As important as external communications are for creating brand awareness, building a healthy sales funnels and gaining media attention—sometimes it’s the culture of an organization that really makes a business attractive to clients and journalists.
One of the key components to achieving a great corporate culture is to have an amazing internal communications strategy, one that is all about facilitating strategic communications and conversations between your employees.
Because transparency, trust, and accountability breed innovation, which in turn motivates employees to create great products, services and external communications.
Agility PR Solutions recently released a white paper titled, 5 media monitoring and analysis strategies for internal communications and the healthcare industry, outlining five ways companies can use media monitoring to enhance their internal communications efforts. And rest assured, you don’t need to be in the healthcare industry to implement these techniques in your organization!
In addition to the recent whitepaper release, here are eight free tools and resources that you can use to step-up your internal communications efforts:
- Bitrix24 (https://www.bitrix24.com/)
Looking for a free project management software that also doubles as a company intranet? Look no further than Bitrix24. Now free for an unlimited amount of users, Bitrix24 allows you to assign tasks, track time, create checklists and gantt charts, interact with other users and ultimately makes collaboration a breeze.
Bonus: Even a free membership comes with 5gb of storage for external documents.
- Slack (https://slack.com/)
Slack allows you to manage teams and projects from one simple interface—separating tasks and teams into different channels giving users a transparent view of what is going on within your organization.The free version of Slack allows you to integrate up to 10 of your productivity apps, meaning users no longer have to switch back and forth between their favourite apps.
Bonus: Slack archives all messages, data, and documents shared within the application, allowing users to easily search through older content. However, the free version only allows members to back search through last 10,000 messages.
- Trello (https://trello.com/)
Trello organizes projects by different “boards,” allowing members of your team to easily shift tasks from between different favourites simply by dragging a “card.” This fluid and visual approach to project management allows members of your team to quickly understand what needs to be done in order to complete projects. Assign due dates and track time to really get the most out of Trello!
Bonus: There is only one version of Trello—and it’s free.
- HipChat (https://www.hipchat.com/)
If you’re looking for a simple tool to connect your employees and projects, consider HipChat. The basic version of the HipChat software allows users to connect, share pictures, documents and screens and @mention each other in a chatroom like setting. Similarly to Slack, HipChat also allows you to back search up to 25,000 messages.
Bonus: Should you choose to upgrade, HipChat is only $2 per user, per month.
- Convo (https://www.convo.com/)
Similarly to other internal communications tools, Convo allows you to communicate in real-time with your colleagues. Share documents and provide feedback visually, and instantaneously, on working documents!
Bonus: Individual users can’t remove data from the network, meaning what happens in Convo stays in Convo!
- WorkingOn (https://www.workingon.co)
WorkingOn is a great internal communications software because it allows users to easily see what work was done in a specific day. WorkingOn’s work calendar keeps all employees accountable to tasks and deadlines, and demonstrates project transparency to every member of the team. Like the aforementioned softwares, WorkingOn allows users to create teams and tasks.
Bonus: The software sends a daily round-up of all the work done in the previous day, allowing you to see how much work all the members of your team completed!
