Chris Brennan (00:03)
Welcome to Modern Coms, the podcast series designed to help communication leaders navigate today's hyper speed demands and move forward with clarity, confidence, and impact.

This podcast is brought to you by Co-fenster, the creators of AI video agents built specifically for communication professionals.

Our agents empower your teams to deliver high impact on brand video without needing any prior video experience.

In today's episode, we're going to be talking about enterprise internal comms trends, what leading teams are doing in 2026.

And joining me for this conversation is Dana Feldhacker, Senior Enterprise Customer Success Manager at Interact. Dana, welcome to the show.

Dana Feldhacker (00:47)
Thanks for having me, excited to be here.

Chris Brennan (00:49)
my pleasure. This is going to be really exciting. I love this topic so much. But before we get started,

I would love to know a little bit about your background and your role at Interact.

Dana Feldhacker (00:59)
Yeah, absolutely. So I am the Senior Manager for Customer Success for our enterprise accounts here at Interact. I spend my days partnering with enterprise organizations to help them modernize how they communicate internally. Really what I love most about this role is I sort of have a front row seat to how the employee experience is evolving and how communications is becoming the true driver of culture and performance in these huge organizations.

Chris Brennan (01:28)
Fantastic. And because of that front row seat you have, what are some of the kind of modern internal comms challenges that you're hearing about so often or recurringly from the teams you actually support?

Dana Feldhacker (01:42)
There's lots of different challenges and it really is specific to all of the different industries. So if you're working at a company that has a lot of frontline workers, how are we reaching those frontline workers? How are we giving them opportunities to look up content that they need on the fly, to make the content digestible for them to actually, you know, understand it on the fly. And on the flip side of that, people who need to understand really complex content.

⁓ or rollouts of new processes and procedures, how is that being communicated and how do we make sure everyone in the organization gets the same communication when we need them to? And how do we make sure we personalize communication for all different people in the organization? So I definitely don't envy internal comms folks. They have a lot of challenges and it's just essentially this change management constant communication and constantly do people know

what they need to know, are we pushing out what's most important for them? I would say that's the biggest challenge for sure.

Chris Brennan (02:49)
Wow, great. And are you seeing some specific shifts happening because of these challenges right now? And if so, what are the biggest shifts that you might be ⁓ witnessing from your vantage point?

Dana Feldhacker (02:59)
Yeah,

definitely. I would say that employees expect communication to feel really personalized for them and more, I would say, like consumer grade, right? People are ⁓ used to YouTube videos now, Instagram reels, TikToks, things like that, short form, authentic human content. And they're increasingly becoming disengaged with more long form emails, static updates, which is really like

the bread and butter of professionally how we've been communicating. So that's definitely a shift that comms teams are up against today. And there's also this decentralization of communication that's happening. Communication can't just really come from one team anymore. People want to hear from leaders. They want to hear from their frontline managers and even employees themselves can be the ones sharing and adding content.

in a lot of ways. So platforms like Interact make that possible. We have structure to do that. We have governance and personalization at scale that sort of allows companies to lean into that shift that they're feeling. And then of course there's a lot of shifts happening with AI. AI everywhere, AI in everything and I'll just leave.

AI at that for now, because that could be a whole other podcast.

Chris Brennan (04:30)
Yeah,

absolutely. And that's actually something that we're seeing from our side too. It's not just when we connect with...

comms leaders, but also with other teammates to kind of learn about their experience and what we've been hearing which I think something that you actually touched on just now is the the interest in trying to match some of their offline consumption of content and information with how they're absorbing information in the workplace of the now where they go I just want to consume it differently like I can I can retain information from YouTube from all these other sources, but then you're just giving me this gigantic

deck of information and I'm going to shortcut it by going into a chat and summarizing what that whole thing says, which isn't probably what the comms leaders even wanted to do because they curated it in a very specific way and then it was just absorbed into a different platform to then be summarized anyway. So it really resonates with me what you're saying about how they're wanting to adopt that those kind of modern out of office channels as well.

Dana Feldhacker (05:36)
Right. Yeah. You have to speak to everyone and everyone, not everyone sits at a desk and has a big two screen setup like I have here and has time to read a long form article every day. And a lot of people do and that's great to have that, but communications teams just, they need to be more flexible because they can be more flexible.

Chris Brennan (05:56)
And are you seeing some specific trends and new behaviors from some of the more forward thinking or mature comms teams and how they're tackling these kind of challenges or how they're adopting new methods to ⁓ create these connection points?

Dana Feldhacker (06:12)
Yeah, absolutely. would say really forward-thinking ⁓ comms teams are really treating communications more like a strategic function and not like just an output function. They're not looking at this communication and saying, this is the message and so here's the message written out for you here in an email. That's really just sort of like an output. But they need to be thinking more strategically about how they're disseminating that.

communication. They're really intentional about who needs what and when, you know, not all communication is meant for everyone. So personalizing that for them ⁓ and then using platforms to segment by audience, automate delivery, measure engagement also on how things are being engaged and how things are being consumed. Like did this actually hit with my target audience or not? ⁓ Maybe this kind of communication.

does do really well in a long form way ⁓ versus a short form way and just going back and iterating on that. They know their jobs is really at end of the day to enhance employee experience and engagement. So they understand that the business outcomes directly relate to how they are communicating. And like I said, it's really more of a strategic play for them of how can I communicate this in the best way for my audience?

Chris Brennan (07:41)
Very good. And are you seeing a kind of a difference between how the more high performing comms teams are doing versus the ones who are probably still catching up, let's say.

Dana Feldhacker (07:51)
Yeah, I would say they're more of the thought leaders, right? They're those early adopters. They're the ones going in there and saying, well, we have never really done video before. And we don't have a lot of video, maybe currently in our communication strategy or in our intranet, but we know the trends and we know what people want. And so we're going to try that. It's those early adopters that

really become the high performers because they figure out what works and they iterate constantly. They test, they learn, they refine. It's not just like a set it and forget it for them.

Chris Brennan (08:33)
Right, well that makes perfect sense. This is an era where all these new challenges come and so the ones who embrace experimentation will probably be the ones to find the new unique routes to success faster while the other ones can just watch. I guess is how you highlight with thought leaders. like, let's watch the high performers, see if they've figured it out and then we can follow and adopt.

Dana Feldhacker (08:49)
Yeah.

Chris Brennan (08:56)
Great. And we were touching on AI. We can't avoid that, of course. But like, just in general, yeah, yeah. What role do you think technology and AI is playing right now to help these teams scale their efforts and reach even diverse employee groups more effectively?

Dana Feldhacker (09:01)
More.

Yeah, absolutely. mean, obviously technology is everything and what we all do nowadays. ⁓ Large organizations simply can't reach the diverse and global and also multi-generational workforces without it. ⁓ Tech helps specifically, you know, from my perspective with targeting when we're communicating, with governance on communication, with channel orchestration, and also creation.

I mean, when you look at something like video creation and using AI to help with that and the technology, not necessarily old school. We're here with a video camera and we're creating a video that way. There's lots of other ways to do it now. That's, you know, a great one. It's a bread and butter, but there's lots of other technology you could use to scale that and make it easier. So I would say tech offers com teams reach that they've never had before getting content in front of right people.

Relevance also, personalizing it by role and by region and interest and then also repeatability. So automating some of it, becoming more efficient with something like video creation or content creation in an intranet. So ⁓ yeah, I would say technology is overarching what we do every day leads back.

Chris Brennan (10:35)
And

then I can imagine when they're embracing these kind of new technologies and even experiment in that there's going to be some common pitfalls that they may fall into. It might just be early adoption issues. Are you seeing some of that as well when there's these tech rollouts in internal comms platforms or even in the channels themselves?

Dana Feldhacker (10:54)
Yeah,

for sure. ⁓ I would say major pitfall or challenge is sort of underestimating change management and what it takes to manage that, manage a new huge rollout of something like a new piece of tech. It really fails when it's not adopted correctly. And almost every company that I've worked with over my career in success, which at this point has been many,

doesn't really have change management fully figured out. Sorry to anyone listening who is a customer or a former. No one has the silver bullet. No one knows exactly how to communicate perfectly so everyone walks away with the message. So change management is a major pitfall and just, it's the nature of the beast. But companies that have a centralized location, one system where everyone knows

this is the place to go for information when I need it, do a lot better in this category. So ⁓ that's a good thing. And I would say another pitfall is just overloading employees with too much information too fast. So a strategic rollout is important. Back to that viewing communication strategically. Rolling out something new is usually just another thing on a team's plate.

It's not their whole meal. It's just this extra thing that they now need to figure out. So you need to roll it out in more bite-sized pieces for people to digest rather than shoving everything in front of them all at once and hoping that they have the time and energy and capacity to retain it.

Chris Brennan (12:41)
That makes perfect sense because there's this, where AI gives a lot of benefits, I think that sometimes we can produce an overabundance.

of competent, confident looking content and expect people to like find the actual meaning within it. Because when we review it, like I'll generate it and go, look, it says pretty much everything I meant it to say, but it just overdoes it and people will just bring that in. So that comes into the content as well. And then the channels too. So like there's, we're seeing is there's a definite remixing and rethinking of the channel mix. ⁓ But from your vantage point, like how are you

Dana Feldhacker (12:54)
Yeah.

Long.

Chris Brennan (13:21)
see these enterprise comms teams rethinking their mix of channels when it comes to 2026 in particular.

Dana Feldhacker (13:29)
Yeah, for sure. ⁓ Back to that AI comment. I can't tell you the amount of times I've asked AI to do something for me. And then my follow-up question is, again, but like two sentences. know, like just give me the quick hit. What is it actually? Give me the summary. ⁓ So yeah.

Chris Brennan (13:41)
Yeah.

Great

instinct, and that's exactly the kind of questions that you should be asking. like, yeah, yeah, yeah, I know, I know, I know.

Dana Feldhacker (13:53)
Yeah, right, right, yeah, we get it. I know, I'm really

good at asking you to do the work. ⁓ Exactly. Okay, back to channel mix. I would say comms teams in this year, trends for 2026 is thinking less in terms of email versus intranet, right? ⁓ And those things really go hand in hand and more in terms of experience journeys. Where is the content gonna land?

Chris Brennan (13:58)
you

Dana Feldhacker (14:23)
How is it going to be consumed? How do we reinforce it across multiple touch points? Which channels for which people? And also video is becoming a super hot topic, a super hot channel. Again, if you're not already in video, the question is, why are you not? Where is the video and when is it going to come? It's no longer like, is that something we're going to do? It's when are we going to do that? So that's definitely a channel that is

If you're not really there yet, you're a little bit behind as a communicator and it's time to sort of start figuring that out. Are you gonna embed it in your intranet, surface it in your feeds, share it in chats, share quick leadership updates with video versus that one long leadership update that comes once a month or once every three months. So it's figuring out what channels are lacking and making sure we're hitting all of them for everyone.

Chris Brennan (15:20)
I think when you touch on video, ⁓ we can kind go back to even the experimental side of things for. ⁓

comms leaders in 2026 because historically they just haven't really had the capacity or the experience to create video. as cofenster have AI video agents, it's been really rewarding being able to show them like what they can actually do themselves within their department without the prior video experience and just even learning from them when they start coming to us saying, this is what I've done. I've actually created a video summarizing where to find things within the internet.

I'm like, wow, I didn't even think of that. You could use video to explain where things are located. Because as you say, the channel mix, a lot of times people just don't know that there's a area or a space already created to get this information. You could actually experiment or you can generate a video that explains it or do a video that can be edited for you where it's more authentic and you could actually just describe what the new functionality is for your new channels for the quarter or for the year.

going into it.

Dana Feldhacker (16:28)
Yeah, and creating video for the first time is sort of like when everyone started using AI for the first time and they didn't really know where to start. They were starting very simply with very simple questions and then realizing how much they could do and how much AI could do for them. It's similar with video. If you haven't created a lot of video before, it's like first you're just thinking of the very low hanging fruit, you know, examples. And then once you start creating, you start thinking about all of the different

opportunities that you have to add video and all of the things that you would have never thought of before, like using it to show people how to find other content, not just using it for content period, right?

Chris Brennan (17:11)
Yeah, and are you seeing some new creative approaches when it comes to video, like internal podcasts, like interactive content, like short form video? Are you seeing that from your side of the fence basically?

Dana Feldhacker (17:24)
Yes, definitely. ⁓ I would say definitely short form, bite-sized videos are the most consumable, the most watched, but also short form videos from people you might have not heard from before in the organization. So utilizing tools to get executives in some of these short form videos is really impactful.

⁓ I think in really large organizations, which are most of the organizations that I work with, I would say most of the employees don't maybe feel a connection to their C-suite or don't know where their C-suite is coming from and some of the decisions that they make. So to be able to, like I said earlier, of democratize that a little bit and give the executive the ability to deliver a short form message. They don't have to wait until, you know,

this all hands meeting that happens two months from now and this decision is on the back of everyone's mind. Maybe hear from them today on why this is being rolled out this way today opens up that sort of two way communication that's important for employees to feel really connected to the job.

Chris Brennan (18:38)
Yeah, true. And then what we can also see too is in those all hands, the leader will then ask, anybody have any questions? Which is a very difficult space for people to ask questions. even from, yeah, even when I'm doing a webinar, you have to really encourage people to ask a question. ⁓

Dana Feldhacker (18:51)
for sure. If you're brave enough.

Chris Brennan (19:01)
because a lot of times people don't want to be the first one. They don't want to be kind of singled out. But then from the leader's perspective, oh, I must have gotten my point across perfectly because there's no questions. So that tells me they've understood when really there's probably loads of questions, but in that space, they didn't feel comfortable to ask. Whereas those kind of videos can help answer questions in shorter bursts that kind of give people a bit more insight, which I think is really exciting.

Dana Feldhacker (19:29)
Right. And then if that video lives in a specific page, you know, in your intranet and then there's commenting in there and then people could ask questions and there could be people moderating those questions and answering. It's just, yeah, it's definitely a safer format for delivery and for clarification for some people.

Chris Brennan (19:49)
Yeah. And even in advance, you can do the question gathering and that can turn into its own video then is like, this is my response to the questions, the anonymous questions that we have received, you know, which is great because nobody has to really put their name behind it. Again, it's nice in a space if you can be transparent, but understanding the different personalities in any given team, you also want to give shy, introverted or kind of anxiety prone people a chance to ask questions in a safe

Dana Feldhacker (19:53)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Chris Brennan (20:20)
comfortable manner so they can feel like they're included as well. And then we can flip over to metrics as well. So what are the kind of metrics that you're seeing from the successful enterprise customers, the kind of metrics that they're tracking right now?

Dana Feldhacker (20:23)
Yeah, totally.

Right. That is a loaded question, I would say. Seems like a simple question, but every customer has such different business outcomes when it comes to their internet and their communication. So it's really a loaded question, but I'll highlight a few, some of like, I would say the most recurring that people really care about. ⁓ First and foremost, which again is sort of a low hanging fruit, right? It's content completion.

Chris Brennan (20:41)
Ha

Dana Feldhacker (21:07)
It's views, searches, general information consumption, information gathering for people who are in their intranet. ⁓ It's gonna be important to teams, right? It's just like, is the content landing, period? And there's lots of different metrics that you can look at to answer that question. Next would be engagement by persona or region. Not only engagement, but...

specific engagement, right? Like did this content land for this group of people that it needed to land for versus like company as a whole. Then also sentiment and feedback. ⁓ Using our Pulse tool to quite literally like take the pulse on how people are feeling is something that people look at, right? Like we communicated this, how do people feel about us communicating that?

Chris Brennan (21:43)
Okay.

Right.

Dana Feldhacker (22:06)
Major change happened, like what do they think? ⁓ And then measuring sentiment based on the communication that has happened. And then there's also just behavioral outcomes. And that's very specific for every customer. It goes back to that change management. They've communicated this and then this major behavioral or procedural shift should have happened. That's a very specific metric or specific KPI for that specific customer.

Chris Brennan (22:35)
Right.

Dana Feldhacker (22:35)
⁓

And then another overall that kind of hits everyone is just general employee retention. It goes back to that employee experience that communications kind of like wears on their shoulders of if employees are connected with the work, they know what they're doing, they know how to get answers, they can hear from executives, they feel they have an open two-way communication.

through the tools that they use, it helps with that overall employee retention. And we do see an increase in retention when people are implementing something like Interact and a really strong ⁓ communication strategy through Interact versus if they don't have it at all.

Chris Brennan (23:17)
Wow, that loaded question, but yeah, you went into lots of different.

Dana Feldhacker (23:21)
I've loaded answer

to, sorry.

Chris Brennan (23:22)
Yeah, no,

it's fantastic. It kind of reminds me as well of the importance of not just having the metrics but understanding the ones you should track. Like an old marketing phrase is, the only thing worse than no data is bad data. So you don't want to be looking at the wrong metrics or getting the wrong impression of something and then making key decisions based on that. So it can be difficult to evaluate, but it's critical that you understand.

Dana Feldhacker (23:25)
you

Mm-hmm.

care.

Chris Brennan (23:52)
how to and what those metrics should be defined as, or even more, that everybody's on the same page as to what the definition of this is. Because one of the unique experiences I have with this series is that pretty much most guests I have on the podcast go like, what's your definition of engagement? They're like, I have a definition, you have a definition. So the success rate of that.

Dana Feldhacker (24:02)
percent.

Chris Brennan (24:18)
is clearly defined by how we define engagement, which is quite unique.

Dana Feldhacker (24:21)
Yeah.

We can look at one metric with one company, something like, okay, I see that someone is taking one minute to search and find an answer in the platform. To one customer, that might be amazing. People are going and they're searching and they're finding an answer in one minute. To someone else, might be, why is it taking a whole minute to find this answer? So it's very much company specific and outcome specific.

Chris Brennan (24:43)
Right.

Dana Feldhacker (24:51)
You want people to get in there and get an answer as soon as possible. You want people to come in and spend time looking at that, looking at other things. It's just, you know, it's challenge for us as a team, as a success team to uncover that for everyone and keep track and help them to achieve the outcomes that they want, even if it's a total opposite to the outcome of the next call you have in the day. So.

Chris Brennan (25:06)
Right.

That's so fascinating. And I bet based on that kind of metrics and the impact of those results, it can actually also impact how internal comms is being evaluated. So with that in mind, are you seeing ⁓ any kind of mindset shift happening around how internal comms impact is actually being evaluated for like last year, this year as well?

Dana Feldhacker (25:43)
Yeah, for sure. ⁓ Going back to that ⁓ metric on behavioral outcomes, it's not so much just impact is did people see it? Did we get eyes on this? But it's did people understand it? Did people do something because of it? ⁓ And this is also where video shines, right? It drives clarity and cuts through a lot of the cognitive load that comes with some sort of

behavioral shift that needs to happen and makes things a lot more digestible and easier to understand for a lot of learners. Watching a video versus reading something. So yeah, I would say the impact goes from did people to see it to did people understand it and did they do X, Y, Z because of it.

Chris Brennan (26:31)
Yeah, makes perfect sense. And it also kind of brings back into how they're starting to use AI. Because not everybody has fully adopted it yet. But from your side of the fence with enterprise customers, how do you see them starting to use AI in their internal comms workflows?

Dana Feldhacker (26:51)
Yeah, definitely becoming, I would say, the silent co-author of a lot of things in intranets. Drafting first versions of content, ⁓ repurposing content, repurposing video content as you guys do really well, creating multi-language variants instantly. We're using AI for that, of course. ⁓ Scaling personalization.

We also have a really amazing tool called Signal Insights that can give you insights into what people are doing in your internet without going and entering in every page, reading every comment. That would take a whole team of people weeks and they'd always fall behind if they really wanted to understand the insights of your internet because if you have a hundred thousand employees posting

Comments and in your social feed and asking questions all over the internet You know, it's impossible to look at but we have a signal insight agent that can do that for you now You know like bubble to the top everyone who's asking a legitimate question So we can answer it bubble to the top all of the positive feedback and then also all the negative feedback So we can gather it and do something about it. So there's AI coming in in all of these different ways beyond just

content creation, which is how most people are using it. It's just changing the mindset around AI doing the hard work and heavy lifting for you in all different facets of your role.

Chris Brennan (28:28)
Absolutely. Yeah, like from what we're seeing, because we do the AI video side of things, and there's a few different versions of it. So you can convert a static document into a dynamic video. It can help somebody request authentic video, or it can also cut a clip into like more of a snackable moment.

It's been really fascinating seeing even not just the creation with AI, but the curation of it too, and even translating text into different languages for different regions so you can ensure that the message stays dynamic even through the different ⁓ departments and different languages that you're trying to get your word across. But from your side, are there any other use cases that you see AI having real staying power with?

Dana Feldhacker (29:19)
Yeah, I would say for sure the video piece of AI. And having had, you know, more than 10 years in video and video creation, I can speak from experience. Your example of just taking a piece of content, static content, and AI creating a video, and then AI creating, let's say, 10 or 15 different language versions. For someone who hasn't really worked in video before, I don't think they understand the time, the energy.

the money that would actually go into something like that, just creating one piece of content. First of all, is such a lift for you need 10 people. You need all of the budgets of the 10 people. You need all of the time of the 10 different people. You need the, the Smee. need the people, the person who's going to actually create the video. Then you need 15 different, you know, language localizers who will make sure that it's, you know, hitting all of the language. So it's

Incredible what that can do so much time saved so much money saved so for sure I see staying power there Doesn't really make sense to go back to the old way on that one ⁓ Maybe for some content, but not all definitely not all ⁓ also

Chris Brennan (30:35)
And I can even say it from

my vantage point of an editor, as a video editor, and when I can see with AI video, like our AI agents, being able to retain the branding instantly in video, it's like, that would take me so long to individually organize and constantly add and make sure that it sits properly because one of the things we have seen, like in general as society, is people expect a higher quality video no matter what.

Dana Feldhacker (30:40)
Yeah.

Chris Brennan (31:05)
social outside of work has trained us to expect a professional level and watching what AI can do, I'm like, guys, as an editor, it's actually amazing that you have this ability because that would take me half a day, myself, as a fully trained professional editor, and you can just do that instantly? It's like, my gosh. And what I love is they're embracing it and they're, as I said, finding those new unique use cases themselves, showing it to us, and we're going, we didn't even think of

Dana Feldhacker (31:21)
Yeah. At least. Yeah.

Chris Brennan (31:35)
Like that's new. Can we show other customers what you've done here? Like that's pretty incredible.

Dana Feldhacker (31:36)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah. And not only can you do it instantly, but with like no prior knowledge or experience. Like, let's not ignore the fact that you're an editor and you've spent years becoming an editor and someone with no experience whatsoever can go and do that now. That's pretty incredible. ⁓ And it's also, you know, not, I was going to say just, you know, and I think sometimes people ⁓ maybe don't like that idea, but it's not about

Chris Brennan (31:54)
Yeah.

And look at that.

Dana Feldhacker (32:10)
taking the job away from an editor, your skills are necessary, right? But it's making you so much more efficient in your work.

Chris Brennan (32:18)
That's true.

However, like a lot of my experience, especially when it came to comms teams is they're coming to my department in marketing or content, and then they have to work around my schedule and my backlog. So I'm like, yeah, I would love to. It's just, I also have like.

Dana Feldhacker (32:28)
Mm-hmm.

Chris Brennan (32:32)
a lot of these other requirements. from my side, I think it's incredible watching them get those tools themselves. It makes perfect sense. Like I still have a other type of output whenever I do edit a video, but getting to see them just even take the more text to video solutions where it turns it into video images with text over it and music. It's like.

That's fantastic, I don't even want to edit that. That's great that you can do that. So go shine, just do that. You've got the blessing of an editor right here to tell you that you should be going off and finding as many unique use cases to embrace the idea of getting your point across ⁓ with video itself.

Dana Feldhacker (33:06)
Mm.

Chris Brennan (33:20)
And then if you had one piece of advice to an internal comms team inside a large complex organization in 2026, what would that be?

Dana Feldhacker (33:30)
Great question. ⁓ Another loaded question. I don't know if a comms team maybe in a large huge organization could take this advice, but I would make the advice to be bold in their communication. I think it speaks to the time and the space we're living in. Nothing really shocks us anymore, right? And it's hard to grasp your audience's attention more than ever.

And I think written content alone can't really meet the pace and the complexity and the human sort of need of today's workforce, especially as the workforce gets younger and younger every year. ⁓ One way we can do that is using video. It builds trust and it accelerates the understanding. It brings the leaders closer to the employees. So just being a little bit bolder and thinking outside of the box in the way you're communicating, I think.

will really accelerate their whole strategy in 2026.

Chris Brennan (34:34)
I love that advice because I think that they need it right now because of all the changes that are happening. There might be a ⁓ worry of going bold and trying to stick with what is familiar, but this is not the time for that. This is the time to like use new exciting opportunities to show even more of the value that you as a professional and your team as a department can actually deliver. So that's wonderful advice.

Dana Feldhacker (34:49)
Yeah.

Thanks.

Chris Brennan (35:04)
And then finally, ⁓ what's

one trend or shift in comms that you're personally excited about right now?

Dana Feldhacker (35:12)
⁓ I mentioned it earlier, I'm gonna mention it again. It's the democronization of content creation and putting content creation in the hands of other people other than maybe just like the designated content creators, communicators, subject matter experts of the team and being able to allow someone who is an expert

in their field to go and create content in an intranet. Give them author rights to go and do that. Give someone who is not a video creator the ability to go and create a video because you have the tools that can support that. It's just getting different perspectives and different voices in the communication space of your company and not just coming from the same few people everywhere.

Chris Brennan (36:08)
I couldn't agree with you more. That's fantastic. All right, now we're gonna move on to a game that we like to play at the end of our ⁓ episodes, which is called Comm's Roleplay Q &A. So this is gonna be me playing the skeptical CEO who doesn't see the value in comms. You're a comms leader justifying your role, your goals, and your budget.

Dana Feldhacker (36:16)
Okay.

Okay.

no. Okay.

Chris Brennan (36:33)
Okay, so I'll ask the hard-nosed questions and I'd love to hear what your response to these would be. All right, are you ready? So question number one, what's the plan to make sure employees actually engage and understand the comms this quarter and not just put it on an intranet and hope that they read it?

Dana Feldhacker (36:34)
Okay.

Great question. As a comms team, we have shifted away from this sort of publish and pray that it works mentality to a more personalized, multi-format approach that we know will work. So using interact, we could segment messages to employees so they only receive what they need to see, what's relevant to them. It will take away all of the noise.

⁓ that they might get elsewhere. And by layering in short form videos throughout our communication, we make content more engaging and easier to understand. So I would say engagement is in really luck anymore. It's design and it comes with a strategic mindset that our communication team has.

Chris Brennan (37:47)
wow, I love that answer. I hope people are taking notes, because that is an impactful way to answer that question.

Dana Feldhacker (37:52)
Did I get past this?

The CEO is not a skeptic anymore or he still has questions for me.

Chris Brennan (37:57)
Yeah, no, that's a good

one. That's a good one. Okay, next question. You're proposing more comms video in 2026, but how will that actually help the company?

Dana Feldhacker (38:08)
Great question. There are multiple studies that show video improves comprehension, sometimes by up to 95%. ⁓ Not only does it build comprehension, but it also builds trust in leaders like yourself, accelerates change adoption, it meets employees where they are. ⁓ So with video tools, we can also now do that at scale. I'm not.

going to propose video and also ask for a million dollar budget for all of that video. We don't really need to do that anymore, thankfully, like we did have to do 10 years ago. ⁓ With utilizing video tools, we can distribute, create, measure impact really quickly, really efficiently, and it's really about creating more effective content.

Chris Brennan (39:03)
I'm sold. We're bringing video in for this year. Wonderful. Okay, next question. Are the younger staff actually listening? How do you, in comms, propose we actually get through to them?

Dana Feldhacker (39:05)
Okay.

Hmm.

⁓ start a TikTok? No, I'm just kidding. ⁓ But kind of. ⁓ Maybe let's think about this. Thinking about our workforce, we're a lot of millennials and a lot more Gen Zs are coming in and they're the TikTok generation. They probably won't like that I called them that, but ⁓ they prefer short, authentic video and they prefer...

communication that's direct and to the point. And also empathetic, that's a really sort of empathetic ⁓ generation. And so having the, you know, messages come from the people that they should come from, like someone like the CEO like yourself really matters to them. So I would say that we will utilize formats that they already gravitate towards outside of work, so that the engagement will just naturally follow inside of work.

⁓ And so it's not really like fighting back to what we know they don't really engage with. It's leaning into what they engage with and trying to weave that into our strategy.

Chris Brennan (40:27)
It also makes perfect sense. Don't fight them. Just try to invite them. guess you could say. Great. And final question.

Why should we invest in comms when sales, product, and marketing can show ROI faster?

Dana Feldhacker (40:42)
Great question. ⁓ The soft ROI question is never an easy one to answer, but I would say like every major business initiative that a CEO would have to think about, ⁓ productivity, retention, customer experience, employee experience, ⁓ transformation, it all depends on your employees.

understanding goals, aligning to those goals, and actioning on key messages and actioning on things that you need them to action on. So if they don't know what those goals are, they can't align to those goals and they can't action on to them. So I would say comms is the multiplier sort of within your team to ensure that every department works together. All of those departments that have the

easier ROI to measure is aligning to the same goals and actually meets their goals. But if they don't understand that, they don't understand a new rollout, they don't understand what their goals are, they don't know where to go for that information, they can actually meet those goals and hit those metrics that we know you like to see.

Chris Brennan (41:59)
Another great answer. And that's it. That's the game. That was fantastic. Great job. No, you won. Yeah. No, it's really fun. And what I love about that is these are some of the fears and anxieties that even experienced comms leaders have. So just having kind of another.

Dana Feldhacker (42:03)
That's the game. Did I win? ⁓

Yeah.

Chris Brennan (42:19)
perspective on how to answer those questions can be really good, or even pushing back on the premise of a question too, because you don't actually always have to have the answer to that question. So it's just really nice getting a variety of different perspectives on these very difficult, challenging, and sometimes trap door pitfall questions that can arise. So great job.

Dana Feldhacker (42:43)
Yeah.

Thanks. Yeah. And you know what? We hear that a lot. We work with comm teams. So we know sometimes it's difficult for them to show all of the work that they're doing. And we know how hard they're working. We're partnering with them on all that work. So it's our work too. And it's sometimes really difficult to show the ROI or the KPI or the metric that aligns with all of the hard work. You know, it's that soft ROI. It's helping everything. But how can we really measure it?

You know, big question that we come across almost daily here.

Chris Brennan (43:19)
All right, and we've reached the end of our episode. Dana, thank you so much for taking the time to join us today.

Dana Feldhacker (43:25)
Thank you for having me. This was super fun. Yeah, thanks so much.

Chris Brennan (43:31)
And finally, before we leave, could you let our audience know a little bit more about Interact?

Dana Feldhacker (43:35)
if you are someone who maybe hasn't modernized your comms yet and you're looking to, I would direct you to check out Interact Software. We can help you do that. We partner with Cofenster and we can essentially help you overhaul and modernize your entire communication strategy through our intranets.

Chris Brennan (43:56)
and for the listeners, we hope you enjoyed it. Let us know in the comments if there's any specific questions you might have relating to this topic or if you have any topic requests you'd like to hear in the future. Be sure to follow us on LinkedIn as well, at CoFenster, on YouTube, and we're on Spotify and Apple Podcast as well for Modern Coms itself.

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