Rollout
How long it takes, who sets it up and what you have to put in
There is no rollout project, no setup fee and nobody from IT wiring anything up. That is an advantage and it is also a burden: you do the work, and it is four weeks of odd moments, not a deployment.
Requirements
What is needed from your side
None of the three is technical, and the first one is worth the other two put together.
One person who posts
You don't need a communications department. You need a named person who posts twice a week for the first two months. If that person doesn't exist, the tool goes quiet on its own, ours or anybody else's.
The list of sites and departments
In your head or in a spreadsheet, it makes no difference. They are created by hand in half an hour and they are the basis of all the targeting that follows: a post goes to the whole company, to particular departments or to particular sites.
A way of handing out the code
The noticeboard in the changing room, the shift handover, the payslip, or the supervisor at each site. Whatever already works for telling yourselves things works for this.
If there are member organisations
What changes when the organisation signing isn't the employer
A federation with thirty stations, a professional body with its chapters or a network with forty franchisees can't hand out the codes from head office: it doesn't set foot in the thirty houses. The calendar is the same, but there are four things to do first, and if they aren't done you'll leave half the roll outside.
One lead per house, asked for in writing
One name and one deputy per member organisation, with a deadline. The houses that don't reply within a fortnight are exactly the ones that will sit dark, and it is worth knowing that before you open rather than three months after.
The agreement on who sees what, settled first
Who sees whose list of people, and whether head office sees what a member organisation publishes for its own. The honest answer is that whoever administers the whole organisation sees everything. It is the first question a member asks and the worst one to discover halfway through.
One code per house, handed out by the house
The poster goes up by whoever is standing there, not by head office. And if head office pays, seats get divided up: each member organisation has its own and asks for more when it needs them, which is the only way the spend doesn't grow without anybody having decided it.
The words, chosen on day one
Stations and members, or chapters and professionals, or units and teams. You pick when the account is created and you can change it afterwards. Calling somebody an employee on the first screen when they aren't on your payroll is the fastest way to make sure they never log in again.
Timetable
Four weeks, starting with one site
You can open it to the whole company on day one, and sometimes that works. But if handing out the code goes wrong across two thousand people at once, there is no second chance at a first impression.
- 1
Week 0 · You · half a day
Set the account up
Create the company, upload the logo, pick the colour, add the sites and the departments and create the communities. One person, one afternoon. Nobody from IT is involved.
- 2
Week 1 · You · two hours
One site only
You generate the code for that site, hand it out and publish the first two announcements. One of them has to be something the workforce genuinely wants to read — the rota, some news from the company — not a welcome to the tool.
- 3
Weeks 2 and 3 · You · a short while each week
Look at the number, then widen
How many people at that site have seen the announcements. If the number is low, the problem is either how the code was handed out or the content, and you fix it before going wider. Once the number is decent, you open the rest of the sites.
- 4
Week 4 · You · one meeting
Decide on your own data
When the fifteen-day trial ends you have a read rate for your own people, by department. That is what you take into the decision meeting, and it is a better argument than anything we can tell you.
Sign-ups
How 2,000 people get signed up
With invitation codes, not with a file. An administrator generates a code that already carries the role, the department and the site inside it, with a maximum number of uses — up to five hundred per code — and an expiry date. Each person enters it on their own phone and creates the account themselves, with their personal email.
- One code per site: people are sorted from minute one
- Five codes of 400 uses each cover a workforce of 2,000
- No company account, no going through IT and no list to keep up to date
- The code expires, and it can be revoked if it has been handed round too far
Where the code goes up
- On the cork noticeboard by the entrance and in the changing room.
- Read out by the supervisor at the shift handover.
- Printed alongside the month's payslip.
- In the welcome pack for new starters.
It is low-tech on purpose. Any method that depends on having an up-to-date email address or phone number for all two thousand people fails on exactly the people you need to reach.
No small print
What the rollout doesn't include
We would rather this list was read before signing. If any of these seven is a must-have for you, say so in the first meeting and we'll tell you whether it is on the roadmap or it isn't.
- Importing the workforce from a CSV or an Excel file. Sign-ups are done with codes.
- Email invitations. Blastack doesn't send emails of any kind.
- Syncing with your HR system does exist — SCIM 2.0, with joiners and leavers handled automatically — but it lives in the corporate identity module, it is bought separately and it is configured afterwards: it is not part of the rollout.
- Single sign-on is in that same module and it speaks OpenID Connect, not SAML 2.0. If your tender requires SAML, that we haven't got.
- Consultants of ours at your plants, or workshops on site.
- Migrating content across from another tool.
- Automatic password recovery: today you have to email us if somebody loses theirs.
The hard part
Why these tools go quiet
They almost never fall over on the technology. They fall over because two months in, nobody is posting.
The pattern repeats: it goes up with enthusiasm, six things get posted in the first week, then the person running it has a difficult month, a fortnight goes by with nothing new and the workforce stops opening it. Winning that back costs more than starting did.
The only thing that prevents it is a minimum rhythm, kept up: two posts a week for the first two months, with someone responsible and a stand-in. They don't have to be big announcements; the rota, a photo of a finished job and a birthday are reason enough for people to open it.
That is why the reach analytics are not decoration: they are the alarm that tells you this is happening, with two weeks in hand to fix it.
Start with one site and look at the number
Fifteen days, no card. If you would rather see it with somebody walking you through before touching anything, book a demo and we'll run it over a video call.