StepStone saves $120K annually by leveraging an intranet solution

Saves $120K annually by leveraging Seismic as intranet

Candice Blackburn — Vice President

98%

platform adoption within first year

11

content channels updated regularly

$112,000

annual savings

Challenge

Critical company-wide communications were getting lost in email inboxes.

Solution

All company communications resources are consolidated to one central hub.

HEADQUARTERS

New York, NY

INDUSTRY

Asset Management - Traditional

StepStone is a global private markets investment firm focused on providing customized investment solutions and advisory and data services to some of the most sophisticated investors in the world. With US$313 billion of private markets allocations, including over US$72 billion of assets under management as of March 31, 2020, StepStone covers the spectrum of opportunities in private markets across the globe. The firm uses a disciplined, research-focused approach to prudently integrate fund investments across the private equity, infrastructure, private debt and real estate asset classes.

The challenge

“We were searching for a platform that acted as our company’s single source of truth for all content and company updates. Seismic is the perfect fit. Leveraging their technology allows us to streamline all communications, making it easier for employees to quickly find the resources they are looking for.”

Candice Blackburn

Vice President

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StepStone was struggling to deliver effective, company wide communications due to the lack of a centralized communications platform. Communications were sent via email, and as a result, employees’ inboxes were inundated with clutter. Additionally , different teams’ content lived in multiple locations, making it difficult for them to find the resources they were searching for.

StepStone needed a centralized location to house all content and company announcements to more effectively distribute communications. They began their search for an intranet to solve these challenges. However, the team was faced with new hurdles when evaluating solutions, including the high price tag and the amount of time it would take to roll out a new tool, as well as the change management that would be required.

Candice Blackburn

Vice President

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The solution

StepStone quickly realized their current sales enablement platform, Seismic, obtained all the capabilities needed to fulfill their intranet needs. Prior to launching Seismic firmwide, they pitched Seismic as a solution to help internal teams market their offerings to all employees. After receiving buy in, they moved forward with expanding the use case of Seismic across the entire organization. When Seismic was first implemented at StepStone, they utilized Seismic’s DocCenter to consolidate and distribute all go to market resources for their client facing teams. By launching NewsCenter and providing platform access to their entire organization, StepStone’s employees now had a single source of truth for all company resources.

StepStone leverages Seismic’s NewsCenter to deliver enhanced company communications that are easily accessible to all teams in one location. Human Resources, Marketing, and other departments can easily develop landing pages with timely information directly in NewsCenter. After creating these landing pages, they submit them for final review and approval prior to publishing them to NewsCenter, which ensures a consistent tone and format across all communications. The teams can also embed content within the landing pages to increase usage and awareness of available resources.

To ensure a successful launch of the tool, the team took steps to increase adoption across the organization. A key to driving this adoption was enforcing Seismic as the organization’s single source of truth. StepStone’s team shut down access to other repositories which forced employees to go to Seismic to find necessary resources, helping to increase awareness of the tool. Content contributors were required to submit materials through Seismic for compliance approval, which streamlined the approval process and facilitated content audits. To take it a step further, they made Seismic the default homepage across all browsers.

By making Seismic impossible to ignore, the team was able to achieve significant adoption of the tool. Additionally, employees no longer had to search through their inboxes to find emails containing the timely information or content they were looking for. Now, they can easily search for resources right within Seismic and have full confidence that it is the most up to date information available. Furthermore, internal teams can utilize the highlight panel to showcase the most important employee communications. This allows them to narrow employees’ attention on the top priorities for the organization.

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Results

By leveraging Seismic’s NewsCenter, StepStone saved their organization the significant cost of building out an intranet solution. NewsCenter has become the single source of truth for all company communications, which enables their employees to easily access company announcements and resources. Additionally, teams such as HR, Marketing, and others can efficiently deliver communications to help market their internal offerings. StepStone’s strategic approach to rolling out this tool led to impressive adoption results. In just 30 days, they saw 86% adoption across the organization. After 1 year, adoption grew to 98%.