How the Plek Engagement Score Helps You Reach Your Communication Goals.

This blog is the first part of our series on the adoption of social intranets. Whether you’re selecting a new social intranet or have been using an intranet solution for years, one question always comes up: "How do we ensure sufficient adoption of our intranet?"

In this series, we take a step-by-step look at adoption: what it is, how to measure it, and how to improve it. In this first part, we answer the following questions:

• What exactly is adoption?
• How do you measure adoption?
• When is adoption sufficient?

Based on our years of experience developing and providing social intranet software to hundreds of clients, we have developed the Plek Engagement Score. This tool not only provides insight into adoption within your organization but also allows you to benchmark your performance against similar organizations in terms of goals, size, and industry.

Read Part 2: Benchmarking Social Intranet Adoption
Read Part 3: How to Make Internal Communication More Strategic

What is adoption?

Many applications provide statistics such as the number of likes and the most-read posts. These are often referenced by vendors when discussing adoption. But what do those numbers really tell you? Statistics provide many data points but little insight. For instance, how do you demonstrate that the social intranet is being used better than it was a year ago, and what has driven that improvement? How do we compare to others? Statistics alone don’t answer these questions.  

Adoption means maximizing reach, visits, and usage of your social intranet. Adoption isn’t something that only happens during implementation—a launch campaign with balloons and festivities, and that’s it. Adoption requires an ongoing process of collaboration, measurement, and improvement across departments and teams. It also calls for awareness of where the organization stands in terms of Internal Communication maturity—and where it aspires to be.

How do you make adoption measurable?

To improve adoption, you need to make it measurable. As mentioned, metrics like likes or pageviews fall short in this regard. The solution? Break adoption down into five clearly defined components, express each as a number between 0 and 100, and ensure you can track these over time.

These five components are combined into a single figure—the ultimate index of social intranet adoption: the Engagement Score. For insights into what is working well and what can be improved, it’s best to examine the five underlying components. These components are:

• Reach: Are you reaching your target audience with your message?
• Visit: Are you encouraging users to visit the platform?
• View: Are visitors consuming the content provided?
• Interact: Are visitors engaging with the content and with each other?
• Contribute: Are visitors actively creating content themselves?

By breaking adoption down into these five measurable components, you can:

• Track platform usage over time.
• See the impact of improvements and campaigns immediately.
• Compare your scores with other organizations (benchmark).

Reach

Are you reaching everyone you want to reach?

Reach indicates something about your potential reach compared to your actual reach. For example, if the Reach is 89, it is quite low compared to other platforms, which makes sense because 11% of the target audience has access but cannot be reached. When looking at how this has changed over the past 18 months (see the graph below), Reach has decreased from 95 to 89. This suggests that something may be going wrong with the onboarding of new employees.

Visit

How often do employees visit the social intranet?

It depends on how you use the platform and how important it is in the daily work of employees. The more relevant the platform is to someone's daily work, the higher the Visit score will be. If the platform mainly features top-down news updates, the Visit score will likely be lower. If active knowledge is shared, for example in thematic groups or within departments, the connection to someone’s work is stronger, and the Visit score will be higher. The example below is from a construction company where a large number of employees visit daily or at least weekly. Even during the summer holidays, many employees still check the app weekly and feel connected to the work.

View

How much of the content is being read?

By not just counting the number of posts read, but the amount of content the average visitor consumes (View), you get a clearer picture. This makes it possible to track and compare trends over time.

In organizations that primarily broadcast top-down messages, with few content creators, View will tend to be closer to 100. In organizations where more people create content on a wider range of topics, View will be lower. This is due to personalization—there is more content to choose from, and not everyone shares the same interests.

The example below shows a childcare organization, where it is clear that employees mainly catch up on the intranet during breaks, when they are not looking after the children.

Interact

Do visitors engage with the content and with each other?

A high Interact score is an indication that employees easily respond and engage in conversations with each other. In practice, there is a clear correlation between Contribute and Interact: the more content creators there are, the more interaction there is.

However, this doesn't tell the whole story, as even in organizations where Contribute is low (with few content creators and primarily top-down communication), Interact can still be high. For example, there is a significant difference in Interact between two of our existing clients, both of which have a very low Contribute score. This could be related to factors such as engagement or social safety within the organization.

Contribute

Do visitors actively create content themselves?

A high Contribute score means there are many employees actively creating content. This can include other staff departments such as HR, IT, or compliance. A truly high Contribute score, like the example from a healthcare organization below, requires more. In such cases, team leaders are also active on the platform.

Achieving this requires a strategic approach and a different role for Internal Communication within the organization. Internal Communication is no longer a content editor but a facilitator and enabler.

A high Contribute score is a sign that successfully activating team leaders has been achieved.