Reach Further, Act Faster, Prove More: What's New in Q2 2026

Last quarter, we shipped Custom Homepage and Focused Content, expanding personalization across the employee experience. Instead of one-size-fits-all communications, organizations could create tailored experiences for different audiences within a single platform.

This quarter, we're expanding what's possible by extending your reach across every corner of the organization, giving employees self-service capabilities without leaving Firstup, and surfacing the data leadership needs to make real decisions.

When these capabilities work together, engagement goes up, HR inquiries go down, and leadership conversations shift from 'we think it's working' to 'here's the data.'

Here's what's new.

Expanding who you can reach means solving for identity complexity, ensuring critical content can't be ignored, and automating the touchpoints that matter most.

Every employee who can't access the platform is a message that doesn't land, an initiative that stalls, and engagement that never happens.

Large enterprises rarely have simple authentication. Acquisitions, subsidiaries, and decentralized IT create complexity that traditional single SSO can't handle.

Multiple SSO allows organizations to connect multiple identity providers simultaneously within a single Firstup instance. Microsoft Entra ID, Okta, Ping, Google Workspace, and any SAML 2.0 provider all work together so that every employee gets a consistent login experience, so no corner of your organization is left out of critical communications.

The business value: broader reach across your entire workforce, smoother employee experience, and confidence that your most important initiatives can actually reach the people who need to act on them.

When safety alerts and compliance updates go unread, people get hurt, and your organization faces real risk.

Some communications aren't optional, but until now, employees could unsubscribe from anything, including the content that carries the highest stakes.

Mandatory Auto-Follow adds a new toggle in Studio that locks subscriptions for targeted audiences on Topics and Knowledge Hubs. Critical communications can no longer be manually unfollowed, giving you enforceable governance for the messages that matter most.

The business value: 100% confidence that safety protocols, compliance deadlines, and crisis communications reached the audiences they were built for.

Your most important audiences often can't be reached because they don't fit neatly into HR categories.

Union members, event attendees, project teams — these groups are business-critical but can't be queried from your system. The current workaround involves copying emails into spreadsheets, building complex formulas, and pasting queries into the advanced builder.

Static List Audiences replaces that entire process. Upload a CSV directly, create reusable audiences that work across programs, and reduce audience build time by 95%. Sometimes HRIS data doesn't fit dynamic categories, and this makes targeting those groups simple.

The business value: critical initiatives stop stalling while you manually build lists, and the right people get the right message regardless of how their data is structured.

Missed birthdays, forgotten work anniversaries, and late compliance training don't just frustrate employees — they erode the culture and compliance standards you're working to build.

Recurring employee moments shouldn't require annual manual rebuilds.

Journey Frequency Settings automates recurring Journeys with flexible weekly, monthly, and annual triggers that require no maintenance after setup. Work anniversaries, compliance training, and routine reminders run automatically, so critical touchpoints never fall through the cracks.

The business value: communicators get time back for strategic work, and employees receive consistent touchpoints that strengthen culture and compliance without manual intervention.

When employees can get things done directly in Firstup, they stay engaged with the platform where your most important communications live.

App switching and re-authentication friction doesn't just annoy employees — it pulls them away from the communications platform you need them engaged with.

Q2 enhances Workday and UKG Pro integrations to handle key HR tasks directly within Firstup.

Employees can now submit time-off requests in Workday without leaving Firstup and check UKG attendance points in real time without switching apps. When paired with AI Search, employees can access the productivity enhancements and more, like payslips, time-off balances, all through natural language in just seconds.

The business value: higher process adoption, reduced HR ticket volume, and stronger employee engagement with the platform where your most critical communications live.

Leadership needs proof that your communications program drives real business impact.

Q2 gives you unified reporting and the analytics tools to tell that story.

If you've built custom intranet experiences on Firstup's Developer APIs, a meaningful portion of your content engagement has been invisible to leadership, making it impossible to show the full impact of your program. Developer API-generated engagement — comments, shares, bookmarks — now appears in Campaign Results and Standard Reporting alongside native channel performance.

Plus, a new secure REST API lets data teams retrieve engagement data for Power BI, Tableau, and internal data lakes without managing SFTP infrastructure. No lag, just your data, where your team can combine it with HRIS and business metrics.

The business value: unified reporting that reflects the full scope of your program, and the ability to correlate communication engagement with business outcomes in the analytics tools leadership already trusts.

We're continuing to expand what's possible with enterprise employee communication. When every employee can be reached, when employees can get things done without friction, and when leadership can see clear proof of impact, everything else gets easier.

That's the foundation we're building toward.

Want to learn more about what's new in Q2? Reach out to your Firstup account team or visit firstup.io.