Internal audience only
Due to the terms of the Civil Service Code for former employees, I am unable to publish screen shots of the e-Postcard approach I designed.
I have hard copies of this work would be happy to talk through them at any face to face meeting.
Fundamentally, they are my implementation of HTML emails and are successfully used in the National Insurance Contributions Office (NICO) to market and promote corporate initiatives and provide regular news flashes of information.
Hand coded in HTML, the e-Postcards use shared CSS and imagery (all stored on the IIS server for the NICO Intranet to keep email file size down) to communicate information in an eye catching format. Positional <div> tags and semantic use of headers and lists create a separation of information into a three column layout with overflow being handled automatically in CSS.
Branding and colouring was controlled by CSS with each subject matter (e.g. HR issues) being given it's own look and feel, helping users to immediately identify the nature of the message being received.
The style of writing is kept deliberately casual and the reduced amount of content is supplemented with hyperlinks to Intranet items that provide more information on the subject matter being communicated. This approach to content proved very successful with the Intranet hit count increasing by 500% compared with a traditional Intranet only news item.
I came up with the idea for the e-Postcards as a solution to the problem of finding a new way to support the promotion of corporate initiatives in NICO. Staff feedback had indicated that they found a lot of the corporate information to be bland and difficult to relate to their needs so I set myself the challenge to come up with an approach that was:
What was the inspiration? Well, I regularly received HTML emails from companies at home and thought "Hey, these stand out. This would be a perfect way to communicate at work" and so the e-Postcard was born.
I started off the project thinking that I would only use the approach to support new corporate initiatives but after some very positive feedback on the prototype version, I decided there was an opportunity to broaden my aims and make this a mainstay of NICO's communication strategy. So that's what I did.
The original idea to provide a channel for corporate initiatives still successfully went ahead but I also introduced a monthly 'news round up' version that was issued to all staff. The aim of this version was to reaffirm important information, provide timely reminders about how to access static items on the Intranet and also to act as a vehicle to share other information that didn't fit with the Intranet publication policies.
Successfully launched in August 2006 and continued ever since, the e-Postcard approach was picked up by other teams in HMRC and from a local communication channel for 4,500 people, it expanded to include a potential audience of over 100,000.
I must admit, it's not the worst idea I've ever had.