Why your internal magazine gets deleted

Every internal communications team we speak to has the same two problems: open rates they would rather not quote, and a suspicion that the money spent on the last issue bought very little.

The instinct is usually to add — more stories, more pages, more frequency. In our experience the fixes are almost all subtractive, and none of them is expensive.

1. It looks like a document, so it gets treated like one

This is the whole game. An attachment that opens onto a page of body copy under a corporate header is, to the person receiving it, indistinguishable from a policy update. They have been trained by a thousand previous emails to close it.

The first spread has about two seconds to signal this is not admin. That is a design problem, not a content problem, and it is solved by the cover and the opening spread doing something a memo would never do — one photograph at full bleed, one headline, and nothing else on the page.

2. Nobody in it is recognisable

The most-read page in any employee magazine is the one with people the reader knows. Not the leadership team — colleagues.

Issues that lead with the chief executive's reflections and put the site team on page fourteen have the priority backwards. Reverse it. The strategy update still runs; it just does not open the issue.

A useful test: count the number of named, photographed people who are not managers. If it is under six, the issue is going to underperform whatever else is in it.

3. The photography apologises for itself

Almost every internal comms team opens a conversation with us by apologising for their photographs. They are taken on phones, in poor light, by people with other jobs.

That is not the problem people think it is. Phone photography of real colleagues outperforms polished stock imagery every time, because the whole value of an internal magazine is that it is about us. Stock photography of models in a generic office actively destroys that.

What matters is treatment, not source: crop hard, correct the colour, run the good ones large and drop the weak ones entirely. Four strong images beat twelve mediocre ones — the mediocre ones are what makes an issue feel like filler.

4. It is too long

Twenty-four pages that people finish is an enormous success. Forty-eight pages that people scroll is a failure that cost more.

If contributions are thin this quarter, publish a shorter issue. Padding an issue to a page count is the most reliable way to teach readers that the magazine can be skimmed, and that lesson is very hard to unteach.

5. Nothing in it is useful

Recognition and culture stories carry an issue emotionally, but people forward and keep things that are useful: what is changing on their site, what the new shift pattern means in practice, who to actually ask about the benefits change.

An issue with one genuinely useful page gets kept on a noticeboard. An issue with none gets closed.

6. It arrives at random

A magazine that appears "roughly quarterly, when there's enough for one" never builds a habit. One that reliably lands in the first week of the quarter does, within about three issues.

This is the argument for booking a year at a time rather than commissioning issue by issue. The predictability is not an administrative nicety — it is the mechanism by which people start expecting it.

What this means for the budget

Notice that five of the six cost nothing. Shorter issues cost less. Leading with colleagues rather than leadership is free. Cutting the weak photographs improves the issue and reduces the work.

The one that costs money is the first: making it not look like a document. That is design, and it is worth paying for once — because a template built properly for the first issue carries every issue after it.

If you have an issue that underperformed and you are not sure which of these it was, send it to us. We will tell you what we would change, and whether you need a designer at all.