average monthly click-through rate was 3.8% in September 2022.