Love them or hate them, internal newsletters are here to stay. Arguably they are more important than ever; with an increase in agile working, a key piece of the employee engagement puzzle for remote workers is to at least keep them informed. 

If you’re using PDFs or email templates to send out your internal newsletters, but your Microsoft licence gives you access to Microsoft Sway, here’s why I’m convinced you should make the switch.

What is Microsoft Sway? 

Sway is an app that allows you to create (and update) impactful online documents. Part of the appeal of Sway is that you can use it for a wide range of situations, from presentations, to How-To guides, and even for a CV. 

Why is Sway great for an internal newsletter?

You can lock it down so that it can’t be shared externally 

This is especially important when you’re sharing information with employees that is under NDA and shouldn’t be shared with external sources. By default the sharing options allow only others within your organisation to view your newsletter content. 

Also, if you have a group of people working on the newsletter together, you can generate a separate edit link for those people to all work on it simultaneously – no more passing different versions around via email.  

You can easily see how your newsletter will look on mobile

This may not seem the most important factor, but if you have employees working outside of the office environment (either on site or travelling between locations) they’ll likely use their phone to look at content on-the-go. PDFs are really hard to read on a phone, so many people would save themselves the trouble and skip reading a PDF newsletter altogether. 

Taking the needs of these employees into account and using Sway to ensure that your newsletter content is readable on a mobile device will help keep those people in the loop.

To see how your newsletter will view on a mobile, you can either send yourself a copy to view on mobile, or reduce the size of your browser window.  

It’s really easy to make the content visually impressive 

Sway is packed with lots of nice visual touches that add some extra punch to your content. Subtle touches like animated headings that swoosh into the screen, and the ability to pin pin images so that they scroll alongside long paragraphs of text are easy ways to make your newsletter more impactful. 

You can embed lots of other content 

If you’ve captured the attention of employees enough to read through your newsletter, the last thing you want to do is distract them away from it by linking off to other media. Sway allows you to embed things like video and feedback forms, keeping your internal audience engaged in your Sway (exactly where you want them). 

You can easily change the content structure around 

All of the content in your Sway is arranged into neat content blocks, which means that if you decide to change the order of your content, you can shift things around without impacting the layout of the rest of the document. This can be a real time saver compared to moving content around in other apps like Word. 

You can gain insights into how employees are interacting with your newsletter

Sway provides basic analytics including: 

• Total views
• Average time spent reading 
• Average % completion rate 
• Split between ‘glanced’, ‘quick read’, and ‘deep read’ 

I hope I’ve convinced you – really interested to hear your experiences if you try making the switch! 

How do I send out the Sway?

Once you’re happy with your Sway and you’re ready to distribute it – the ‘share’ button gives you a few different options:

You can either do a good old-fashioned copy and paste of the link, or you can choose ‘Get visual link’ and paste that into an Outlook email or even a Microsoft teams message. This is how the visual link displays:

Employees can click on the ‘Go to this Sway’ button to read it.

You can also use the embed code. If you use a SharePoint Communications site (maybe as an intranet) you can add the Sway to any page on the site via a web part.