A toolkit for the campaign that sneaks up every fall

SEPTEMBER 8, 2026

This week's newsletter is arriving in your inbox on Tuesday due to the US-recognized holiday of Labor Day. Hope you're having a great week!

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Everything you need for open enrollment comms

Future you probably does not want to write another open enrollment campaign from start to finish... so do them a favor now!

Our new Open Enrollment Kit gives you the whole campaign starting point: what to send, when to send it, email templates you can steal, automation ideas, and even AI prompts to help you move faster.

Open enrollment may be inevitable each year, but rebuilding your entire comms plan from scratch every year doesn't have to be. :)

Download the kit

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Four questions you should be asking your stakeholders

Providence CCO Alan Shoebridge regularly checks in with stakeholders and asks:

What communications do you engage with?
What are we doing well?
What could we do better?
What are we missing from your part of the company?

Shoebridge uses stakeholder mapping to identify the people comms should be building relationships with across the organization. Then, uses those relationships to learn what teams are working on, understand upcoming priorities, and uncover employee stories that might otherwise fly under the radar.

See how they do it

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Need one more idea for this month's newsletter?

Our September newsletter roundup is packed with easy content ideas you can borrow all month long. One I especially love: for International Podcast Day, ask employees for their favorite shows and turn the responses into a staff picks section. Easy, interactive, and way more fun than staring at an empty content block.

Browse all 100+ ideas

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Science says work should be fun (and so do I!)

When you think about your favorite moments at work, I'm willing to bet a perfectly polished PowerPoint isn't the first thing that comes to mind. 😉

It's probably a win your team celebrated together, a thoughtful shout-out, a running joke with your favorite coworker, or a moment when you felt connected to the people you work with or your company's mission.

Fast Company shares five simple ways leaders can create more of those moments and ideas communicators could easily borrow for meetings, all-hands, newsletters, and recognition programs!

Add some joy to your workday

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Your company culture lives in the everyday stuff :)

The team at Deutsche Telekom has a simple test for whether culture is truly embedded: Would employees experience it in how the company works, even if nobody labeled it “culture”?

And I love that! It takes culture out of the realm of posters and campaigns and puts it somewhere much more interesting: leadership conversations, feedback, collaboration, decision-making, and how information moves through the organization. For communicators, that creates a whole lot of opportunities to help bring culture to life.

Read more

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A positive, practical newsletter
about internal comms curated
by the team at Workshop