How the PGA TOUR Is Improving Global Employee Communications with Bananatag

About the PGA TOUR By showcasing golf’s greatest players, the PGA TOUR engages, inspires, and positively impacts fans, partners, and communities worldwide. Worldwide, PGA TOUR tournaments are broadcast to 216 countries and territories in 28 languages. To date, tournaments across all Tours have generated more than $3.2 billion in charitable donations.

Challenge #1 - Small team with no design support

As a team of two responsible for communicating to more than 1000 employees globally, the TOUR’s Internal Communications team certainly had their hands full.

While Dave’s team is headquartered in Ponte Vedra Beach, FL, they work cross-functionally with all departments to inform and educate employees on tournament news, benefits, events, and everything in between.

To keep a global employee base informed and aligned, Dave and his team create and send a whole lot of internal email—including daily, weekly, bi-weekly, and monthly newsletters.

As it is their main communication channel, Dave wanted to be able to send clean, professional-looking emails that were more engaging and polished than what he was sending with Outlook.

But since the small team of two did not have a dedicated designer, nor the capacity to take on email design themselves, they were stuck.

Challenge #2 - No data to inform strategy

One day, after the PGA TOUR Commissioner recorded and emailed a video message to employees, the Commissioner inquired, “How many employees had viewed the video?”

Unfortunately, the team did not have an answer.

Because they were sending with Outlook, they had no way to measure open rates or engagement.

“That quickly prompted us to seek a tool that would provide open rate data.”

And that was the moment when Dave realized it was time to look for an internal email solution that would satisfy the senior leadership team—and prove that their internal comms strategy was working.

Dave needed a way to:

• Save time creating internal communications
• Support communications across the organization with a limited team
• Provide leadership with data on the impact of internal comms
• Enhance their internal comms strategies based on that data
• Create clean, professional emails that employees would want to read
  
  

Solution: Bananatag’s Analytics and Email Designer

“From day one, Bananatag solved two huge issues:

1. We were able to send clean and professional-looking emails that were more “sticky” than plain Outlook messages.

2. We were able to track engagement by reviewing the open rate and read time of each message being sent.”

Now, his team is equipped to analyze which content pieces resonate most with their employees, so they can build data-backed internal comms strategies with confidence:

“The read time buckets are our favorite. We love gaining insight into how long our employees are reading our messages. This has allowed us to pivot and make necessary changes to the length and type of emails we send.”

“We love the simplicity of the Email Designer. We especially like how Bananatag was able to incorporate fonts and colors that matched our brand standards.”

Being able to set and lock brand settings is essential for the PGA TOUR IC Team, since they’ve started inviting users across the organization to collaborate and send better internal communications:

“We have introduced Bananatag to at least five departments. We love how easy it is to train employees.”

Result: Impressed employees and more impact.

Check out an example of the team's new employee newsletter:

Once Dave’s team started using Bananatag, employees started to reach out to applaud the new designs:

“We received a ton of feedback from employees. Primarily, how great our emails looked.”

With the right tools, Dave and his small team of two started to make much bigger waves:

“Even though we are a small team, Bananatag makes our internal comms team feel bigger.”

“The Bananatag team is fantastic.”

We can’t wait to see what Dave and the PGA TOUR do next!