A guide to setting and measuring KPIs for internal comms
Every communicator wants to prove the value of their work. But measurement is one of the toughest challenges our profession faces. Reports have long shown this gap, but now our own research underlines the urgency.
The 2025 International Employee Communication Impact Study by Staffbase and YouGov — with responses from over 3,500 employees in six countries — reveals a serious disconnect:
Only 9% of non-desk employees are very satisfied with internal communication.
63% of employees considering leaving their jobs cite poor communication as a contributing factor.
And those who describe leadership communication as “very clear” are three times happier in their jobs than those who say it’s unclear.
These findings show that internal comms isn’t just about reach or engagement. It directly impacts retention, productivity, trust, and organizational stability. In other words, ineffective communication is a business risk.
Addressing measurement challenges for modern communicators
We're not the only source that noted communications problems. According to the 2025 State of the Sector report by Gallagher, communicators still lack the time, clarity, and space needed for meaningful measurement even as their roles become increasingly dynamic and strategic.
In fact, change fatigue is now one of the top barriers, with 44% of internal communicators citing it as a major obstacle — second only to limited team capacity.
These combined insights reinforce that communicators need to adopt a data-oriented approach to prove ROI. And it must connect comms outcomes to business outcomes, including reduced turnover, improved crisis response, stronger trust in leadership, and greater efficiency across the organization.
Due to these ongoing challenges, we’ve put together this guide to help you set and measure some basic KPIs. In this article, we’ll talk about the following five sections:
How to think about measurement
The right software solutions for measuring comms
Benchmarks and the measurement cycle
KPIs for operative and strategic measurement.
And finally, a short conclusion on setting goals.
Remember — getting started with impact-driven measurement is the first step toward demonstrating the real value of internal communication. Ready to begin?
1. How to think about measurement
Measurement isn’t just about tracking clicks or opens. It’s about showing how internal communication delivers value across the business. For different stakeholders, that value looks different:
For senior IC managers: Measurement is about proving strategic influence, reducing “communication fatigue,” and earning a stronger seat at the leadership table.
For HR managers: Measurement is about tying communication to the employee experience, retention, and demonstrating ROI on change initiatives.
For IT directors: Measurement means proving that communication tools support business continuity, mitigate risk, and reduce tool sprawl through smarter consolidation.
With that in mind, we can boil comms measurement down to two core questions:
Are we doing our job well?
Are our activities contributing to the business in the way they need to?
To answer these questions, let’s split measurement into two areas for this guide:
Operative measurement: Evaluating whether channels and individual internal comms activities are performing as intended.
Strategic measurement: Assessing whether communication around key initiatives and campaigns is delivering the intended business outcomes.
Now, before we jump into actually measuring, there are a few things to keep in mind:
1. Make measurement actionable
For both types of measurement, the goal is to gather data you can act on. That means choosing metrics that help you and your stakeholders make better decisions.
2. Give data context
Furthermore, when you give your data context, it comes to life. Here are some examples of metrics with context:
Time context: How do results evolve over weeks, quarters, or years? Look at the same metrics from quarter to quarter to track changes.
Audience context: Which employee groups respond best? Which are underserved? Break down your results by target audience to learn which audiences need more attention.
Other context: Compare performance by topic, channel, or even the communicator behind the message.
3. Keep it realistic
It’s also important to acknowledge limits. Internal communication influences outcomes like employee satisfaction, retention, or change adoption — but it’s not the only factor at play. That’s why measurement goals should focus on the areas where IC makes the most direct impact.
When done right, measurement isn’t just reporting activity. It’s building the case that communication drives engagement, efficiency, and ROI across the organization. Overall, make sure to set measurement goals that focus on the impact you actually have.
2. Finding the best software solutions for comms measurement
There are several tools and software solutions that make data collection and measurement possible. We're going to explore employee email, surveys, apps, and modern intranets.
Employee email
First, let’s look at employee email. Tracked emails let you measure any interactions with the information you’re sending. Tracking the rate at which recipients open emails will show how emails are performing. For example, you could measure engagement on email by the open and link click percentages for each email sent during a selected time frame.
An average unique open rate and an average unique click rate can show how many recipients have been reached. If a tool tracks engagement by email and engagement by day (as seen below), line graphs can illustrate the effectiveness of email communications.
🔎 ROI focus: Inefficient communication comes with real costs. Every unopened or irrelevant email represents wasted time and lost productivity. Measuring engagement helps communicators prevent wasted effort and prove the efficiency of their channel strategy.
Employee surveys
Even more engaging — and with greater opportunities for tracking interactions — are employee survey solutions.
The recurring use of work-related questions posed at regular intervals helps to establish trends and collect direct feedback. These results can also be tracked visually, for example, in the form of line graphs. The visual aid offers an easy way to display results over time.
So-called pulse surveys allow regular feedback on important topics or measure general employee satisfaction. These results make it possible to work with the data in real time. They can also easily address operational topics. Pulse surveys should be kept short and focus on direct, anonymous feedback.
Other survey options include creating targeted, in-depth employee sentiment surveys to support large company initiatives. With your intranet, you can collect and act on feedback directly. Internal communicators can review survey and poll results and track feedback over time.
🔎 ROI focus: Measuring sentiment and feedback doesn’t just capture opinions. For HR leaders, this data becomes proof of whether communication supports retention, culture, and change adoption — all of which directly affect ROI.
Employee apps and modern intranets
Another way to successfully measure employee engagement is by utilizing the social features of an employee app or a modern intranet. Similar to social media platforms, a powerful internal communications platform gives great insights into engagement. A digital environment that centralizes employee interactions makes it possible to track and measure reactions such as comments, likes, and shares, all reflecting the levels of employee interests.
The Staffbase platform does more than provide social features. The AI-native front-door solution combines a mobile app and intranet, further enhancing the ability to use both emails and surveys to track engagement all in one.
This makes setting and tracking KPIs easy and accessible. More than simply sending out emails, Staffbase makes it possible to reach employees with push notifications. The Analytics Dashboard provides information on employee engagement, and all survey results are available via the Surveys plugin.
🔎 ROI focus: For IT leaders, the value lies in consolidation and resilience. A single platform reduces tool sprawl, strengthens compliance, and ensures reliable communication during crises — preventing the operational and financial risks of downtime.
Now that we have a framework and the means for measuring our comms efforts, how do we go about establishing our benchmarks and KPIs?
3. Understanding benchmarks and the measurement cycle
You’ll be happy to hear that there’s a cyclic nature to measurement. We always start by defining a standard of success. Here, we can make use of benchmarks to define success because they’ll help us use previous KPIs as a point of comparison.
Secondly, we collect our KPI data and compare it to our definition of success. We then evaluate the next steps we should take. The central question here is whether we are currently investing our resources wisely in order to attain the outcome we’re aiming for.
If we don’t match our standard for success, that could be an indication that we should:
Adjust our content
Increase activities in this area
Discontinue working on this topic altogether.
If we do match our standard for success, this could be an indication that we should:
Further increase our activities in this area, because it has proven to be engaging for employees
In particular, examining the specific context can provide us with important learnings as to why this activity yielded success. In both cases, the data we collect will inform our future benchmarking KPIs.
By now, you might be thinking: What if I’m new to measurement and don’t have any benchmarking data?
Don’t worry. By collecting the same metrics for the same contexts each time you make a new round in the measurement cycle, you will have created your own set of benchmarking data in no time.
Soon, you will know which times are best to share content, which target groups respond best to which types of content, or which audiences are not yet engaged. You can then use this data to set new goals — and adjust your benchmarks as your data set grows.
Ready to take action? Let’s look at the metrics we can use for operational and strategic measurement.
4. Defining KPIs for operative & strategic measurement
Measurement is where communication becomes more than intuition. It’s how you prove impact, refine your approach, and secure the resources you need. By the end of this section, you’ll know how to demonstrate whether your internal communications are actually driving business outcomes.
We’ll start with operative measurement — the day-to-day metrics that show whether people are using and valuing your channels and content. Then, we’ll move to strategic measurement, where you connect communication to organizational priorities and long-term goals.
Operative measurement
Are our channels and content performing as intended? Let’s start with operative measurement. Here are the main questions we want to answer now:
Are our channels performing as intended?
Is our content performing as intended?
So, how do we do that? Let’s look at some of the common goals and data points available to us for our channels and content. We can start by looking at our channel metrics.
Channel metrics
The number-one goal for any channel is to establish reach. We can measure reach through the registration rate: How many employees have signed up to receive content over this channel?
The next goal is for our employees to actually use the channel. Here, we can look at the activity rates on a weekly or monthly basis.
Our next goal is for employees to interact with the channel. Here we can measure likes, reactions, comments, event registration, survey participation, and user-generated content.
Finally, our goal is employee satisfaction with the channel. This is often assessed with the help of an Employee Net Promoter Score, or eNPS. This data is collected with the help of an eNPS survey, asking employees and content contributors whether or not they would recommend the channel. You can collect eNPS quarterly or even annually.
In the Staffbase platform, eNPS can be collected through surveys on a 10-point scale, ranging from “not at all likely” to “extremely likely.” Often, anonymous comments are encouraged in order to generate sincere and accurate responses.
Now let’s look at content metrics.
Content metrics
Examining our content metrics will allow us to measure if the content we share over our channels is performing as intended. To gain accurate insights, it’s best to focus on individual pieces of content, not full campaigns.
The first goal when it comes to content is getting our employees‘ attention. We can measure this through potential reach. That is the total number of employees we can access through the channel.
Next, our goal is to generate a high level of interest in the content we’ve shared. We can see interest in statistics like the actual opening rate, or the number of visits, views, and visitors of our content. We then want our employees to engage with our content.
We can measure this with the help of likes, reactions, comments, and sentiment analysis. Another good indicator of engagement is the number of returning users. You can calculate this by dividing the number of visits to a specific piece of content by the number of unique visitors. A result of 2.3 to 3 is a good indicator that your content is resonating with your audience. The higher this number, the more worthwhile it will be to look into the reasons why it’s performing exceptionally well.
And our final goal can be for employees to take action. We can measure through shares, @ mentions, event registration, survey participation, and subscriptions.
Regarding both channel and content metrics, many modern digital communication solutions can easily access such data through the platform dashboard. However, when it comes to measuring returning users, subscriptions, or survey responses, you might want to collect the data at different places.
Now let’s take a look at strategic measurement.
Campaign/topic metrics
Strategic measurement is about measuring whether our work on key strategic campaigns is yielding the intended results. Usually, comms teams have about three to four big campaigns they run annually. By measuring strategically, we can track how these campaign topics develop over the course of the year.
You can now measure visibility and resonance with the help of your operative metrics from the previous section. To measure understanding and advocacy, you will want to collect data from different places, such as surveys, sentiment analysis, shares, focus group interviews, etc.
As with channel and content metrics, you want to set clear goals and KPIs for each campaign. These could be:
Creating visibility for your topic by reaching your employees
Getting your workforce to resonate with your topic, so they engage with it on an individual level
Having your workforce gain a common understanding of the topic by connecting them with the topic’s greater context
Creating advocacy for your topic so that employees become internal ambassadors.
Before we wrap things up — don’t forget, you’ve got to have goals!
5. Setting clear strategic comms goals
There’s one more important step you need to take on the path toward getting started with internal comms measurement. You need to properly match your goals and objectives to your key performance indicators if you really want to measure them successfully.
Let’s examine an example to illustrate the point about setting clear strategic internal comms goals. Say your objective is to:
Establish focused communication that clearly orients all employees regarding the four strategic focus topics.
Your key results could be that:
The four focus topics (in other words, your four campaigns) generate double the attention of every other topic combined
The four campaigns are above the benchmark for interest and engagement in their respective channel and target groups
90% of the employees know the focus topics at the end of the year and can align them with corporate strategy.
Final thoughts on setting & measuring KPIs
We hope you now feel more confident about getting started with setting and measuring your internal communication metrics. Once you have the numbers to back up your work, it will make your life so much easier. You’ll be able to prove the value of your efforts, understand what works and what doesn’t, and use your findings to justify increased budget in the most effective comms areas.
Best of all, you’ll be able to increase engagement and dialogue with key messages through highly relevant, targeted comms, sent via the most effective channels.
Remember: Informing is easy — but proving ROI is what creates impact.
What if you could measure employee engagement with the same tool used to create it?
