Project Nexus: Boosting Engagement 42% by 2026

Internal marketing, especially a solid ad campaign for your own employees, is how you get a real lift in employee engagement. When your people are informed and motivated, it has a direct line to better productivity and how the public sees your brand. But how do you run a good communication strategy for an internal campaign? Your usual metrics and ad rules are out the window. This breakdown of our “Project Nexus” campaign shows how we rebuilt our approach to employee communications after the 2026 ad-tech ban.

The advertising regulation shifts in 2026, especially around data privacy, had a funny side effect: they forced a lot of us to get serious about our internal comms. We created “Project Nexus” because we saw a growing gap between our leadership’s strategic vision and what our front-line employees were hearing. The mission was straightforward: build a stronger sense of purpose and connection across our 1,500-person global team, especially with our new Q3 product roadmap dropping. We’d seen participation in company surveys dip and heard a lot of “I’m out of the loop” chatter during Q1 and Q2 of 2026, so we knew we had to do something different.

Our communication strategy for Project Nexus was built on transparency, empowerment, and recognition. We wanted employees to feel informed and truly integral to where the company was headed. The campaign ran for three months, from July 1 to September 30, 2026, with a total budget of $75,000. That’s not a trivial amount for an internal project, but our leadership saw the potential ROI in morale and, frankly, getting things done.

Strategy: Beyond the Bulletin Board

Our core strategy had to be more than just another post on the static company intranet. We designed an interactive, multi-channel experience that felt more like good content and less like a corporate memo. The team focused on the digital channels people were already using every day. This meant custom dashboards on our Slack channels, special sections in the employee portal, and short animated videos we could drop right into the weekly team meeting agendas. We also ran interactive quizzes and polls to check for understanding and get feedback on the fly.

A huge piece of this was segmentation. We stopped blasting the same message to everyone. For example, our engineering teams got content that dug into the technical challenges and cool solutions in the Q3 roadmap. The sales teams, meanwhile, saw messages about new market opportunities and the direct customer impact. This tailored approach, using employee data we already had (department, role, tenure), was effective. A HubSpot report on internal communications even notes that personalizing internal content can lift engagement by 50%, a number we saw reflected in our own results.

Creative Approach: Human-Centric and Engaging

The creative for Project Nexus was built to be visually interesting and connect on a human level. We banned stock photography. Instead, we used pictures of our actual employees (with their permission, of course) and had custom illustrations made that matched our company’s vibe. The tone was upbeat and collaborative. Our short-form videos, usually 60-90 seconds, featured senior leaders talking about the strategy in a casual, conversational style, and we filmed them around the office instead of in some stuffy studio. One of the most popular videos had our CEO explaining our new sustainability goals while walking through the company garden, which just felt authentic.

Our call-to-action (CTA) was almost always “Share Your Ideas” or “Contribute to Our Future.” We set up a dedicated portal on our intranet using Jira Service Management where people could submit proposals, ask questions, and upvote ideas from their colleagues. It was presented as a direct line to leadership and a mechanism to make a tangible impact.

Targeting and Distribution: Precision for Internal Audiences

We did all our targeting using our existing HRIS (Human Resources Information System). This let us segment employees by department, location (our offices in Atlanta, London, and Singapore), and how long they’d been with us. That level of detail allowed for very specific message delivery. The Atlanta sales team, for instance, got a push notification about a local town hall with their VP, while the Singapore engineering team got alerts about upcoming tech talks relevant to their specific projects.

We pushed content out through several channels:

• Company-wide Slack channels: Perfect for big announcements and live, interactive Q&As.
• Employee Intranet (SharePoint-based): This was the central hub for all campaign materials, deep-dive info, and the idea submission portal.
• Email newsletters: We sent weekly digests that summarized campaign news and gave shout-outs to employee contributions.
• Digital signage: The screens in our office common areas ran a loop of campaign messages and key metrics.
• Team leader briefings: We armed managers with talking points and FAQs so they could lead real discussions in their team meetings.

By monitoring the built-in analytics on Slack and SharePoint, plus our custom tracking on the Jira portal, we could see what was working and for whom. For example, we saw early on that videos had a much higher completion rate with employees who had been here less than two years. What did we do? We made more short videos for that exact group. Simple.

What Worked and What Didn’t

What worked extremely well:

• Personalized video messages from leadership: These had an average view-through rate of 85%, smashing our 60% benchmark for internal comms. The sight of a leader speaking directly and honestly about the future just worked.
• Interactive idea submission portal: We got over 500 unique ideas for process and product improvements. This showed real ownership and a genuine desire from people to pitch in.
• Segmented content delivery: The custom messaging drove a 65% higher interaction rate (clicks, comments, submissions) than our old one-size-fits-all emails. Employees found the content relevant.
• Real-time Q&A sessions on Slack: These sessions built a sense of community and let us clear up confusion about strategy on the spot. One Q&A with our Head of Product had over 300 people actively participating.

What didn’t work as expected:

• Digital signage engagement: The signs were visible, but the Click-Through Rate on the QR codes linking to more info was a dismal 2%. It seems people would rather engage on their own phone or computer than a public screen.
• Over-reliance on email for critical updates: Even with a decent 70% open rate on our weekly newsletters, that still meant nearly a third of our people were missing key info. We learned email is better for summaries, not for breaking news.
• Lack of immediate feedback loop for submitted ideas: We got a ton of ideas, but the initial response from departments was too slow. Mid-campaign pulse surveys showed this was causing some frustration.

The campaign directly increased employee engagement by 42%, a number we calculated based on town hall attendance, idea submissions, and positive survey sentiment. If you think of an “engaged employee” as a lead, our Cost Per Lead (CPL) was about $150 ($75,000 budget / 500 ideas). The ROAS (Return on Ad Spend) for an internal campaign is tough to pin down in dollars, but the qualitative feedback on morale, alignment, and the actionable ideas we received suggests a strong positive return.

Optimization Steps Taken

Based on what we learned, we made a few key changes for our next internal marketing push:

1. Simplified Feedback Loop: We created an “Idea Review Board” with people from every department. They now have a 48-hour SLA to acknowledge an idea and a 10-day turnaround for a first-pass assessment. This small process change made a big difference in people feeling heard.
2. Integrated Digital Signage with Mobile: Instead of QR codes, our new digital signs will sync with our internal mobile app. When an employee walks by a screen with relevant info, they’ll get a notification on their phone, making it easier to access the content.
3. Shifted Email Strategy: Email is now for personalized reminders and recaps, pushing people toward the interactive platforms where the real conversation is happening. This cuts down on inbox clutter.
4. Increased Manager Training: We’re putting more resources into training our team leaders to be better messengers for these big initiatives, giving them better toolkits and more frequent briefings to cascade information effectively.

Project Nexus showed that a smart, data-informed internal marketing plan can get you real, measurable results. It requires the same strategic thinking you’d apply to an external campaign: know your audience and never stop tweaking your approach. Across all our digital channels, we tracked about 2.5 million impressions (a sum of Slack views, intranet page hits, video plays, and email opens). Our conversions which we defined as a unique idea submission or a completed campaign survey, totaled over 1,200 unique actions. That puts our cost per conversion around $62.50 ($75,000 / 1,200). These metrics illustrate the impact of a well-run internal campaign, especially now that the old ad-tech playbook is off the table.

Treating your internal audience with the same strategic focus you give your customers is a competitive necessity. When you create genuine engagement and give people clear ways to contribute, you turn your workforce into your best advocates and a source of great ideas. For more on this, check out how to apply similar thinking to shareholder events engagement.