Using the intranet to tear down silos during a rebrand

During Ragan’s Internal Communications Conference last fall, Audacity’s VP of Corporate Communications and Corporate Social Responsibility, Katherine Ide spoke to Interact Software Customer Success Manager James Lovely about how the multi-platform audio company unified its communications and culture strategies during a rebrand by launching its intranet as a central destination.

Here’s what we learned:

Cleaning up the clutter during a rebrand

Ide recalled how making the business case for an intranet began with her writing “a five-page treatise” and advocating for an intranet for a couple of years amid some recent acquisitions. She was working with the COO, who was also in operations, and let them know that they needed a dedicated communications function. There was PR, but there was no one who could do more than send an email out to 1,000 employees.

It took about two years of lobbying before that five-page paper, which Ide joked read more like a colleage paper than it should have, translated into an actual position. Central to the creation of her role, Ide said, was “a philosophy that communications internally has to be thoughtful, nurtured and taken care of.”