Internal Communications · Research2026

Executive Message Effectiveness Research System

Designed and built a research system that triangulates in-depth interviews with anonymous surveys to diagnose whether recurring executive messages (New Year's addresses, founding-anniversary speeches, and the like) actually reach, get understood by, and resonate with employees. The survey layer is fully automated with Google Apps Script, from generation to analysis.

Challenge

The effectiveness of executive messages had only ever been measured by view counts. A view count proves someone opened the message — not that they understood it, related to it, or acted on it. Groups with different channel access, such as field workers, were left out of measurement altogether. The team needed a way to ground improvement proposals in empirical data rather than personal taste.

Approach

Designed a measurement framework that decomposes message effectiveness into multiple axes — reach, recall, comprehension, resonance (authenticity), relevance, and action (onward sharing)

Structured the research as qual-to-quant triangulation — in-depth interviews surface hypotheses first, then an anonymous survey validates them quantitatively

Automated the survey with Google Apps Script from generation through distribution to analysis — guaranteeing full anonymity while keeping just enough classification questions to analyze gaps between groups

Designed a separate response path for field workers, who are easily excluded from desk-based channels, to shrink measurement blind spots

Embedded benchmark-derived improvement candidates (delivery channels, follow-up content formats) directly into the survey questions, so the research itself prioritizes the next round of actions

Completed qualitative interviews balanced across sites and job levels, then moved to the anonymous-survey stage for extended validation

Outcome

✓

First application of interview-survey triangulation to internal-communications effectiveness diagnosis in the organization

✓

Built a reusable research infrastructure with the anonymous-survey pipeline automated end to end — designed to extend to other internal-communications diagnostics

✓

Interviews complete and quantitative triangulation underway — laying the groundwork for improvement proposals based on empirical data instead of gut feeling