How to Create an Internal Communications Channel Matrix With Governance That Actually Works

Are your internal communications channels getting out of hand? Governance in communications is often a difficult subject, seen as stuffy and bureaucratic, but without it, you won't be able to deliver an effective communications strategy. Employee engagement may suffer as people are bombarded by different digital internal communications channels, making it hard to pick out the essential from the nice to have.In this guide we're going to take a look how to create an internal communications channel matrix and how it can drive your governance in communications leading to happier employees, happier internal communicators and more effective communications.

What Is a Communications Channel Matrix?

Communication matrix design is very simple. It's just a map of which channels go to which groups of employees, indicating the best usage for each. From the point of view of the employee, they have multiple sources of communications coming at them every day. There is broadcast email and the intranet. There is Viva Engage and Virtual Town halls. Maybe you've got a specific frontline app or digital signage. If you are a large organisation each person will be exposed to communications from many perspectives:

  • Global
  • Geography — region, country, city, office
  • Organisational levels — division, group, department, team
  • Role, hierarchy or tenure — managers, new starters, trainees
  • Project or business process
  • Community — affinity groups, professional networks, communities of interest, sports and social groups

All of this messaging comes at them every day. The bigger your organisation the more complexity there will be. But formal communications is not the only internal communications they get. For each of the geographical, organisational, role, project or process or community areas, looking top-down, there will exist "communications dark matter". This dark matter is not created by internal communicators but arrives in similar ways, particularly email, Teams and Viva Engage (if you use it). Some of this will be nice to know and some will be essential or actionable (such as HR message or something from facilities about your office). Some of it will be of no value.

If you have an international footprint, you may have languages to consider too. What gets translated, what doesn't, what are the working languages? The importance of geography is sometimes underplayed by communicators. Employee processes tend to be delivered along national lines as that is how payroll, procurement, recruitment, expenses is delivered as well as things based on local legislation.

Why Governance Matters for Internal Communication Channels?

A failure to bring control and sense will add to the chaos. Each of the different sorts of channels has meaning to communicators (these are their tools of the job after all), but for employees they can very quickly get lost and begin to glaze over and start to ignore the whole environment.

If you don't know what's out there, you can't describe the communications environment. If you can't describe it, you can't manage it.

Governance is about clarity – nice clean lines that everyone is aware of. If there is a problem, different groups can talk it out and resolve it. But without clarity? People then improvise, do what they think is best, sulk, misbehave or go maverick. A channel matrix allows you to define the space and record useful information against each level as well as guide people's practices. It answers the question, "What's the best way to get this message out, to this audience, for the best impact?"

How to Map Your Internal Comms Channels

  1. Map the organisation: What does the playing field look like? Collect and organise the things that describe the different areas of interest such as organisation, brands and geography.
  2. Map the likely audiences: If you can, get hold of some employee data. You need to know how many people that are in each of those organisational units and geographies. It's likely that some far flung branch offices are very small. This is also where you can try and find things about languages too.
  3. Map the tech: Look at the existing channels that you're aware of. What digital tools do they use to deliver them?
    — Intranet news: SharePoint or something a little more toothy like Interact or Unily
    — Broadcast email: Something like Poppolo or JungleMail, or perhaps even just Outlook and email lists.
    — Social platforms: Things like Viva Engage, even LinkedIn.
    — Frontline apps: Such as Staffbase or Blink
    — Digital signage: Such as AppSpace or ScreenCloud
    — Newsletters: Anything exotic
    — Town halls: Specific webinar style tech, or plain old Teams or Zoom.
  4. Audit the known: Look at the channels you know about and look at samples of them.
  5. Interview users: This is critical – you have to speak with a representative sample of users. Discover the sources of news and information that they find the most useful for them and any frustrations that they have. They might tell you of the impact of the dark matter communications that also lead to the loading of their communications "workload" or of channels you haven't even heard of. They will tell of their favourite methods for keeping up to date and the personal tactics they have to employ to find information that is essential for them.
  6. Work with comms leads outside of the corporate centre. Get their input about how they put together their channel mix and get their help to understand additional channels that they create and maintain.

Putting it together

Now you've got the basic data, you can start to put some shape to it.

The communicators story

At Spark Trajectory we like to look at thing in user stories. It cuts through the crap. What do people need to achieve and what is their daily task and in what digital tool can they complete that tasks? We wouldn't pretend to know more than you internal communicators about your message, but broadly when it comes to channels we are talking about large audience and you need to tell them something or get them to act, or both.

Everything stems from those two key needs. The communicator is then faced with matching those needs to the different channels that are available like paints on a palette.

The key questions

  1. Is it time bound?
    Does the message need to find someone within a specific timeframe or ASAP?
  2. Is it high stakes?
    Is there an impact if the message doesn't land?
  3. Is it actionable?
    Does the employee need to do something in response to this message?
  4. Is it strategic?
    Is it the big picture stuff that shows people their part in the whole?
  5. Is it engaging?
    Is it the stuff that makes you feel warm, proud or recognised?
  6. Is it for discussion?
    Is it a topic that would gain from people talking about it, or needs the ability to ask questions to understand or process ambiguity?

Not everything is a critical communication

When speaking to regular employees you will find that they really want to get a handle on what is essential. They get busy and they need to know what channels they can cling to like a life raft:

  • When they get too busy
  • When they've been out of the office and need to catch up
  • When they need to know that they haven't missed anything really important

As part of your matrix, you need to decide what is critical for your organisation, and where that critical stuff goes. It is up to you as part of the process, but for is this our formula for critical:

Time bound + High stakes + Actionable = Critical

Criticality needs to be limited and you need to get across the idea that critical is not the same as important. Loads of things are important but critical needs to be reserved for something that has to happen now, for something that will have a big impact if it doesn't happen, and needs people to change their behaviour or routine.

  • A notice about a weather event and the office being closed is critical
  • A message about the organisation being acquired is critical
  • A communication detailing that an operational system is going to be replaced on a certain date is critical.

Any crisis communication fits in this category.

You need to work out what channels are used to send critical communication.

Push or pull

This classification is straight out functionality of the digital channel.

  • Push channels arrive in front of people's noses
    Emails, messages and notifications. Ping! But also digital signage.
  • Pull channels require people to go somewhere
    Intranet, Viva Engage, Frontline apps, virtual town halls. It requires someone's engagement and habit to engage.

All or some

The concept of "All employees" for virtually all organisations is staunchly defended territory. Targeting a message to everyone depends very much on the push and pull. Putting something on the intranet for everyone to see is much less of a demand that sending everyone an email. In reality, in the realm of push messaging in large organisations there is usually some demand to put a local spin on it to make it more relevant to the target group.

Frequency

How often do each of these channels hit their audiences? Setting and recording an expectation is important in understanding whether the channels are healthy.

  • Multiple times per day
    Updates to Viva Engage for example
  • Daily
    Such as intranet news
  • Weekly
    For instance a summary digest
  • Monthly
    For a regular newsletter
  • Quarterly or biannually
    Town halls
  • Annually
    A company all-hands or a results day extravaganza

And there is also the tricky one:

  • As required

We firmly believe that "As required" has the inevitable translation of "Whenever I bloody want." It therefore is best reserved for critical communications if used at all.

Documenting and explaining

OK, now let's put it black and white.

The matrix

The matrix itself is the core of it. A spreadsheet will do for now, but a database is better (we use a tool called Fibery, you could use Airtable and at a push with a lot of shouting and screaming, SharePoint).

It's a picture of a pretend governance matrix made to look like a spreadsheet table. The contents aren't that important to describe and there is tabular data in a downloadable spreadsheet nearby on this page.

You can download a sample spreadsheet to save you about three minutes in Excel: Sparko_channel_matrix 11kb

The flowchart, the decision tree, the allocation framework, the rule of thumb

The matrix is what we call in governance terms a "Register". Like stamp collecting and cricket statistics its very much for the fans. Something that you will use to be able to point at and tap the sign. This is what we've got and what we expect. But it doesn't really help other communicators throughout the organisation make choices.

For that you need form of decision tree, flowchart or ready-reckoner that helps communicators help make good choices and can work for non-communicators to appreciate the landscape.

We've seen these get very elaborate, like a choose your own adventure story with a bunch of hard-coded criteria in. This can work, but they can confuse people and they can get very brittle. As soon as something unexpected happens the whole regime falls apart.

We whipped this one up after an engagement. More of a map to guide people's way and think about audiences and impact first and an appropriate digital platform second. No hard edges, just good advice.

A communications channel selection matrix. Apologies as this diagram is complex and may not be fully accessible. The matrix helps communicators choose the right channel when telling a large audience something or getting them to act. It is organised around six key questions: Is it time bound? Is it high stakes? Is it actionable? Is it strategic? Is it engaging? Is it for discussion? A further question asks whether the communication is critical. Channels are split by audience: for everyone, options are global broadcast email, intranet homepage banners, intranet global news story, and Viva Engage All Company feed. For a specific audience, options are targeted broadcast email, targeted homepage features, intranet local news story, and Viva Engage community. Each channel has validating questions to confirm the choice is appropriate.

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Written by Chris Tubb

Intranet and digital workplace consultant
Chris Tubb advises large organisations on intranet strategy, governance, and the information management challenges raised by AI. He is co-founder of Spark Trajectory, a UK-based digital workplace consultancy.

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"If you don't know what's out there, you can't describe the communications environment. If you can't describe it, you can't manage it."

This sounds like a lot of work…

It is. Done properly, mapping your internal communications channels, defining audiences, setting governance rules, and recording it all in a usable format takes real skill and considerable time. Most internal communications teams are stretched: there is always another campaign, another crisis or another set of stakeholders who want their message to take priority. Standing back to look at the whole landscape, interview people systematically, and build the governance structure needed to make it last? That tends to get shuffled to the bottom of the pile. That is where Spark Trajectory can help. Channel Trajectory is our structured methodology for doing exactly this work, in a way that produces something durable and genuinely usable, not just a document that gets filed and forgotten.

What Channel Trajectory delivers

Channel Trajectory produces a clear, detailed map of your internal communications landscape: channels, audiences, governance, and the relationships between them. That means a channel matrix that documents what each channel is for, who it reaches, who owns it, how often it runs, and what category of communications it carries. It means audience definitions that go beyond org chart boxes to capture how people actually receive and consume communications. And it means a governance framework that gives communicators the rules of the road: when to use which channel, who decides, and how to handle the edge cases.

The deliverables are built to be handed back to your team and used. They are not just advisory slides. We document everything in formats you can maintain and build on, and we can work with whatever tooling you already have in place.

How we work

Channel Trajectory starts with a kick-off workshop to agree scope, understand your existing channels and organisational structure, and confirm what good looks like for your situation.

We then conduct user and stakeholder interviews across a representative cross-section of the workforce, because the only way to understand how communications actually land is to ask the people on the receiving end. We also review existing documentation and samples from your current channels to ground our analysis in what is really happening, not just what is supposed to happen.

The analysis phase draws all of this together into insights and recommendations. We map the channels, define the audiences, apply the governance classifications (criticality, push versus pull, frequency, ownership) and produce a full channel matrix alongside audience definitions. Where the picture is particularly complex, or where there are sensitive organisational dynamics to navigate, our experience of doing this work at some of the world's largest organisations means we can help you make the right calls.

Why it works

The reason channel mapping projects so often stall internally is that they require a combination of research discipline, stakeholder management, and governance design that sits across several skill sets. Internal communications teams are typically strong on the creative and strategic side; the structural, analytical, documentation-heavy work is harder to prioritise and easier to procrastinate on. Bringing in a practitioner who has done this before (and who has no internal politics to navigate), accelerates the process considerably and produces something more rigorous than most teams would build on their own.

Channel Trajectory is not a strategy product in itself; it gives you the mapped landscape and governance structure that an effective communications strategy requires. If you need to go further such as building out the strategy itself, or connecting communications governance to broader intranet and content governance – we can scope that as part of a wider engagement.

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'"As required" has the inevitable translation of "Whenever I bloody want."'