Create multiple touch points
OK, truth time: Have you ever skipped over an e-mail when you were busy? There’s no shame in it, and Feiger knows his people do it from time to time. The fact of the matter is, creating effective communications is more repetition than anything else.
So the next time you think about getting an important message out, consider a product advertisement that caught your attention recently. Feiger says the odds are you didn’t pick it up the first time you heard or saw it.
“To communicate with the most people most effectively, they need to receive the message in different ways,” he says. “A good analogy is multimedia marketing campaigns where you may see a company send a message in the print media and then send the same message on radio, TV, billboards and bus signs all at the same time, and that’s the most effective way to reach an audience.”
So MB Financial thinks like Nike or Pepsi when it has a message. The company uses conference calls, wall posters, an intranet, newsletters, internal e-mails, a company culture committee and an “Ask Mitch” e-mail option where people can send Feiger messages that are personalized or anonymous.
Plus, like any good campaign, MB Financial has a launch point everyone knows about that is short but sweet.
“Every Monday morning at 8:35, everybody in our company who is available is on the phone listening live to a conference call that I usually lead where I can bring everybody up to date,” Feiger says. “And it’s an amazing thing how you can convey so much information in just a 10-minute conference call.”
The call’s brevity is its strength. A brief overview will give people a starting point, and subsequent messages can flesh out details. A regular touch point allows you to be topical and gives you a chance to tie your messages around a theme.
“A lot of times, we’ll talk about things that we’re thinking about before we’ve made the decision so that they can understand where we are in the decision process, and that then makes them make better decisions for themselves and their clients,” Feiger says. “Then, oftentimes, we’ll try to coordinate the messaging that’s coming in those calls in newsletters or e-mails or in posters or in other ways.”
MB Financial has another way that these communications are similar to a marketing campaign: The calls are recorded so that the company can keep track of how many phones tune in live and later to make sure they’re making an impact. Feiger also tests message effectiveness from time to time.
“Every few months each year, I ask people to e-mail me back with some idea or some thought about some subject matter,” he says.
Now, you won’t have the time to sort through 1,400 ideas every time you need to make a decision, but Feiger has his people do it occasionally when he needs a good brainstorming session.
“Having 1,400 people ponder an issue is a powerful thing,” he says. “And if you have an effective way to solicit feedback from 1,400 people, which we do, you can get some really good ideas. It gives me a little bit of real-time feedback about our people listening to the calls — are they taking them seriously, do they consider what we’re talking about? And it’s remarkably effective, and to tell you the truth, I’m not sure why more companies don’t do this.”
Beyond measuring the effectiveness of your communications, you can also help give them a boost by being responsive. If you’re smart, you can address a commonly asked question to everyone at once and help ease some concerns.
“Every single person gets a complete response,” Feiger says of e-mails sent to his Ask Mitch account or responses to internal e-mails. “If somebody brings up something, good or bad, that I think would be of interest to more than just a handful of people, I’ll either talk about it in a Monday morning call or we’ll put in a regular newsletter or we’ll put an answer out on our intranet. I’ll give you an example: A week ago or so, I got an Ask Mitch about the safety of our people’s money in our 401(k) plans. So we responded the end of last week with a lengthy explanation of how we think people should be managing their money in this economic downturn and where they need to be cautious and where they may not need to be cautious.”