The struggle to deliver consistent communications

With more than 70,000 employees across 79 countries and 16 languages and operating 250 internal websites along with various newsletters, maintaining BP’s integral corporate identity took monumental effort.

Leading this effort was BP’s communications team, who owned the task of representing the company both internally to current and future employees, and externally, to everyone from consumers to the media and government officials. Internal communications proved especially difficult. Too often communications teams worked in solos across several communication channels. This, in turn, led to mixed messages and disconnects which resulted in confusion, and ultimately, apathy.

“That was causing a lot of people to disengage with, certainly, internal communications,” explained Ben Jefferies, Head of Global Publishing at BP. “People have channel overload and don’t know what to receive. Our teams don’t know where to post stuff. The don’t what their audience is receiving or what they’re seeing.”

One of the biggest contributors to these challenges was the development and delivery of content. Although BP had a CMS, it didn’t contain all the places content was being developed — email content was written in a separate tool, dotdigital, and rather than maintaining a single corporate intranet, there were hundreds of internal sites with global editors around the world. Delivery proved to be equally challenging as BP employed four different systems to serve their content.

Finding the right headless CMS

For its part, the communications team wanted a solution that would consolidate their content into a single source of truth with minimal disruption to the business.

Jefferies knew that if he could find a single CMS solution that could power downstream communications across channels — from their intranet to internal chat on Yammer to their newsletter — the benefits would be felt worldwide. He also knew that ease of use was paramount, so one of his key metrics was the total amount of content being published on internal platforms.

“The so-called holy grail will be having all comms created in one place,” Jefferies continued. “So we can then see the end consumption metrics for the stories being published across multiple end points that use different consumption metrics.”

Arc XP’s microservices architecture, powered by AWS, facilitated that strategy. While content would be viewed on various channels around the world, it would not be driven from a single platform. For the thousands of global BP content creators, Arc XP’s intuitive interface meant that content publishign would now be a pushbutton process.

“Wherever they want to publish it —Yammer, social media, etc. — can be done in one place,” Jefferies explained. “All I have to do now is push a different button and it will go into the news part of my website.”

The result: increased efficiency and communication consistency

For Jefferies, the business case for Arc XP was clear: efficiency and productivity. By leveraging Arc XP to eliminate the usage of four individual content systems into one, BP experienced a nearly 75 percent reduction to the time to took to publish content, with an almost equal reduction in time spent onboarding new employees to the processes and tools.

What’s more, having this single source of truth drove increase communication consistency across teams and continues to facilitate productivity and continuous improvements.

“Arc XP allows our comms professionals to concentrate on producing content rather than navigating multiple publishing systems,” said Geoff Morrell, Global Head of Communications and External Affairs for BP. “What’s more, its flexibility fits perfectly with our ‘write once, publish anywhere’ strategy for digital publishing.”