In 2009, High Road Communications lead the planning and design of an internal microsite that supports the roll-out of Sun Life’s brand vision and values.  This micro-site, “BrandShare”, integrates social media to encourage and showcase employees’ engagement with the Sun Life brand.  Employees can share photos and videos of themselves, their colleagues or their families that show Sun Life’s brand attributes and they can enter into discussion forums to discuss and share stories around the brand. They can also access educational content that explains the business value of a brand, Sun Life’s brand journey and how a consistent brand expression can help the performance of the company.  Virtually all content on BrandShare enables and encourages engagement from employees – creating and publishing content through real-time dialogue in discussion forums, through to full commenting, rating and tagging functionality.

How do you engage employees at a level that stimulates corporate growth, collaboration and innovation? These were the questions posed when RBC Financial Group approached High Road Communications to move employees from being informed to being engaged.

High Road worked closely with RBC staff and internal stakeholders to define a communications vehicle that met the needs of a diverse range of employees. Content strategy was defined in collaboration with RBC and included discussion on strategic initiatives that define RBC’s core strengths, including competitive intelligence, business development and financial literacy.

With this knowledge the monthly, bilingual online publication, RBC Insite, was born. RBC INsite provides a number of feedback options to increase a sense of belonging and collaboration – from dynamic polls to article rating, related reading, e-mail feedback, and article commenting.

The feedback has been incredibly strong, with hundreds of comments posted, story suggestions put forward, and an average of 150 article ratings per issue, suggesting that High Road has successfully turned RBC’s informed employees into engaged employees.

In November 2007, the Multiple Sclerosis Society of Canada approached High Road with a unique challenge: to design and build a bilingual web campaign that would help raise $60m and ensure a cure for multiple sclerosis would be discovered in Canada. Naturally, we accepted the challenge head-on.

To accomplish its mission, the MS Society of Canada needed to be relevant to visitors at various levels of engagement in the fight against MS, and move them up on the “participation ladder”. With this in mind, we tailored the web site to track visitor behaviour and allowed endms.ca to serve up personalized content to everyone from the newly aware to the hyper-engaged.

A campaign blog allowed potential donors insight into the workings of the campaign while a multitude of RSS feeds allowed users to subscribe to all updates: from new events to blog postings and from video updates to new funding.

endMS.ca also showed off  our creative team at their best – they developed a Flash “funding simulator” that demonstrated how donations change the face of MS research in Canada. The team also created an emotionally-stirring cut of the campaign PSA, subtly introducing colour into the black and white video to enhance the site’s overall design and aesthetics.

Using an integrated multi-channel solution that incorporated online editorial outreach, online advertising and community-based marketing, we recommended a truly integrated approach and helped the MS Society pursue their funding goal.