A lot often happens in large organizations. Changes in administrative processes, new colleagues starting out, teams working together differently or work shifting. Changes follow each other in rapid succession. Internal communication plays an important role in informing, connecting and supporting employees in their work. News items, alerts, policy updates, events, HR information and IT announcements appear daily.
Not all of this information is equally relevant to everyone. For example, what is important to employees in the office may not always be relevant to field staff and vice versa. When everyone in the organization receives all messages and notifications, it can create an information overload. As a result, messages are more likely to be skipped, less likely to be read, or important information may be missed.
With audience-centric communication, you can prevent this from happening. In this blog, we explain how you can tailor content to specific audiences using Fresh within a SharePoint intranet. We delve deeper into the options you have for doing so and why this contributes to more effective internal communication.
Targeted content means that information is shown only to the employees for whom it is intended. This could include communication by department, role, location or type of employee.
For a field employee, practical, immediately applicable information is important. Think safety updates, scheduling or operational changes. Office workers are more likely to need policy information and project updates. By making these distinctions, each employee gets an intranet that better suits his or her workday.
Within a SharePoint intranet, this requires more than just good content. It requires structure, clear choices and capabilities that support it.
There are several ways to tailor content to specific audiences. This allows you to communicate in a more targeted way, without making management unnecessarily complex.
Fresh allows you to apply audience targeting to different types of content, such as news items, pages, documents, events and tools. This means that when you create content, you determine which audience it will be visible to.
For example, a news item may be visible only to a specific department, location or project group. Other employees will not see this message on their intranet, simply because it is not relevant to them. Content reaches the right target group directly and does not get lost in a general stream of messages.
An important basis for audience-oriented communication is the use of taxonomy and metadata. Fresh allows content to have fixed tags, such as subject, department, location or type of information.
This metadata is used to automatically display content in the right places, such as on department pages or in overview views. Employees don’t have to search or filter; the intranet does that for them. This provides more structure and findability, while editors create content once and have it cleverly reflected in multiple places.
Fresh can display content based on the information in your user profile, such as department or location. As a result, each employee automatically sees content that matches his or her role within the organization.
A field employee gets to see different information than an office employee, without the need for separate pages or intranets. This makes the intranet feel more personal and more in line with employees’ daily work.
For many employees, Microsoft Teams is where they start their workday. Fresh connects to this by making the intranet accessible within Teams and by offering communication there too in a targeted way.
Important content can become visible within Teams, tailored to the right audience. This keeps communication close to the employee’s workplace. Employees receive relevant information in an environment they already use daily, without additional applications or platforms.
For urgent or important communications, Fresh offers various forms of alerts and announcements. These can become visible as a banner, notification or pop-up, and again, you control who gets to see the message or not.
In addition, these messages can be sent as notifications in Teams, targeted to a specific audience. Important information gets noticed by the right employees, without disturbing others unnecessarily.
Fresh provides personalized dashboards and views, such as “What’s new,” in which employees see only recent and relevant content that applies to them.
This overview takes into account target audience, profile information and previously published content, so employees can quickly catch up without having to search through everything. That makes for less noise, more overview and quicker insight into what’s new or important to an employee.
In addition to the intranet, Fresh also supports targeted newsletters. Newsletters can be composed based on the same target groups and content structure as the intranet.
This way, employees receive only news that is relevant to them, with insight into open and click behavior to further improve communication. This is useful for consistent communication across intranet and email, with better engagement and measurable results.
In international organizations, multilingual communication is often a requirement. With Fresh, employees can see content in their own language, based on the language settings within Microsoft 365.
At the same time, targeted communication is maintained. This means that employees not only see content in the correct language, but also only the information relevant to their role, department or location. So an employee in France will see different content than a colleague in the Netherlands and will be offered this directly in the correct language.
This ensures clear and consistent communication for international teams, without having to manage content multiple times or manually separate by language or target audience.
Targeted communication within a SharePoint intranet requires more than just good intentions. It requires structure, clear choices and tooling that supports how organizations and employees actually work. Tailoring content to target group, role and context creates calm and overview, while important information is better seen and understood. With Fresh, this becomes part of daily practice, making the intranet not just a place that holds information, but an environment that truly helps employees in their work.
