Internal communications challenges? Create Knowledge Volunteers

Knowledge Volunteers are employees who actually WANT the information on offer in your internal communications. That’s exactly what you need when you can’t make employees read emails, visit the intranet or turn up for lunch-and-learns.

You work in a large organisation and you have something you want employees to know.

The problem in large organisations is that employees have almost unlimited places to hide from information they don’t want to acquire.

They don’t read the emails.

They don’t look at the intranet.

They don’t show up for the lunch-and-learns.

Unless you have a way to MAKE your colleagues take this new knowledge onboard, you need to persuade them that the information you have is something they WANT to learn.

We say that you need to turn your colleagues into Knowledge VOLUNTEERS.

We like the concept of a Knowledge Volunteer because it reframes a project.

It changes it from a communication project into a marketing project — even if it’s internal.

“Communication” implies that if you’ve said it or published it on your intranet, the job is done.

But if you want people to actually have this information, the job is not done unless they’ve actually taken it onboard.

That means they need to make a choice to do so.

And THAT means you need to MARKET the information to them — because marketing is all about creating volunteers. Unless you’re the government, you can’t make somebody buy something. They have to volunteer to pay.

Information is just another product. And if information is YOUR product, it’s Knowledge Volunteers you need to create.

So if you’ve got an internal communications challenge in your organisation, it’s very likely you could solve it by reframing your thinking in terms of marketing and creating Knowledge Volunteers.

We have more tips on improving your conversion rate — internal and external — here.