3. Involve Stakeholders

Don't try to do this alone! Whether you're the only Internal Comms person in your organisation, or you have a giant Internal Comms army, you're still going to need people from right across the business to get involved, and to to take a stake in the app's success.

If we go back to Step 1 of our 'Steps to Success' plan "Talk to Your Staff" - if you did that, and you went and engaged with a range of people, then this step is easy, because you've already taken the first step to getting these people on board. You've listened to them, and you've taken what they had to say into consideration when you planned your content at step two. Now it's time to get them involved in helping you to make your employee app a success. You'll need these people across various departments for a few reasons:

• Technical Input
• Senior Management Buy-In
• Creating 'Champions' to drive usage

Technical Input

It's always a good idea to have people from your IT team involved in the process at this stage. If you're going to have your own branded app available for your staff to download, your IT team will be able to advise on what Apple and Google accounts your business already holds, what policies are in place that govern the distribution of apps for employees, and you'll need their help if you want to integrate your Active Directory for logging in to the app.

Your Client Success Manager at Thrive will be happy to talk with your IT team about the ins and outs of how we handle things like app distribution and logins, but don't wait until you need a decision made to get them involved. A half hour meeting early in the process with your IT team to say 'here's what we're doing, this is Thrive, and this is what we want to achieve', will go a long long way and will help to clear any potential internal governance roadblocks.

Senior Management Buy-In

Bringing your Senior Management Team along for the ride can help to make your life easier. These are often people with wide influence across your business, who can act as promoters for your app. Having members of the Senior Management Team behind you, promoting the app to staff tends to make people take notice a little more than they otherwise might!

One of the great things about your app is that it allows for direct communication. Senior Managers might be used to relying on cascade briefs - but with your app, you could think about having a dedicated section for them to post so that they can be in direct contact with staff. This is a great way to boost engagement and show staff that those 'at the top' really care about how their employees feel.

Champions

We'll talk a lot more about this at Step Five of the app success journey, but pulling in people from across the business also allows you to start creating champions that you can rely on later. When your app launches and you tell your employees that it's now available for download, you'll need these champions right across the business to encourage their peers to download it and to engage with the content.

The key message here is just to try not to do this alone. You'll need to bring in others for technical help, governance, and to get content from different departments. If everyone feels like they have a stake in the app - it will be more successful. But if it's just "that thing that internal comms are doing", then it will be much more difficult to get any traction.