Data-Driven Communication with Dot Foods & Cooper Standard

Speaker 1:
Alright, alright, well why don’t we go ahead and get started because there’s a lot to talk about today. My name is Rey Bouknight. I’m Senior Director of Customer Success with Firstup, and I’m so excited for this session. I’m also a former communicator in-house communicator, and I think when it comes to the topic of metrics, sometimes that’s intimidating for communications professionals. I’ve often heard communications pros say I speak Word, I don’t speak Excel, and other things like that. And I actually think that this is a result of not having the right tools to support metrics. But the beautiful thing is with Firstup, of course, we provide you with those tools and insights. And so today’s session is all about how you can leverage those tools in order to drive data that supports your business goals. And we have three fabulous guests with us from two different organizations that will start out with providing some slides about who they are and how they’re using data. Then we’ll get into q and a and I’ll help facilitate that. But at the end is where the magic happens. That’s when you have the chance to ask them questions about how they’re leveraging data. So that’s the idea today. We want to keep that energy up, we want to keep things moving right along. So without further ado, I’m going to welcome to the stage Savannah Riese from Dot Foods, and she’s going to share with you some of the great things that they’re doing at Dot Foods around data. Savannah,

Speaker 2:
Good morning. Good morning. Good morning. My name’s Savannah Riese. I’m the employee content specialist at Dot Foods, and that’s basically a fancy term for saying I manage our Firstup platform and our relationship with Firstup. So to get started, a little bit about me. Like I said, I’m the employee content specialist at Dot Foods aka, the shameless plugger of the Dot app, as you can see by this sandwich board situation. I am on the brand marketing team at Dot. I have been for five years now, and I’m a part of the internal comms project team. So I am full-time remote out of Minneapolis. And when I am not working or promoting the Dot app, I am probably reading, playing volleyball, dancing, doing DIY projects around my house or traveling. So a little bit about me,

Speaker 2:
So enough about me, let’s talk about Dot Foods. Dot Foods is North America’s largest food industry. We provide products to food industry customers in less than truckload quantities. So basically we are trying to make more products more accessible to more people. And we like to say we don’t make anything, but we move everything. So chances are if at a restaurant, something that’s on your plate or on your table has been in a Dot truck. So we touch a lot of things. We’re kind of like a little bit of a middleman, but basically we’re providing supply chain solutions to streamline the supply chain.

Speaker 2:
We have 13 US distribution centers and two Canadian distribution centers. Our headquarters is in Mount Sterling, Illinois. Tiny little town, literally 1200 people live there. And so it’s really fun going and seeing this giant, giant compound for.in the middle of nowhere. We also have an office in St. Louis, which is where I am based out of when I am traveling for work. And we have a joint venture in Mexico as well. So at Dot we have a little bit of a unique employee makeup. So just over 4,000 of our employees are Dot Foods employees, but then we also have a trucking affiliate transportation. And so about 2,700 employees who are on the.app are transportation employees. So that gives us about 6,700 employees that we are communicating with regularly. And 85% of our workforce is non wired. So we’ve got warehouse employees, garage employees, truck drivers obviously, and those folks are not in front of a computer every day. So they’re the group that we really harness the.app to communicate with.

Speaker 2:
So we launched the.app company wide in 2020 as a lot of companies understand 2020 kind of flipped communications upside down. And so we decided to pursue an app platform that could help us communicate with our frontline employees. So we launched in October of 2020. That was after we did an alpha and a beta launch in August and September of that year to make sure we worked out all the kinks, made sure we were communicating in the best way possible about the launch, and we were able to successfully get 50% company-wide registration within the first 90 days, which was really exciting for us. That was our goal and we were able to hit that. So then fast forward to today, we’ve been with the platform for just about three years now, and we are at 68% registration, and we have a pretty decent non wired versus or non wired engagement and registration rate. So 64% of our non wired employees are registered for the platform. So we are always trying to grow that number. I think our customer success manager, Leo, would say 70 would be great. That’s what we’re really aiming for. So that’s still a work in progress, but our Wired employees adopted really quickly, and so we’re at 93% there. Our platform also has 148 content publishers, which is really great. It means we’ve got a lot of variety going on across the business.

Speaker 2:
So I wanted to give you an look of what our platform looks like. So I kind of divide our content into three buckets. The first one is corporate driven. That’s what me and my team work on. That’s what we do with our senior leaders. We collaborate with them to make sure that we’re sharing corporate messaging. The second bucket is more location focused and department focused. And then the third bucket is user generated content. So anything that’s coming from our employees and basically making the platform much more exciting than if we were just pushing out corporate content all the time. So a few examples of the corporate content we’re working on, we do a lot of, anytime we’re in the news, we like to share that with our employees. We do a business update every four weeks. So we’re updating employees on the status of the business, what our priorities are for the next period, and that’s done in a five or so minute video by our president.

Speaker 2:
And that engagement is incredible. Employees love that, and we’ve actually seen a lot of ties to our 30 day retention rate and these videos being published. So these videos are oftentimes the piece of content that drives employees back into the platform every month. We also started doing Managers Corner, which I actually got the inspiration to do this from Attune last year. And so we basically share monthly content with managers and we are sharing what we want them to know and what we want them to do about it because they’re the point of contact for a lot of our frontline employees and them being informed is the best option to disseminate communication. So then we also have a lot of fun user generated content our drivers have adopted incredibly. The sense of community that they have built in the.app has been really, really awesome to see. So you can see here we’ve got some fun new technology, new equipment, drivers posting views from the road, and then also celebrations, so retirement milestones, anything like that. Our employees are really good about posting in the.app.

Speaker 2:
So we track a lot of data and kind of like what Ray alluded to, I’m a writer by trade. I’m not a data analyst by trade, so working with Firstup and taking on the.app has been a really, really good learning experience for me and has forced the storyteller in me to look at data as a storytelling opportunity. When we first started with the Dot app, we were very focused on registration, engagement and viewership that eventually started moving into user generated content as well. And since 2023, we have started tracking some other metrics because we figured that at this point, we’re three years into the program. Registration is not our number one priority at this point. So we look at that 30 and 90 day retention rate. We look at the engagement with our non wired audience, and we also look at onboarding rates. So basically what percentage of our new employees are getting onboarded into the.app month? So this is kind of where we stand today. Our program is at 68% registration, 43% of our content thus far this year has been user generated. We also have 16% engagement platform wide and 17% non wired engagement. Our viewership has been just over 4,600 employees. We have a 54% onboarding rate and our retention rates are hovering around 80%. So these are kind of the key metrics we’re using at this point to track the health of our platform. Okay, that’s it for Dot Foods. I’m going to pass it on to Chris and Catie from Cooper Standard.

Speaker 3:
Thank you, Catie. So we’re really excited to be here today. We got special permission to come to Attune, and it’s already been so incredibly inspiring. We’ll share a little bit about Cooper Standard, but what we’re really excited about is sharing some of the data. And this is Catie, in case you didn’t hear the first time, she and I partnered together on this. So to start with, when I was asked to share a little bit about myself, one of the things that I thought was funny is I realized when I started out in my big girl career that I thought I was going to do, it actually was to be a math teacher. And so when thinking about this program today, it occurred to me, geez, I started out with numbers and here I am back here again. So aspiring math teacher and I accidentally became a communicator and I loved it.

Speaker 3:
I’ve never looked back. So I have a bachelor’s degree in marketing and an M B A. I’m married and I’m proud mama of two children who are in the medical industry. So shout out to all the medical people out there. I love volleyball. It’s not volleyball, you play it off the walls on a racketball court. So much fun. I actually play piano at Menards, which is another weird one. Once I became an empty nester, I had some time on my hands. So I played piano at Menards, and I basically have grown up at Cooper Standard. It’s a fantastic company. I’ve been there for 29 years, starting straight out of high school. So you do the math. All right, Catie’s going to take you through the company. Hi everyone, I’m Catie Dymond. I’m content developer at Cooper Standard in the marketing communications department. Similar to Chris’s story, I always had big dreams of being a detective when I was younger, and I liked the part of solving the puzzle or putting the pieces together with the evidence. And although I didn’t go down that route, I find myself using some of those skills today as a communicator. I will get into that a little bit later, but I have a marketing degree from Western Michigan University, primarily have worked in automotive, but I had a fun opportunity to work for Under Armour. Thought I’d do a little bit of show and tell today, and I’m a long distance runner in my spare time. And I am our lead on the Firstup app for CSS Connect.

Speaker 3:
So before we get started, I just want to share a little bit about our company. We have 23,000 employees in 21 countries across the world. We are a global leader of systems and components for ceiling and fluid handling systems, and we recently launched some customer brochures. So if you’d like to go learn more about what we do, you can go on our website. We are the number one in ceiling systems with 16% of the market and 14% of fluid handling systems. Second and globally, we also operate globally. We primarily have customers in North America, but we do have other operations around the world. Last year we reported 2.5 billion in revenue, and Ford and GM are our primary customers, followed by STIs. We do have some non-automotive, 33% with customers like three M and Harley Davidson.

Speaker 3:
All right, so a little bit more about why we decided to use the Firstup app. First of all, for years I had Firstup, or at the time Social Chorus or other apps that we were looking to get into. And for years it was pulled out of my budget, so frustrating. I could see that this was the future where things needed to be. And then covid happens, and all of a sudden we need to communicate with all of our frontline workers who are in their homes and have no way to do that. And so what do we do? We use radio ads and phone trees and mail letters home, and all of a sudden now it matters. And we were able to get this approved and so excited. We launched our app in 2021. But prior to that, what we had was basically the cascading approach of communications to get to our employees.

Speaker 3:
And we had our corporate functions. So we had the C-suite messaging, the corporate communications messaging, our global functions, share that with the regional leaders that hopefully it gets down to the plant leaders and hopefully it gets to the employee. But what often happen is we either it didn’t happen or we didn’t know if it happened. And so when we have this communication, now we have a direct line of communication to our employees. And it’s been so incredibly powerful for us because we can see from beginning to the end where that communication is happening and how effective it is, and if our employees care. And for us, we have roughly 23,000 plus employees globally. As Catie mentioned, we have roughly over 300 publishers. So we do a lot of decentralized communications and trying to empower those employees to share some of that local messaging. And we average around 4.2 clicks per user per month, which we think is a good number. We have roughly 76% adoption out of our global and workforce. And of our workforce, 80% of them are non wired. And so we have 71% adoption of that workforce. So we’ve really had some really good success and data has been a key enabler of that.

Speaker 3:
All right, so we’ll save those for later

Speaker 1:
Share, but let’s give Chris and Catie a round of applause.

Speaker 1:
And if you’ll indulge me, I have a few questions I would like to ask them, and then we’re going to open up to all of you to ask your questions as well. But I imagine we have folks on different stages of their journey of data. So I’m just a little curious, how many of you would consider yourselves novices and learning insights and understanding how to apply the data to your communications? If you could just raise your hand real quick, so maybe about 30% of the room. And then for others, who would you consider to be more veterans? You’ve learned how to apply the data to drive your communications and figure out how to demonstrate business value too. So yeah, pretty much the rest. Great. Well, the purpose of today’s discussion is to try to address questions on both sides of that journey as well. And the first thing I want to bring up, and I know that this has been done both in.as well as Cooper Standard, and we’ll start with you, Savannah, as what I’ve seen among customers is that data has really allowed you to have a seat at the table among executives.

Speaker 1:
And that with the data that you’re receiving through Firstup, it’s helping to inform not just communications decisions, but also business decisions. So Savannah, we’d love to hear from you. How has that happened for you at Dot? And then maybe Chris, we could ask you the very same question.

Speaker 2:
So the first time that I really realized how imperative data was in terms of getting that state at the table and working with executives directly was I was presenting to our HR managers at an annual business meeting, and our CEO popped into my session intentionally to ask me some questions. So it was really interesting. He was there, he literally came for my 20 minutes and then he left. So he had questions, he wanted to understand how the platform was performing, he wanted to understand that comparison to how industry competitors are using the platform and using those benchmark stats. So that was my first aha moment. But our team in general at the branding team has been on a data journey for many, many years now. And not only with the app platform, but also with all of our other communication tactics, we are seeing that there’s a huge benefit to proving our value and proving that our work is actually impactful by using data. So being able to show that data to executives is really giving us a seat at the table overall. And with the.app, it’s given me a seat at the table personally.

Speaker 1:
And then Chris, I know you all have done the same in that you report out to senior leadership where they are adoptions and other places. So we’ll love to hear your thoughts and thoughts on how that’s given you a seat at the table.

Speaker 3:
So early on, we just had no data when it come to internal communications. We had no way of knowing what was reaching whom at what time and whether or not it worked. And so we relied on professional experience and intuition and hearsay basically to get an understanding of what was happening. So the minute that we actually had data at our hands, now all of a sudden we have information that we can use and our teams pay attention. We’re a manufacturing environment, and so they’re very used to KPIs. And the minute you have a K P I, now they’ve got something to drive after. And in the minute you can show that and how it measures against other ones, it’s huge. One of the big things that we did early on for adoption that was really impactful was that we had a leaderboard basically because we could do adoption by attributes, so we could show adoption by location, and man, you put that up on the slide, all of a sudden the competitions come out, we want to see, we had some facilities that they want to be the first one to be a hundred percent adoption.

Speaker 3:
We had some countries want to be the first country to get a hundred percent adoption. It happened just because we started sharing this data and they had something to work towards

Speaker 1:
Among senior leadership. I don’t know if it was your CEO, but once you put where they stand that holds them accountable for that. And I’ve even heard of customers where the CEO has given a goal for each of their facilities for them to reach, and then it’s very obvious that they’re not performing according to this. So that’s definitely innocent of their, so as mentioned, I imagine you didn’t overnight become a whiz and data and insights that you probably encountered some challenges prior to that or along that journey. And Catie, we would love to hear from you, what type of challenges did you all encounter on that journey and how did you overcome them?

Speaker 3:
Yeah, so one of the big challenges we had was technical issues when we were trying to adopt people onto the platform. And one of the ways we overcame that was we have a ticketing system, so we make sure that we’re escalating it to the right groups. And then another challenge is just, oh, I’m sorry, let me go back really quick. So we also do flyers too, customized flyers by pulling unregistered users and doing a mail merge to have all that information available. So they have instructions, they have their employee id, and they have a way to get to the app right away. So that’s been really powerful as well to help with that. But the other challenge that we’ve had in general is just motivating people, keeping them engaged, keeping them using the tool daily. So that is something that we work with our HR managers a lot to make sure that we’re partnering with them and making sure they have the tools and resources.

Speaker 1:
Well, 300 content publishers and I managed, I imagine some of them are HR managers in your plants that they’re huge champions for you, you all to overcome that barrier of, because I remember I was with you in implementation, some of those employees did not even know their employee ID number, so you had to educate them on that first before really them adopting that. So I’m sure that’s been really critical. What about you, Savannah? What’s a challenge that you encountered on this journey and how did you overcome that?

Speaker 2:
Yeah, so I think from a data perspective, we really struggled and I really struggled with what do we even track what even matters? This was new for us and it was new for the company. And so leadership was looking to us be like, well, what KPIs do you think we should be tracking? That kind of stuff. So I mentioned before, I am a writer by trade, so I had to really force myself to dive into what KPIs matter and how can we take those KPIs and translate them into what it means for the business because that’s the language that everyone else is speaking. So that was probably the biggest challenge for me. And I always say to customers that are earlier on in their journey, data is a journey and what you’re tracking is a journey. So at first, registration is that number one thing, you want to get your employees in the app, but at some point you have to transition over to maybe engagement, maybe retention. And so it’s continuously ebbing and flowing and changing, and it’ll continue to do that for us at Dot Foods

Speaker 1:
Too. And how did you land on those metrics that matters to you, like those KPIs? So when leadership comes to you and says, what should we be tracking? Talk through the steps that you went through in order to determine, yeah, this is really what we should be following.

Speaker 2:
So I have a background in social media, I did social media for Dot before moving to this platform. And so we kind of started with, okay, obviously registration is the number one thing, but then also we probably should be tracking engagement. We probably should be tracking viewership and clicks and stuff like that. So that’s kind of where we started. And then now we’re moving into more looking at the overall health of the program and our employees using it because at the end of the day, you can have this great platform and you can have really high registration numbers, but if your employees aren’t coming back, then what’s the point and what’s the point of spending this money on the platform? So that’s kind of what we’re looking at now and that’s what our leaders are caring about.

Speaker 1:
One other question I have, and this came out of discussions we had before, and also seeing that you all have what, 180 content publishers, you’ll have 300 content publishers and the power of the platform is to enable those closer to the employees to communicate. A key aspect of that is metrics. And I would love to hear, maybe we can start with you Chris, how have you utilized the metrics from the platform to support local leaders? That could be managers, could be some of the content publishers. I imagine that there’s been a lot of value and being able to show them this is the level of engagement you’re getting in your area.

Speaker 3:
Yeah, absolutely. For us, the important thing is to, so we have access to a wealth of data and trying to understand what the data’s telling us. So early on, honestly, I can remember setting some of the goals early on and just being annoyed almost at first. It’s like I’m just trying to get this thing launched off. Why do I need to even define some of these goals? And Firstup is so huge in helping us define those goals, but understanding what data you have, what does it mean? And then we’re all communicators, what does it telling us? And then one of the things I always tell my team, I’m sure they get annoyed hearing it, is don’t present the data but present the insight. And so the minute that you can look at the data and find the insights, in fact I love that first op has changed the name from analytics to insights because that’s really what we’re trying to go after and what we’re doing is we’re now looking at those data points and it can tell us where we need help with what locations.

Speaker 3:
Some locations need help with adoption. Some locations had great adoption, but their viewership’s down, so they need maybe a relaunch or something to refresh content. And some locations have great clicks per viewer, but their adoption’s not great. So it’s like they’ve got good content, but they don’t have good adoption. So that’s where they need to focus. And so we have a chart, we will show it later in one of our examples of where we track just that I still feel like we’re a little new in our program, we just got to our second anniversary, but we track adoption versus engagement and then we can see we’re in that chart facility lies, and then based on that we give them, here’s kind of a playbook on things to do to help you continue to improve your communications.

Speaker 1:
So I actually want to do a follow up. That was going to be my next question. And I dunno, Catie, if you can chime in on this too, the playbook. So it’s one thing to identify there’s an issue, but that’s not solving the issue. It’s a whole ‘nother thing where you can say, this is the issue and this is how you solve that. So could you speak to a little bit about the playbook or what do you do after you’ve identified, okay, your adoption is low, your engagement is low, here’s how you can improve on that. Anything to add related to that?

Speaker 3:
I would go back to what I mentioned about those flyers. Like if we notice adoption is low, that’s one of the ways that we encourage our teams to get adopted. And then posting content, making sure that you’re posting two or three times a week is what we encourage. It’s not always doable, but we definitely try to engage our teams to do that.

Speaker 1:
And then too, I think you guys have a toolkit as well, like a promotional toolkit, if I remember correctly. It’s easy for it to ship out and the manager already has the materials to help drive that adoption, get that adoption in the area. Yes.

Speaker 3:
So with our content publishers, we send out an email when they’re onboarded with all the materials they need. So it’s got the playbook, it’s got the flyers that I mentioned, the new studio training, all the things that they need to get started. So that’s been really helpful. And a lot of the time that will actually generate questions too from their teams. So they’ll ask us questions like how to get onto the platform and things like that. So sometimes we’ll do follow-up calls with content publishers and some are more engaged than others, but it’s nice to give them the resources that they need.

Speaker 1:
Great. Well, I have one last question, and this question is more for all of you as well. I think when it comes to Attune, one of the most valuable things is to look behind the veil, so to speak, is what customers are doing. So I asked both Dot and Cooper Standard to share, do a little show and tell what do their custom dashboards look like? What are their metrics and reporting up look like? So maybe why don’t we, if you could start with Dot first with some of their show and tell examples and allow Savannah to share that. If you all want to take pictures, you’re more than welcome to and take them back to you where you are. I know that’s how this works. So yeah, if you want to just walk us through, and if you could also highlight, because we talked a bit about goals and I would like to double click on the KPIs you identified and the goals that you have and how you landed on that. And so I know you went into that a little bit, Savannah, if you could double click on that. And same for you Chris, if you could speak to that as well.

Speaker 2:
Yeah, for sure. So basically what it came down to is we created a custom dashboard with Firstup because it was taking me a lot of time to pull the data every month I was pulling all 12 at the time of our locations and then by our four major departments. So I was basically pulling five reports per location for 12 locations every month. And it was just a huge time driver. So this custom dashboard has been a total game changer for us because not only can I just pull this up any day of the week and have the most up-to-date data, but it also is just a really big time saver. So we started out with just basic registration viewers, engagement, average clicks per user, just kind of those high level metrics. But then this is the custom dashboard when you continue to scroll down.

Speaker 2:
So this year we added the 30 day and 90 day retention rates and we also added the user submitted content. So those things have been really, really key, especially as those are the metrics that we’ve been focusing on a lot this year. And then we also can look at the top five topics and the top 10 posts within whatever timeframe you filter too. So that has been really cool as well to see what posts are performing the best and then also to see what topics are performing the best. So I will tell you this year, my primary goals are the 90 day retention rates, our non wired engagement, our user generated content, and then the onboarding rate that I mentioned before, which we still have to manually calculate. That’s not a metric that Firstup calculates for us, but we’re basically taking the new possible users and the new onboarded users for the month and creating a percentage way.

Speaker 2:
So that’s kind of what that looks like. But something new that we did recently just this past summer is we were like, well, what other stories can we tell using data? Because at the end of the day, we’re storytellers, we’re communicators. And so we wanted to make the.app bigger than just the.app and we wanted to see are there correlations to our locations that have better retention rates, that have better employee survey scores, that have better culture index scores. So we were able to take that and find that there are pretty major correlations between a lot of those data points. Obviously correlations are not causations. So that’s definitely a clarification that I always like to make. But the fact that there are correlations is really, really exciting. So we actually just got the green light from our VP of HR to really dig into this data more and to use analyst resources within Dots who really make this more robust so that we can share it with our locations and we can use this as a tool to drive app usage. So this has been really exciting. This chart can continue to be added to for years to come, and it’s just been a really, really big win for our internal comms team.

Speaker 1:
And this is something we really want to highlight here too. You heard it yesterday that this is where our platform is going where we just don’t want to provide you insights related to communications, but insights related to your workforce that’s predictive. So you can take this type of data to your leadership and make business decisions of areas where you might need to put more of focus in order to drive motivation. And so I know Dot Foods is one customer doing this, I know there are others as well. And maybe when we get into q and a, we can get into this a bit more, but this is the direction where we’re going and something we want to make very clear during Attune this week. So thanks for sharing that. And if you want to share a couple, do a little show and tell as well from your side, Chris, we’d love to hear that. So

Speaker 3:
This is what we use and our custom dashboard is something that we’re still working on. We do have some custom reports that we use to pull some of the charts that I’ll share, but this is what we use as our report card essentially, and our plants understand what this information is, but where it really gets fun and some of the data you’ll see, we’ll highlight it in green or yellow. Our viewership was down during the month of August due to all the holidays. And in Europe everybody goes off on vacation for three weeks. So it notably was down. But some of the other, this is the chart that was one of my favorites early on, and I got this inspiration from our manufacturing team. They were comparing two analytics. So this is comparing adoption rate versus clicks per viewer per month. And that’s what we currently use to gauge our engagement levels.

Speaker 3:
But what this helps us understand is what facilities we need to help focus on where, and obviously the goal is to get into that darker green area because then you have good adoption and good engagement. If you have poor adoption but good engagement, then you’re yellow, and then that’s one set of things to go after. And vice versa. If you have good adoption, really poor engagement, well that’s a whole different problem. In fact, to me that’s a worse problem. I would much rather have a facility that has low adoption but good engagement than one that has great adoption and poor engagement. So it just gives us different ways to focus our needs. This is that leaderboard I was telling you about early on. That was a huge, huge motivator for our plants. And some plants, as you can see, are happy to hang out at the bottom there.

Speaker 3:
And that’s fine, that tells a different story. But what this enables us to do is just to go after to celebrate the plants that are doing really well and then to help assist those that aren’t, help us make sure that we focus in the right area. We have a goal of adopting 80% of our workforce by the end of the year, and I think we’ll get there. It’s been a little challenge early on, it was easy, but now we’re down to those last few groups, mostly in our hourly workforce that we really need to convince and gain their trust on. And just to add to what Chris is saying, we have bimonthly communication meetings, so we’ll celebrate the locations that are doing really well during these meetings. We normally will call out the top 10 performers or something like that. And then the other thing that’s new for us is that we’ve now been invited to share data and a dashboard with our global leadership team.

Speaker 3:
So they have a monthly meeting there, and then the same data now is being shared with our board of directors. So the minute that we have data and data that can be shown a visual way that they understand, all of a sudden now they care. So this is the power of data and where it’s brought different relevance to communications in general because now we have proof of something. And so this is one of our dashboards that focuses on adoption. And then we have another one that focuses on engagement. And these metrics, no doubt will change over time as our program continues to merge or to mature. But what we like to do here, like Catie mentioned, we do show on this other one, we do highlight those top performing plants. And now that the plants understand that they might be highlighted in front of a board of directors, it gives a whole different motivation as well. So when we started sharing with our plants that we’re going to be sharing this at that level, we’ve seen an uptick in some of those locations that have been poor adopters early on. Yeah,

Speaker 1:
That’s amazing stuff. So last question and then we’ll turn to your audience. But hearing that the work that you’re doing and the metrics of that is going all the way up to the board and for you leadership, how does that make you feel as far as your role at Cooper Standard? Chris?

Speaker 3:
Oh, I love it. One of the things, what’s next for us is that that one chart that I showed with the two double access thing, that report was very manual to figure out early on. And so now the customer reports that we have are enabling us to pull down this massive set of data for all of our facilities. And it breaks it down by hourly, by salary for viewership, for adoption. It just gives us all of this data in one sheet. And what it’s allowing us to do is put this now into another key metrics tool that we have at our company called our K P I workbench that’ll allow us to even track this against other KPIs in the plan. And I think the minute we do that, it’s even bigger. So I love it. I think it’s empowered my team to do things in a new way that we never thought was possible. And it’s just giving relevance. People trust data. So it’s one thing for me to say, oh yeah, this is great. But when they see that employees actually adopt and care, it just changes things.

Speaker 1:
And what about you, Savannah?

Speaker 2:
Yeah, I mean, like I mentioned, our next step with data is that correlation data and how can we present that to our general managers at the DC level and help them prioritize. Because at the end of the day, if it’s not being prioritized by our GMs, then no one else at that location is prioritizing it. So we definitely want to use that data. I’m taking some inspiration from Cooper Standard. I think we’ve learned a lot from each other with getting ready for this presentation and we’re like, wait, I’m going to steal that idea and wait, I’m going to steal that idea. So we’re definitely moving in a similar direction to where Cooper Standard’s at now and being able to get that data in front of leadership is really key.

Speaker 1:
And Catie, anything to add there?

Speaker 3:
Yeah, so yesterday’s Attune session. Someone mentioned people coming to them as the experts or the point people, and we’ve had a lot of that. We’ve had a lot of different departments wanting to get involved, create channels, things like that. So that’s been really powerful.

Speaker 1:
That’s great. Awesome. All right. Well, now is the time. We’re going to open up to the floor for questions. We have Leo back here with the mic. Yeah, if you have a question. All right. I see one over here. I’m going to come down. Sorry. There’s a few back there too. So why don’t you start there, Leo. I’ll come down and start working the room this way too. So yeah, please go right in. I see the one and I think that’s great. Yes, there you go.

Speaker 4:
Hi, my name’s Catherine Keho. I’m with Rogers Corporation. Thanks so much for everything you’ve talked about. There’s so much great stuff in this presentation. My question was for you, Savannah, but if anyone has things to add, please do. You talked a little bit about transitioning from when you first started the platform, focusing on registration numbers and things like that, and then focusing on retention down the road. That’s kind of where we’re at with our platform is right in that shift from, okay, we’re good with registration now, how do we focus on 30 day retention, 90 day retention? If you could just talk a little bit more about some of the specific strategies that you use to bump up those numbers or some of the things that you’ve been implementing, that would be wonderful. Thank you.

Speaker 2:
Yeah, for sure. So the first thing that I did when we decided to make that shift to the 30 and 90 day retention and tracking those numbers was to pull our top performing content and also to pull our viewership stats. So we pulled the viewership stats week over week, and then any major corporate communication that we were doing, we were pulling when we published those things. So our business updates, we have monthly letters from our president or c e O that go out. And so we were able to start tracking those viewership curves, and they all really aggressively correlated with those business updates and with those letters. So we were able to hone in on, okay, this is the content that’s getting people in the app. I will say those business updates are where we announce our quarterly bonuses. And let me tell you, that’s what people care about are their bonuses, and we announce it in the app a week before it gets announced in any other way. Adding that exclusivity has been really helpful for us. But basically once we were able to figure out what those big viewership drivers were, we were able to start tweaking things to more aggressively impact our 30 and 90 day retention.

Speaker 1:
We have another question right over here.

Speaker 5:
Hi, Tamara Kramer from Polaris in Minnesota. Hey, so two questions I guess. First clarifying by retention, do you mean employment retention or retention in their activity?

Speaker 2:
Oh, retention in the app. So how, what percentage of registered viewers are coming back every 30 or 90 days?

Speaker 5:
Okay. So my next question is going to be if it was employment retention. I’m just wondering if there’s a way to actually get to that as well by using created date and block date or something like that. Is anybody doing that?

Speaker 1:
So I think that’s part of where we’re going. And I see Nicole’s in the room. She just stood up. So maybe Leo, can you hand Nicole a link? Yes.

Speaker 6:
Okay. Hi. Yes, I help myself and I also brought Carl, who’s our product manager for insights. So I’m not going to promise anything, but some of the things that you’re still doing manually, I believe we should be able to do in the product. So that’s 0.1. Point two is if we think about all of the data that we’re currently looking at, those all should be how do we then tell the business story? So I loved the correlation dashboard, and I was going to ask the Cooper folks, if you look at the manufacturer, the different plant level adoption and engagement, are we then looking at what is the safety incidents, for example, or what are their engagement scores? Or you mentioned your other K P I dashboard to see if we can even track to some of those productivity metrics. I think that’s the thing that we’re most excited about, to be able to really drive that.

Speaker 6:
And then I would say employee retention is one. We have something in a pre beta at the moment. It’s actually a retention forecast and actual employee retention. So if we’re looking at the types of engagement and changes in those, and to be able to look and say, oh my goodness, this or this plant might have dropped off where they used to be here, is that an early warning signal of folks maybe looking or potentially attritting? And then could we step in, have the conversations with them, and then potentially change the direction? So whoever asked that question, I love it, but that’s very much where we’re going.

Speaker 3:
Yes,

Speaker 1:
Great. Yeah, super excited as far as what’s on the way there. So yeah, to Nicole’s point, some of what was manual, doing it on an automated basis as well.

Speaker 3:
Exactly. And I’ll just add on, so the K P I work bench that we’re talking about, we’re looking for exactly that. It’s like, we’ll put this data into our other KPIs, and I got to believe there are correlations. I need proof of it. So this is a way of doing that. The custom reports are enabling us to be able to have this download so that we can put it into this other area and give visibility in a different way. But I mean, on the surface, when our plant leaders see that these are the plants that are performing well, and these are those that don’t, like, not a surprise, these are the plants that perform well in general on everything. So we’re expecting that correlation.

Speaker 1:
So we have one already here. And then Leah, if you want to get the next one. I think so, isn’t on. Let’s see. Yeah, it should be. Yep. Is this one on? How about this? Oh, no, I feel really close. That’s not quite long enough. Why don’t, Leah, let’s go to yours and we’ll figure this out. I was hoping this was going to be long enough, but not quite. Thanks, I Go

Speaker 7:
Ahead. Okay. Hi, good morning. I’m Katie Raey from Charles Schwab. Sorry about that. And I’m interested, a lot of the metrics you all spoke of I see as table stakes, right? Adoption of the app is the first thing we have to do. Absolutely. So how are you helping your content publishers gather insights from the data that further helps them define their communication strategies and tactics?

Speaker 3:
I’ll start. So for Cooper, we have our communications council meeting that Catie mentioned, that we do every other month that we share all this data into. And we also share it in our monthly HR meetings, global HR meetings, and our monthly operations meetings. But what we’re doing is we’re helping them understand what is the look for their location, and we share that in those reports, and then we give them that playbook. And then the other piece that’ll help us is because not everybody’s in studio is that we’re loading it to this K P I workbench that’ll give them visibility to this alongside of their other metrics. And then once they understand where they’re at, then they’ll have that playbook to play on, and then we always come in alongside them as they need us. Yes. Oh, go ahead. Oh, sorry. Something else we’ve been doing too is when we onboard HR managers, we’ll actually break down their, we’ll take that benchmark data and break it down by location so they have that at their fingertips when they first start. But that’s been really helpful too, sharing that information.

Speaker 2:
So at Dot, in terms of those touch points with our content publishers, we do share a monthly report that I pull and put into a spreadsheet so it’s a little bit more digestible and we color code it so you can see, okay, there’s been growth here, there’s been a decline here, things like that. So we do use that as a touchpoint. And then we are currently working on getting more face-to-face touchpoints with our content publishers. Some locations are better than others in terms of asking for time with me or with someone on my team and others are not. So kind of finding that balance of how can we help those who are looking for help, and then how can we help those who maybe aren’t looking for help but need the help? And kind of going from there. One of our challenges is we don’t have any boots on the ground professional communicators at our locations. So we’re really heavily relying on our HR admin teams at the locations to use the platform and to drive communication on a localized level. And so that’s a big learning curve for some folks. Some pick it up really easily, some don’t. And so it’s definitely a lot of trial and error as well of what works, what doesn’t, and how can we make a more customized approach for each location.

Speaker 3:
I would add one other thing that we do in our council meetings is data allows us to see what is working, what are the pieces of content that resonate well, and then we can highlight those, what locations are doing a great job on adoption engagement and all that. And then we’ll actually bring them in and have them be special guests in our meetings so that they can both be highlighted and share what’s working at their plan. Because oftentimes the best way to learn is to hear from a peer and not from somebody in corporate.

Speaker 1:
That’s great. And we have another, we’ll try this again. That was pretty awkward, but let’s try it again. This up. There you go. All right.

Speaker 8:
Good morning. And I want to congratulate you three on your efforts. Really. It’s nice to hear your stories. I was saying to my leader here, I said, I feel like I’m in a therapy session. Oh my gosh, they’re struggling too. We’re all in this game together. So it’s an interesting journey. Thank you for sharing your insights and some really great, great dashboards that you’ve shown. So two questions for you. If you can share a little bit about your data, and if you use the data or not using the data related to comments for us, we’re seriously thinking about turning them off only because our engagement is not in the common space manufacturing company. So I’d love to understand, are you using that data? If yes, how? If you’re not, why. And then my second question is going to be around QR codes, and are those a value add to your process?

Speaker 3:
For sure. You want to start? Sure.

Speaker 2:
Yeah. So our comments are completely on with our Dot Foods platform, so I’ll start with that. We also do not see a ton of engagement in our comments, but we leave them on because when we do have engagement in the comments, it’s usually very valuable. So it’s usually a, Hey, for example, one thing that we’re working on right now internally is we’re moving to weekly pay. People have a lot of questions about moving to weekly pay. And so those posts that we’ve been doing and those informative pieces that we’ve been publishing have been getting questions in the comments. And so then I can direct those questions to the proper leaders and say, Hey, here’s the link to the post. Can you go respond to this comment? So we don’t get a ton of comments, but the ones we do are really valuable. And I think we want to keep that to a communication open as much as possible, even if it’s not being leveraged on a day-to-day or even week to week basis

Speaker 3:
Regarding comments, we leave ’em on. One of our values is related to transparency. And I think when you turn off comments personally, and we haven’t, we’ve had one time that we’ve had a termination as a result of comments. I mean, it’s really never been a big issue for us. And in my opinion, we leave ’em on because it continues to promote that air of transparency. When you turn ’em off, it feels like you’re hiding something. So we leave that on, I forget those second question. What was QR codes? QR codes, we do use QR codes quite often just to get people to the right articles. So especially on our digital signage, Catie will put together content promoting safety month. We’re doing safety month this month, and it’ll have a QR code to the content on our platform. And so that’s one way that we drive traffic to our platform from our digital signage is using QR codes. That’s

Speaker 2:
Correct Dot. So we don’t necessarily use QR codes to drive to our content, mainly because we usually have to publish those essential pieces of content somewhere else because we’re not requiring people to get the app because we’re not paying them when they’re on the app. So usually when we’re using QR codes, it’s for those mission critical pieces of information. So we’re driving to a website or a landing page or something like that. I will say from a registration standpoint and onboarding people into the platform, we did use QR codes for a while, but we’ve actually found that the text to get a link has worked better and our HR managers see much more success with that at our location. So we do use QR codes, but not as much as with our platform than we do with other communications. And we do not have our digital signage tied to Firstup currently. So if we did, we probably would use a QR code situation, but that’s not where we’re at right now with the platform. Great.

Speaker 1:
We have a question right here. If you could give your name and the company you represent too.

Speaker 9:
Yes. My name’s Tim. I’m with Ryder, the transportation company, and thank you. The three of you’re giving so much information that I think all of us are benefiting from. I do want to talk about the idea of using some of this data predictively, because Savannah, is it, you were spot on. Correlation is not causation. Yesterday, a panelists in another session talked about, well, we had an I P O and we looked at who didn’t buy in on this great deal for employee stock, and are those people maybe not interested in being here six months later in the payout? I could think of a thousand reasons not to buy stock. And I am wondering if you have thought about the pitfalls of, and this is for the three of you, but also for the people at Firstup, the pitfalls of trying to use this predictably as opposed to just analytically and wow, maybe we’re projecting motives onto employees that really aren’t there just because we see these correlations.

Speaker 2:
Yeah, so you’re spot on. Like I said, I keep reiterating their correlations. There’s no causation trend that we’re seeing right now. So all of our data from a correlation standpoint is very reactive. It’s not predictive. Will we reach that point now that I have someone on my side who’s actually a data expert and an analyst expert potentially. But for now, we’re really using it as a tool to show our leaders, Hey, these are the trends that we’re seeing, and we think that your facility would benefit by leveraging the platform more than you are today. So we’re not really using it predictably, and I can understand your concerns. Are we projecting? And that’s not something you want to do, but also is there a way to say, Hey, this department at this location is not as engaged, and is there something we can do to focus there? So I’m looking at it more of as an opportunity to strategically target employees to help them become more engaged and find out what they care about. Are we even publishing content that they care about? Because if we’re not, I want to change that and be able to cater to that group. So for me, it’s more from a, Hey, let’s motivate our leaders and also, hey, let’s tweak our content strategy to make sure that we are providing employees what they want and need to see in the platform.

Speaker 3:
And I would just add, so in manufacturing, oftentimes we’re looking for those leading indicators instead of a lagging indicator. And so we have a thing in safety. This is a leading indicator of good safety performance in the future, and it has improved our safety scores. And I see this is just another tool in the toolbox. It’s a leading indicator, not necessarily it’s an indicator, it’s not necessarily a predictor, but even if it’s just in communications that we see a lack of engagement in communications that says something. So it says either our content’s not great, or there’s something going on with leadership at the facility or something. It’s just another tool in the toolbox. I see. I think it’s really one of those things that you’re absolutely right. You can’t just hang your hat on it, that this is, that employee X is going to leave in three months, but to have that as a tool in the toolbox to do something with it’s way more than we have before, being proactive about

Speaker 2:
It, and we always say at Dot, there’s always going to be the employees who are, they’re there to clock in, clock out, get their paycheck, and they’re on the bell curve of you’re probably never going to convince them to be engaged to be a part of the community that you’re trying to build. But it is good. The stats can show a really big picture and not drill down to the individual employee, but more so tell a story about a group of employees I guess if makes sense.

Speaker 1:
Let’s do two more questions. We have one here and then Leo, you can select whos after that.

Speaker 10:
Hi, I’m Erin Kennedy. I’m from Community Health System in Fresno, California. We serve most of Central California. We’re way past adoption and retention and retention in the app and also engagement. Our leaders are now wanting to know what you’re doing Savannah with, how is it helping retain employees? I love the integration. I’m going to come back to you about how you integrated the HR metrics with that. But what I wouldn’t really know is I’ve sort of leaned into tagging initiative, tagging on my content to see if certain content that I know may drive people to grow their career or engage better or stay better is helping us keep them. Because healthcare, we have huge retention problem right now after the pandemic, but I’m wondering if you guys could talk to how you may, I didn’t see anything like you measuring your initiative tagging and how you use that and how that’s working with your other data.

Speaker 2:
Do you want me to go first? Yes. Okay. So we use initiative tagging in a little bit of a different way. So for example, we have a biometrics wellness incentive program at Dot. So any content that I push out that has to do with the wellness incentive is tagged as such because it just helps us then quarter over quarter and then at the year as a whole to see how was that content engaged with, was it engaged with and were they being driven to actually complete their biometric screening. So we do that with a lot of our benefits initiatives because we’re always looking to pivot and are we inundating employees with information that they don’t care about? So that’s more so how we’re using initiatives. But I really do like the approach that you’re taking and I think that could be a really interesting tie into some of that HR data.

Speaker 3:
Yeah, I agree. It sounds very interesting what you’re suggesting. Initiatives is something, is an area that we’re still a little immature in. It’s an area we’re wanting to develop a little stronger. We’re starting with safety and some of those other key areas that are important to our business, but where we’re at on the maturity path of our program, that’s not where we’re focused right now. I love the idea though. That’s a great idea. That’s fantastic.

Speaker 11:
I’m rethinking a lot of it.

Speaker 3:
Something.

Speaker 1:
Yeah. Well, let’s take one last question and I know that there are more questions. The nice thing is O Vivo is advocating for so and two. Okay. All right. We’ll do two more questions. I did see that one last Leo you had given. Yes, please. If you could go start, we’ll do one last one back here.

Speaker 7:
Hi. Oh good. Sorry. My name’s Brita. I’m with Fortive. Thank you. You three doing an amazing presentation. Something caught my eye on the Cooper Standard PowerPoint, showing your KPIs, and then you had a benchmark column with a industry competitor. And I was just really curious I think how you were able to get that data. We get a lot of questions of what good looks like and how we Absolutely. We within industry.

Speaker 3:
Yeah, absolutely. Right. So we leaned really heavily on Firstup actually. So when we were defining what are the right KPIs we should be tracking early on and then what does good look like, I had no idea. So they have great data that shows across their platform and then they can do a vertical across your industry and even your maturity level in your program. So that’s really nice. So as we continue to progress, they help us continue to redefine what those benchmark data should be. And those are key with our leaders even because when we say this is what we should be targeting, they don’t necessarily have trust in Chris’s opinion on some of that. I mean they do, but not to the same level of saying this is what the experts say. And that’s been huge for us as we define what’s important. In fact, we use that benchmark data now and we’re able to put it on our leaders individual performance reviews. Now here’s the goals that each plant needs to have, and it’s on their performance reviews that our leaders leaders have defined as important. And that benchmark data was absolutely key in that.

Speaker 1:
And I would say in your alignment meeting with your customer success manager, surface that and ask if you could provide that type of data. Nick in the back is Cooper Standard CSM. So shout out to him for providing that type of information. But that’s our role. He’s the best one.

Speaker 2:
I don’t know. Leo’s pretty great. I don’t know.

Speaker 3:
We might have to arm wrestle here.

So but that’s our role in customer success is to help you understand what good looks like. So we could we’d be happy to do that. Okay. The last question we have back in the back of the room. Yes, please.

Hi. My name is Annie, and I am with ChenMed, senior medical centers. We are, I would say, pretty, new. We haven’t celebrated our first anniversary yet with Firstup. And So our journey has been, you know, a little different considering some of the nuances.

We are finally thanks to Firstup able to track data and things on our content for the first time, which has been such a game changer.

And now we’re getting to a point where, again, we’re moving away from the and kind of diving a little deeper. And we have had so many people across our enterprise saying, Hey, I wanna launch something for my team. I want to, you know, participate. I wanna learn. And so I create the analytics reports month over month. And my question is how do you track things that are sent across the enterprise versus things that are a bit more targeted to specific audiences and specific, you know, groups that may be something that was temporary or maybe something that is a bit more longer standing? How do you how do you have that represented accurately in your data so that you can kinda dig deep and understand what that means and what would that look like?

At least for us, when it comes to content, this is an area we’re still maturing, but we look at, just in the given month, what content’s performing well, and what’s not. And that allows us to then shine a spotlight on those areas that are and and then try to emulate what that is. Across other things.

Catie, anything to add on that?

So it’s definitely easier. I think more central communications to pay attention to that.

We are trying to be more focused on local content and how that performs.

We we we generally look at more of the bigger campaigns, but, it is difficult. I I don’t know. And so we we do look at oftentimes so we do reports where we pull out some of the the corporate channels so that we’re not over saturating the local channels, and that helps us identify what some of those other local ones are. Do you have a different experience? Yeah. So we are, like, month over month content that or our month over reporting that we’re doing is very focused on our corporate content and then our location specific content.

But then we also do have some topics that are tied to occupational health and safety and IND and our center for career development. And so, because those groups have ownership over those topics, We I check-in on the health of those topics probably once a quarter just to see, okay, how frequently are they posting are they getting engagement? Do I think I need to step in and help offer them suggestions?

Because one of the things that we do with those departments that are requesting a topic is we say, you know, here are the guidelines. And if you don’t think you’re able to post two or three times a week, then we’re not gonna give you topic because we we don’t want an empty topic sitting there, that’s not providing resources to employees. So, we’re not necessarily pulling data and incorporating it, but we are using the data to check on the health of those topics that we aren’t directly in charge of. I would also say that the clicks per user per month has been a key enabler for us to identify those locations that maybe need a little more help because, corporate content only get you so far.

Employees really wanna see that local content. Yeah. Yeah. That’s great.

Well, I wanna say thank you for joining us for this session. The fact that this is a packed room demonstrates the value of the metrics, and I also wanna say there are a lot of exciting things underway at Firstup related to metrics. Some of you have probably attended the recent webinar are the metrics enhancements that we’re rolling out. So many great things. So stay tuned for more in regards to that. Let’s give our panelists a round of applause.

And I know and I know that there are more questions I’m sure they’ll stay around to help address that. And also, don’t forget, we have booths in the lobby where you can ask our product managers questions as far as metrics, insights, and what’s coming down the pike. So, please continue the conversation. Again, thank you for joining us and looking forward to seeing you for the other sessions. Thank you.