New Firstup Studio to power more employee engagement

Our mission at Firstup has always been to empower companies to communicate with their employees:

• the right message
• sent to the right employee
• at the right time
• through the right channel

Historically, employee communication platforms have always been built on trade-offs. You want targeted, personalized delivery but don’t have the time to manage the added complexity. You want eye-catching designs but don’t have the money to use a professional designer. You want to measure engagement but don’t have the resources to set up tracking across every channel. 

There’s never been a best-of-breed solution that was able to deliver all of these capabilities until now: Firstup Studio.

With Firstup Studio, we took the best of marketing automation, content creation and analytics software and put it into one platform with an intuitive workflow that allows you to do more, faster than ever.

The new Firstup Studio will begin rolling out mid-November to current users, with an opt-in for anyone that is excited to make the move to the improved experience. For those who need a bit more time, no worries, you can stay with your current experience. To ensure an easy upgrade process for every customer, we’ll be reaching out to all our customers to discuss which option is best for your organization in the coming weeks. 

So, now that we’re aligned on how we’re going to begin rolling out the new Firstup Studio, let’s take a look at the key components we’ve upgraded.

Centralized publishing for EVERY channel 

Firstup Studio centralizes the entire publishing process, for any employee application, into one powerful workflow. Create standalone intranet posts, email newsletters, mobile notifications, digital signage alerts or CEO announcements. Publish any kind of content into any digital channel your employees use from within Firstup Studio. No more toggling between tools or copying content from one solution to another.

Your digital workplace is complex. Employees live in different applications depending on their roles. Save time on content management and reach more employees by publishing once into Firstup Studio and then delivering that information to any of your internal channels. Firstup Studio simplifies the experience for communicators so you can focus on the message, not the communication channels.  

Orchestrated delivery with proactive insights 

Cutting through the clutter and having your communications being heard over the noise is the name of the game — and there’s a lot of noise. Desk workers receive an average of 120 emails and 46 smartphone notifications per day. So any communication you send is competing for attention.

Firstup Studio has a new way of approaching this problem, one that goes a step further than just targeting your messages, compiling newsletters, or scheduling a message for later. Those tactics don’t address the noise issue head-on, in fact, they actually contribute to the clutter in your employees’ day.

Our intelligent orchestration engine maximizes engagement with your content by delivering the message at the optimal time and place for every employee.

In an omnichannel environment where your employees are engaged in a lot of different systems and devices, Firstup Studio will proactively predict how much noise you are up against. By knowing all of the communications that are being sent around your company, Firstup Studio suggests what to send, on which channels and what time is best to reach your target audience. 

Firstup Studio might suggest increasing the priority of a message or changing the delivery date because it knows there are several other communications that are also considered critical. You’ll no longer have to manually juggle calendars to figure out what else is going on in the company. 

Likewise, some employees prefer to engage more on email or with mobile push notifications in the mornings when they have more time. Others prefer engaging at the end of their business day through a different application. The orchestration engine takes these personal preferences into account before suggesting the time and place of your message. This is the key to a truly better digital employee experience. 

“…Firstup Studio is bold, clean, and easy to use. The phrase ‘game changing’ is overused, but that’s what this is. I could see this orchestration engine as air traffic control that can transform communications and improve the employee experience.”

— Joe Lees, Director of Internal Communications, GSK

Audience hyper-targeting

The new Firstup Studio also provides an overhaul on your ability to create and target audiences in your workforce. In the past, targeting has been highly manual. Let’s take a look at one example:

Let’s say you want a message to go to your global sales team, minus employees who’ve been with the company less than a year and excluding specific position levels and areas of expertise, as well as excluding a handful of countries that have different sales processes. 

Sounds like you’ll need to make a complicated query to define this audience or reach out to IT for support!

In Firstup Studio, this is incredibly easy! We take your existing employee data, keep it automatically updated with your integrated systems and allow you to target any employee attribute — including behavioral data.  

Want to send a notification to only the employees who haven’t engaged with your previous message? Done! Now you can create employee groups on the fly in the actual publishing process — no need to rely on outdated distribution lists or involve IT. 

Control over groups has also received an upgrade, with the ability to archive or delete any groups in your program.

High-impact, drag-and-drop designs and automated campaign templates

In addition to our new audience builder, content creation has seen a major upgrade. You’ll now have a powerful, drag-and-drop editor that will allow you to create beautiful content that pops and shows up exactly how you intended across all devices and endpoints. 

In the past, you needed professional designers to create visually rich content that could dynamically render across screens. Now anyone has the power to do it! 

The new interface is intuitive and a snap for anyone to add photos and graphics or interactive content, such as videos or polls — or pull from countless sources, including previous posts to build dynamic newsletters.

We’ve also added new campaign templates that will help scale your communications across your organization. Campaign templates in Firstup Studio not only ensure your design and branding are on point, but also save specific audiences and campaign settings giving you confidence that your message will make it to the right people. 

The deep analytics and insights you know and love

If you’re already using Firstup, then you’re familiar with the granular metrics and insights that Analyze provides. You’ll still see all of your favorite reports, plus the same ability to filter by audiences, insights and business initiatives so you can understand what works and what doesn’t. 

With Firstup Studio, you can understand which key company initiatives are resonating with your workforce, view engagement by department and location to see which groups need more support and improve future communications by analyzing which specific areas of your communications drive the most impact.

Game-changer for a new era

We are excited to bring this game-changing experience for employee communications to life, and help usher in a new era of productivity, engagement and inclusiveness for every worker. 

It’s all about cutting through the noise with the right information at the right time while creating a delightful experience for communicators and employees. 

____

As a reminder, we will be rolling out Firstup Studio as an opt-in experience to our current customers. If you have any questions, please reach out to your engagement manager. We look forward to your questions and the new experiences you’ll create.