Firstup is an employee communications and engagement platform used by large organisations to reach every worker—office-based, hybrid and frontline—through mobile, web and email. Companies use it to plan messages, target specific audiences, automate delivery, and measure which communications move the needle on awareness, adoption and performance. It combines a content studio, delivery orchestration, personalisation and analytics in one system so communicators can ship the right message to the right person at the right time.
Firstup helps internal communications and HR teams cut through noise, which improves compliance, safety and programme adoption. It centralises messages that might otherwise sprawl across email, intranets, chat and noticeboards. One platform means one source of truth for content and metrics, which reduces duplication and the risk of missed updates. Because it supports mobile apps and SMS as well as email and web, it’s suited to industries with hard-to-reach staff such as retail, logistics, healthcare and manufacturing.
- Plan: Build campaigns in a shared calendar and assign owners.
- Target: Define audiences by location, role, shift, language or group membership.
- Create: Produce posts, articles, videos and surveys in a visual editor, with templates to keep branding consistent.
- Orchestrate: Schedule once; the platform automatically selects the channel and time for each person based on preferences and past engagement.
- Deliver: Publish to mobile app, desktop web, email digests, push notifications or digital signage.
- Measure: Track opens, clicks, reach, dwell time, reactions, comments and completion of calls-to-action.
- Optimise: Use analytics to refine targeting, content format and cadence.
Firstup emerged from the employee communications space and is widely associated with the union of two earlier pioneers in the field. The platform reflects years of iterating on how to reach non-desk workers, how to personalise at scale, and how to connect communications to outcomes such as programme enrolment or task completion. Over time, it shifted from a simple news feed and email tool to an orchestration engine that coordinates content across channels and devices.
- Attribute-based audiences: Combine fields like department, site, job family, union status and shift to reach precise groups.
- Dynamic membership: As HR data changes, people flow into or out of audiences automatically.
- Preference handling: Employees choose topics or channels; the platform honours preferences while still delivering critical updates.
- Multilingual support: Create variants or auto-translate to reach multi-language workforces.
- Templates: Branded layouts for quick, consistent posts.
- Rich media: Embed video, images, files, polls and micro-surveys.
- Approval workflows: Draft, review and publish with audit trails.
- Accessibility: Support for alt text, readable colour contrast and mobile-friendly typography.
- Channel mix: Mobile app, web experience, email, push notifications, SMS and (in some deployments) signage integrations.
- Send-time optimisation: Deliver when each audience is most likely to engage.
- Nudges and reminders: Automatically follow up with those who haven’t seen or completed a task.
- Digesting: Roll up updates into daily or weekly digests to reduce inbox fatigue.
- Reactions and comments: Gather quick sentiment and qualitative input.
- Polls and micro-surveys: Ask one to three questions to capture fast signal.
- Forms: Capture acknowledgements (e.g., policy read-and-confirm) or opt-ins.
- Reach and engagement: Unique reach, open rates, click-through, completion.
- Content performance: Benchmark by format, topic, channel and audience.
- Campaign attribution: Tie communications to outcomes such as benefits enrolment, training completion or app adoption.
- Executive dashboards: Summaries for leaders, with drill-down for communicators.
- HRIS and identity: Sync people data and manage access with systems like Workday, SAP SuccessFactors or Azure AD.
- Collaboration: Surface content into Microsoft Teams or similar tools to meet employees where they already are.
- Intranets and portals: Publish to company homepages and knowledge hubs.
- Single sign-on: Reduce friction and secure access.
Use the campaign planner, targeting and analytics to run programmes that reach every employee, not just email-heavy knowledge workers. Pre-schedule compliance messages, publish crisis updates quickly, and produce digests that summarise top news.
Drive benefits enrolment, wellness initiatives, policy acknowledgements and learning assignments. Measure completion by site or job family to find gaps, then send targeted reminders rather than broad all-staff blasts.
Reach frontline workers with shift-specific updates, SOP changes, near-miss reports and safety alerts. Confirm read receipts for critical notices. Use signage and push notifications to amplify urgent instructions.
Reduce channel sprawl by standardising on one communications layer. Integrate with identity systems to automate on/offboarding. Monitor adoption and performance without adding heavy custom development.
Publish authentic updates and short videos that cut through. Get evidence on message reach within key populations—store managers, line supervisors, field engineers—so leaders know who’s heard what and where to follow up.
Employees get a modern, consumer-style app and web feed showing relevant updates, not a generic firehose. They can:
- Set preferences for topics.
- Choose channels (email, push, SMS) and notification intensity.
- Read, react and comment on updates.
- Complete short forms, acknowledgements or micro-learning items.
- Search past posts and resources.
For those who rarely use a laptop, the mobile app is the primary touchpoint. Notifications are tuned to avoid overload while ensuring time-sensitive alerts break through.
- Crisis and incident communications: Push immediate, targeted alerts to affected sites or regions with clear instructions and an acknowledgement step.
- Retail and hospitality: Share promotions, planograms and shift policies with store teams; confirm receipt before major trading weekends.
- Manufacturing and logistics: Publish safety moments, maintenance windows and route updates to reduce downtime.
- Healthcare: Coordinate policy changes, PPE guidance and staff wellbeing resources across hospitals and clinics.
- Mergers and restructuring: Sequence leader messages, FAQs and benefits changes to different populations as timelines evolve.
- IT rollouts: Drive adoption of new tools; show completion dashboards and re-target holdouts with quick-start guides.
- Culture and recognition: Highlight wins, spotlight teams and run short pulse surveys to gauge morale.
- Higher reach to frontline staff because content lands on phones, not just in inboxes.
- Better message relevance through audience targeting and personalisation.
- Lower noise thanks to digests and orchestration that prevent duplicate sends.
- Faster reaction during incidents with location-based targeting and confirmations.
- Clearer ROI with dashboards that connect communications to measurable outcomes.
- Change management: New tools fail without training. Provide short role-based guides and manager toolkits.
- Content sprawl: Without governance, feeds get noisy. Define owners, approval workflows and an editorial calendar.
- Integration complexity: HRIS and identity integrations require clean data. Run a data quality check and map attributes before launch.
- Notification fatigue: Over-notifying erodes trust. Use digests by default and reserve push for urgent items.
- Map data sources (HRIS, identity, org structure).
- Define audiences and attributes (e.g., location, job family, manager ID).
- Agree governance: roles, approvals, content standards, brand elements.
- Configure SSO and mobile distribution through enterprise MDM where needed.
- Pick two to three high-impact use cases (e.g., safety alerts, benefits enrolment, store operations).
- Launch to a limited set of sites or business units.
- Measure baseline metrics such as reach, acknowledgement rate and time-to-read.
- Train content owners.
- Automate digests and critical alerts.
- Integrate with collaboration tools to meet employees in their daily flow.
- Establish a quarterly review to prune low-performing channels and templates.
Firstup deployments typically align with enterprise security requirements: SSO, role-based access, encryption in transit and at rest, and data residency options where available. Work with your security team to review audit logs, retention policies and incident response. Limit who can export user lists or engagement data. When using sentiment features or comments, set clear policies on moderation and privacy.
Focus on outcome metrics tied to your programme goals, not vanity numbers.
- Critical reach: Percentage of targeted employees who saw or acknowledged a message within 24–48 hours.
- Completion: Task or enrolment rates after a campaign.
- Time-to-awareness: Median time from publish to first view across key audiences.
- Channel efficiency: Actions per 1,000 notifications by channel.
- Content effectiveness: Which formats and topics yield the highest completion among specific roles.
- Manager cascade health: Engagement among people leaders vs. their teams; large gaps signal a cascade issue.
Run simple experiments: A/B test subject lines, send times, or content formats; keep test windows short (<14 days) to avoid drift. Share results with stakeholders so they can adjust their content.
- Channel breadth: It ships to mobile, push and SMS—not only email or a web portal.
- Personalisation: It uses audience data and employee preferences to tailor content.
- Orchestration: It coordinates timing and channel to avoid duplicates and maximise attention.
- Measurement: It provides campaign-level attribution, not just open rates.
- Frontline reach: It’s designed for staff without regular computer access.
- Identity and HR: Sync attributes that power targeting. Keep fields clean and low-cardinality where possible.
- Collaboration: Surface content into Teams or similar tools so knowledge workers don’t add another app to their day.
- Knowledge and help: Link to articles or request flows in your help desk or knowledge base to convert attention into action.
- Learning: Connect to your LMS so mandatory training appears as a simple, trackable task.
- Owners: Name accountable owners for each channel and business unit.
- Cadence rules: Cap non-critical sends per audience per week; default to digests.
- Approvals: Define who approves content types (e.g., legal for policy changes).
- Tone and accessibility: Keep language plain; ensure images have alt text.
- Archiving: Establish retention and takedown standards for outdated content.
- Crisis protocol: Pre-build alert templates and escalation paths.
Expect enterprise pricing based on employee count and feature tiers. Factor in costs for integrations, professional services and change management. For global firms, confirm regional data handling and translation workflows. For heavily regulated sectors, seek features like read acknowledgements, audit trails and stricter role controls.
- Start with outcomes: State the action required in the first sentence.
- Keep posts short: Aim for 150–300 words with a single call-to-action.
- Use visuals sparingly: One relevant image or a 30–60 second video beats a gallery.
- Tag wisely: Use a small, consistent set of topics to keep feeds tidy.
- Close the loop: Share results or next steps so employees see impact.
- Respect shifts: Schedule around local shift patterns; don’t ping off-hours unless urgent.
- ≥80% critical reach among targeted frontline audiences.
- 30–50% faster completion for high-stakes tasks (e.g., policy acknowledgements).
- Clear, shared dashboards for executives and comms.
- Reduced all-staff emails; more targeted sends with higher engagement.
- A small library of reusable templates and a living editorial calendar.
It’s both. There’s a mobile and web experience for employees, and an administrative platform for planning, targeting, orchestration and analytics.
Sometimes. Many organisations keep an intranet for deep, evergreen content and use Firstup to drive traffic and engagement. Others use Firstup as the primary news and update layer and keep a lightweight knowledge base elsewhere.
Identity is managed through HRIS and mobile enrolment flows. Employees authenticate via SSO or unique codes, then receive updates via the app, push or SMS—no email address needed.
Yes. Reactions, comments, polls and short forms enable quick feedback. Moderation tools help teams manage replies at scale.
Targeting and governance help align with local consultation requirements. Work with legal to set rules on metrics, moderation and opt-in where relevant.
Use digests for most updates, reserve push for urgent messages, and enforce weekly send caps by audience. Let employees set preferences and honour them.
Link campaigns to specific outcomes—training completion, safety compliance, benefits take-up—and report improvements versus baseline. Attribute gains to particular channels and formats to keep optimising.
- Orchestration: Automated selection of channel, timing and follow-ups per person.
- Audience: A dynamic group of employees defined by shared attributes.
- Digest: A bundled email or feed summary of multiple updates.
- Acknowledgement: A recorded confirmation that a message was read.
- Reach: The share of targeted employees who saw a message.
- Completion: The share who finished the requested action.
- Preference centre: A screen where employees choose topics and channels.
Pick Firstup if most communication challenges involve reaching frontline workers, if you need auditable acknowledgements, or if you want to coordinate messages across multiple channels with clear attribution. It’s less compelling if your workforce is small, desk-based and already well served by a single collaboration suite where email and chat suffice. In those cases, a lighter intranet or simple newsletter tool might cover your needs with less overhead.
- Week 1–2: Connect identity and HRIS, define initial audiences, configure SSO.
- Week 3: Build templates, set governance, train owners.
- Week 4: Launch a pilot with two critical campaigns and one culture campaign.
- Week 5–6: Review metrics, prune sends, tune digests, expand audiences.
- Week 8+: Integrate with collaboration tools, roll out to more sites, establish quarterly optimisation cycles.
Use Firstup to deliver relevant, measurable employee communications across mobile, web and email, especially when a large share of your workforce isn’t chained to a desk. Target carefully, orchestrate delivery, measure outcomes, and keep governance tight. That combination improves awareness, speeds up action and reduces noise for everyone.
