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Announcements have been a core part of Viva Engage for years but have recently become a critical way to keep employees informed and engaged with leaders. The broad delivery of announcements across Viva Engage, Viva Connections, Outlook, and Microsoft Teams means that employees can use rich engagement features like reactions, replies, and sharing from within the apps that they use every day. Analytics help track the reach of the announcements, meaning our customers have come to rely on announcements to help run their business and measure the impact their communications are having in your network.


 


We’ve taken it one step further by enabling specific employees as leaders because we know leaders want to share vision, updates, and perspectives to build culture and manage change. When leaders are selected in Viva Engage, and their audiences have been set up they can send storyline announcements. And now leaders can reach and connect with employees in their organizations and send their posts to multiple audiences. Leaders and their delegates can now configure multiple audiences and effectively target storyline announcements to them.


 


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Leaders can now send targeted storyline announcements to different audiences


 


Leaders, and their delegates can now target storyline announcements to preconfigured audiences, expanding the leader’s ability to reach people beyond their direct reporting organization. Upon creating an announcement, the leader’s default audience will be preselected. To add additional audiences, select Change option. This will bring up the Storyline announcements options window in which the default audience can be changed for any of the configured ones. Once an audience is selected, confirm the channels before you send your message.


 


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Set up multiple audiences


 


To view information about how to configure audiences, please visit Identify leaders and manage audiences in Viva Engage. To define a leader’s audience, you add individual users or groups, such as security, distribution, or Microsoft 365 groups. When you add a group, changes to the group’s membership, including nested members, automatically update the audience within 24 hours. This functionality makes it easy to apply existing groups that define a leader’s organization to define the leader’s audience in Viva Engage. Customers may have existing distribution lists that they use to communicate with an audience by email. You can add those lists to the leader’s audience in Viva Engage for continuous communication.


 


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Send announcements to your audience across apps



Leaders can make an announcement and select your audience and reach people across apps. Once the announcement is delivered, your audiences can react and reply regardless of what app they receive the announcement. To make your announcements more engaging, attach images or videos, ask a question, pose a poll to your community, or draw attention to specific actions by using rich media within your announcement. Announcements made by leaders will also be highlighted in leadership corner.


 


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Analyze the impact of your communication


 


When you post an announcement in Viva Engage, you can expect the message to reach your audience. From the notifications with Microsoft Teams, Outlook interactive messages, Engage notifications, we want to make sure that you understand the impact of your communications by tracking the reach of your communications and the sentiment of your audience. With conversation insights, you’ll be able to view how well your announcement has performed. With personal analytics, you can track the effectiveness across multiple posts and announcements. With audience analytics, leaders can track levels of sentiment analysis to help monitor the engagement, contributions and themes across your audience, beyond what you have sent. You can start to understand and know what your audience thinks is important and can help you identify what to post next.


 


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What’s new and next for storyline….


 


Storyline can be made available for only specific employees
Storyline announcements coming to multiple tenant organizations


 


Learn more about Viva Employees Communications and Communities and stay tuned to the M365 Roadmap for the latest updates about what’s coming for Viva Engage.


 


If you are looking to share important news and information with employees, try using announcements on your storyline posts. With the speed of delivery, ability to measure reach, and a way to spark two-way engagement, announcements are an essential way to keep your employees informed.

Brought to you by Dr. Ware, Microsoft Office 365 Silver Partner, Charleston SC.