What Channels are Actually For: a deep conversation about #internalcomms channels

10 April 2026

Mike Klein, based on a conversation with Jeff Corbin and Russell Evans during the PRSA Internal Communication Certificate course.

Most internal communicators spend more than half their time managing, maintaining, and delivering communication channels. Not crafting strategy. Not advising leaders. Channels.

I put that observation to a group of IC professionals recently, and nobody pushed back. The responses came in at 50%, 60%, 75%. One person said their team did the work for them – which is a kind of answer in itself.

So the question I wanted to explore with Jeff Corbin and Russell Evans – two people who between them have spent decades thinking about this from very different angles – wasn’t whether channels matter. Obviously they do. The question was whether the people running them are focused on the right thing.

“Is your focus,” I asked the group, “or more precisely, is your boss’s focus – on having you deliver great channels, or deliver great impact through your channels?”

The response was pretty clear. Impact. That’s what people said. Whether that matches what they’re actually measured on is a different conversation.

Channels versus platforms – a distinction worth making

Jeff Corbin has been in this space for over fifteen years. He founded theEMPLOYEEapp in the early 2010s, before eventually joining Staffbase, with whom he now works. His frame of reference is the technology side of the house, and his first intervention in our conversation was definitional.

The terms channels, platforms, and tools get used interchangeably. They shouldn’t be.

My working definitions: channels are communication initiatives – either ongoing (regular cadence, consistent format) or one-off (stand-alone, purpose-specific). Platforms are where channels are hosted and distributed. Tools help you build and maintain both.

Corbin’s point, which I think is right, is that most organizations are drowning in fragmentation. Content lives in SharePoint, in Workday, in ServiceNow, in email, in digital signage. Different parts of the business own different systems. Employees don’t know where to go. Communicators are logging into ten different content management systems to say the same thing in five different places.

“The challenge is not only for the professionals responsible for managing the different channels and platforms,” he said, “but also for the employee who doesn’t know where to go to get the information they need to do their jobs.”

The platform conversation becomes more interesting when you extend it offline. Most people instinctively think of platforms as digital. But a management conference is a platform. A town hall is a platform. The distinction matters because if you treat a management conference as a single channel, you plan one thing – probably a CEO address. If you treat it as a platform, you design a portfolio: a CEO message, functional updates, Q&A formats, breakout sessions, informal leader interactions. That’s a fundamentally different level of intentionality.

The discipline question

You can create an almost infinite number of channels. The real constraints aren’t technical – they’re human. Platform capacity, reach, integration issues, and above all, employee noise tolerance.

Research on digital friction makes the point well. Employees navigate a growing stack of tools every single day. The question is not just whether your message can be transmitted. It’s whether anyone will seek it out – or whether it disappears into the noise.

Which brings us to discipline. Choosing what information goes where, and to whom.

I’ve found a simple segmentation useful here – one that applies in virtually any organizational situation. It comes from Patton: people need to lead, follow, or get out of the way. In any significant communication situation, all three groups are present, and they need to receive information differently. That single principle, applied consistently, can drive real discipline into channel selection. It’s not sophisticated. But it works.

The cascading problem

Cascading is one of the most popular communication channels in large organizations. It’s also structurally compromised in ways that most organizations have been too polite to say out loud.

The theory is elegant: create a message at the top, and it flows downward through the hierarchy like water. The reality is that managers are under pressure from every direction. They’re being asked to deliver messages through a hierarchy that’s simultaneously being flattened. They add their own spin. They miss the nuance. They don’t deliver at all.

“Higher-ups are so busy, and a lot of them are forgetful about the minutiae,” one participant noted in the chat. That’s true, but it undersells the problem. The deeper issue is that managers have conflicting pressures, and yours is only one of them.

The feedback loop is equally unreliable. When the channels for employee reaction run through the same managers who delivered the original message, unfavorable responses get filtered before they reach leadership. You often don’t know the cascade failed until well after the damage is done.

Cascading has one genuine strength, which explains why it persists: it reminds people who’s boss. Deputizing a manager as an official voice of the organization reinforces authority. That’s legitimate and sometimes exactly what you need. But it’s a poor vehicle for substance. The smarter approach is to use the cascade for the authority signal, and other channels for the detail and the feedback.

The most underrated channel: informal networks

The most prevalent communication activity in any organization is word of mouth. It’s happening all day, continuously, with or without you. A network analysis firm in Copenhagen that does this work across organizations of up to several hundred thousand people found that 3% of people drive 90% of the conversations. The challenge is finding the right 3%.

Champions networks are common. They’re also weaker than they appear. The people nominated for these programs tend to be visible, cooperative, and willing to raise their hand – which makes them reliable delivery mechanisms, but not the same as genuinely influential. The people who are actually influential in organizations are often skeptics. They’re not volunteering for champion programs.

To find your real influencers, you need survey research. Ask employees who they go to for news and information. Who they go to for professional advice. Who they go to for moral support. Compile the data. The people who surface repeatedly are your informal network – and working with them to both distribute information and collect feedback is one of the highest-leverage things an IC function can do.

Russell Evans and the zero-based question

Russell Evans leads commercial banking communication at M&T Bank. He joined our conversation from the Transform Conference in Las Vegas, after a brief delay, dialing in from his phone. His observation that internal comms is one of the most rewarding and most challenging disciplines he’s worked in – and he’s worked across IC, external comms, marketing, and CSR – landed with some weight behind it.

His framing of channel design is one I’ve been thinking about since.

“The way that you do a great town hall is you pretend you don’t have a town hall.”

The exercise is simple: go to your senior leaders and run a thought experiment. There is no town hall. There is no existing format. Why would you build one? What would success look like? How would you know you’d achieved it?

That conversation – built from the ground up rather than the template down – surfaces something useful. The metrics that emerge from it aren’t yours. They belong to leadership. And that changes what gets measured afterward, and who owns the accountability.

I called it zero-based communication – the same principle that drives zero-based budgeting. What would you build if you were starting from nothing? Corbin agreed. “The strategy is going to guide the channels, whether it’s online or offline. Understanding what you’re trying to get across, and how people are going to be most impacted, is really what drives that.”

We are competing for attention

One of the sharper reframings Evans offered was about competition. Internal communicators tend to think of themselves as competing with HR emails, or with the noise from other internal functions. That’s the wrong frame.

“We are competing with everything else that’s trying to get your attention during the day — messages, notifications, and the constant stream of information people choose to engage with.”

Employees don’t read things because you pay them. You are competing for attention in the same environment as everything else competing for it. That means video matters. It means the platform experience matters. It means that a beautifully formatted email newsletter, however well-written, is insufficient on its own.

Evans pointed to a broader pattern in how internal social platforms function inside organizations. When employees have a space to talk to each other — and back to the organization — you get something most channels can’t provide: immediate, unfiltered signal.

“By communicating through a platform like that, you see very quickly how something is landing,” he said. “And just as importantly, whether the issue is the communication — or something deeper.”

That’s the canary in the coal mine function. These platforms surface friction early. Sometimes that friction tells you the message didn’t land. Just as often, it tells you the message isn’t the problem — the policy, process, or decision behind it is.

Without a channel where employees can react in real time and in public, those signals are easy to miss or slow to emerge. And by the time they do, the cost of fixing the problem is usually higher.

The AI question nobody’s asking correctly

I asked both of them about AI toward the end of our conversation – not as a content generation tool, but as an internal comms channel in its own right. What I got back was more interesting than I expected.

Corbin’s frame was structural. Large organizations are sitting on a content landscape that nobody has ever fully audited: SharePoint, ServiceNow, Workday, HRIS systems, knowledge bases maintained by IT, HR, operations, and finance, all largely disconnected. AI is going to surface the inconsistencies – the duplicated, outdated, contradictory information that’s been accumulating for years.

“AI is not just about creating content. It’s about exposing everything that’s out there within a company’s communications ecosystem. And we in internal comms really have an opportunity to do something about it now.”

He continued, “IT wants to own the AI agenda. But IT doesn’t understand content. Communicators do. The window to stake that claim is open. It won’t stay open.”

M&T is a Copilot shop and Evans’ take on the tool was direct.

“If you think of yourself as a writer, Copilot’s scary. If you think of yourself as a communications strategist, you should be incredibly excited. Because Copilot is a poor strategist.”

It doesn’t know your organization’s strategy unless you tell it. Its ideas are mediocre. But give it context, give it a direction, and it executes with speed and consistency that changes what’s possible. His team’s town hall survey response rate jumped from 3-10% to 30-40% after switching to a WebEx pop-up format that auto-deploys when the meeting closes. The tabulation and leader email now take Copilot a few minutes. It used to take him forty-five.

Corbin raised one important limit: “Copilot works within the Microsoft ecosystem. Everything outside that ecosystem – which in most large organizations is substantial – doesn’t exist for it. The content audit problem and the AI tool problem are related. You can’t get a complete strategic picture from a tool that can only see part of your content landscape.”

The three you’d build from scratch

I asked both of them a closing question. If you were standing up an internal comms function from nothing – three months, the tools most organizations already have – what would you actually build?

Corbin’s three: email (not going away, still the most direct channel for those employees with company email addresses), an intranet or SharePoint-based hub for employees with licenses, and a mobile employee app to reach the people who have neither (especially non-desk, frontline employees).

Evans started with what’s already there. Use the Microsoft suite. Build a town hall from the zero-based framework. Run leadership circles – small groups, diverse selection, real conversation rather than broadcast. And then, as a longer-term investment: build a platform where employees can talk to each other and to you.

“Longer term, the Microsoft suite is not sufficient. You need to build something where employees can talk to one another and help solve one another’s problems.”

There’s a pattern in all of this, sitting underneath the platform choices and the technology debates. Both Corbin and Evans kept coming back to the same thing: understand what the organization is actually trying to do.

Evans made it explicit. The first job of an internal communicator is understanding the business — the strategy, the competitive landscape, and the emerging opportunities and risks. Your ability to contribute is directly limited by how well you understand what the organization is trying to achieve.

Understand how the business makes money. Know what employees need to know to do their jobs — not what the communications team needs to produce to justify its existence.

Channels don’t create impact. Strategy executed well creates impact. Channels are the infrastructure that carries it.

The discipline is in knowing the difference.

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Russell Evans is Head of Commercial Banking Communications at M&T Bank.  Jeff Corbin is Principal Strategic Advisor – North America Lead with Staffbase. Mike Klein is Editor-In-Chief of Strategic and leads the current PRSA Internal Communication Certificate Program