ERG communications are a foundational part of each group’s success. It determines your reach, visibility, and often, directly drives participation. It’s also an area that can feel heavily administrative while being invaluable to the ERG; effort may feel disproportionate to the impact you can see. You’re sending regular updates, maintaining active channels, and producing genuinely good content and still find yourself looking at the same core group of participants while a much larger portion of the membership stays at arm’s length. Communication is happening but the reach isn’t following.
Instead of increasing the number of communications, we often need more deliberate communication. I spent years crafting emails, newsletters, and messages for the ERGs that I was leading, and poured a lot of effort into writing “just the right thing”. Sometimes that brought our members to events, prompted survey responses, new member interest, or other engagement – and other times, felt like it disappeared into a proverbial black hole.
What I’ve found is that being intentional about three things can be critical in designing your group’s communications.
Cadence: When Does Your Audience Need to Hear From You
When ERG communication shows up in bursts (e.g. heavily before a major event, then silence for weeks afterward) members learn, consciously or not, that they don’t need to pay attention most of the time. Then, when something important does come through, it lands in an Inbox that’s already been trained to filter it out.
Consistency does something that campaigns can’t. When members hear from their ERG on a predictable rhythm — not constantly, but reliably — the group becomes part of the fabric of their workday rather than an occasional interruption. They know roughly when to expect something, which means they’re more likely to be looking for it.
What that rhythm looks like will vary. Some ERGs find that a monthly touchpoint is right. Others operate in environments where weekly is appropriate and sustainable. The cadence that works is the one that matches both the pace of the ERG’s actual activity and the attention capacity of its members. The only way to determine this is to ask, adjust, and pay attention to what the response tells you.
The other dimension of cadence worth thinking about is timing within the year. Members’ needs shift, and your organization and industry may have particularly heavy seasons. For instance, in my time at Amazon, ERG communications that happened during “peak” (e.g. November through New Year’s) needed to be carefully planned and only sent for time-sensitive items; this will be the case for most retail organizations.
The beginning of a new year carries different energy than the middle of one. Cultural moments, organizational announcements, and external events all create windows where communication lands differently than it would on an ordinary Tuesday. ERGs that communicate with an awareness of that context feel more attuned to their members and more likely to get attention.
Content: What Do Your Members Actually Want to Know
Every member who joins an ERG arrives with a different reason for being there. Some are looking for community or want to contribute to something larger than their day job. Some are seeking mentors and professional development. Some joined because a colleague invited them and they’re still figuring out whether it’s for them. And some just wanted to get the emails to see what’s going on.
That range of motivations means there’s no single content approach that reaches everyone. If your ERG doesn’t consider this, you may only be reaching a narrow slice of your membership consistently.
What works is a strategic blend that acknowledges the full range of why people showed up. Storytelling is one of the most underleveraged tools in ERG communication — a member spotlight, a reflection from a leader, an honest account of what an initiative produced and what it didn’t — these are the things that make a community feel real to someone who hasn’t yet found their way in. Alongside that, members need easy access to the practical: what’s coming up, how to get involved, what the ERG is working on, and why it matters.
This last part is so important, because group leaders are frequently working on important issues and initiatives which may not be seen by the broader community. This may be due to confidentiality, but is often simply a lack of time to outline all of the many things that the ERG leaders are involved in. By finding ways to showcase ongoing conversations and projects, you not only recognize the leaders for their contributions, but you also ensure that members are well-informed about what’s happening.
The blend doesn’t have to be complicated, but it does need to be intentional. When every communication is a promotional announcement, members learn that the ERG talks at them rather than with them. When every communication is reflective and narrative, members who need the practical information don’t find it. The goal is content that serves the member who’s already deeply engaged and the one who’s still deciding whether this is worth their time. This may not always happen in the same message, which is why the next topic is so important.
And when something isn’t landing (when open rates are low, events are underpopulated, or the same people are responding while everyone else is quiet) the answer is to ask why and adjust. Not to send the same thing more frequently and hope the outcome changes.
Channels: Where Is Your Audience Actually Paying Attention
This is where the most consequential decisions get made, and where ERGs most often default to convenience rather than strategy. The channel that’s easiest for the ERG to use is not always the channel that reaches the broadest cross-section of members.
In corporate environments, email and intranet posts are reasonable starting points. But even there, channel choices carry assumptions. Which employees check their inboxes regularly? Which ones have learned to ignore broadcast communications? Who browses the intranet, and who hasn’t logged in since onboarding? A dedicated ERG Slack channel reaches members who’ve opted into it and almost nobody else. An organizational newsfeed reaches more people but competes with everything else the company is publishing.
The harder and more important question is what happens when the workforce extends beyond corporate employees, and for most large organizations, it does. When I was leading ERG work at Amazon, reaching employees in warehouses and distribution centers through email was never going to work. These were employees who weren’t sitting at desks, weren’t checking inboxes between tasks, and had no particular reason to seek out ERG information through channels built for a different kind of workday. We developed a way for them to sign up for ERGs and events directly within the app they were already using for other workday needs, and met them on the workfloor.
That solution was specific to Amazon’s environment and workforce. It wouldn’t translate directly to a hospital system, a national retailer, or a manufacturing company, each of which has its own version of the same challenge and its own set of constraints and possibilities. What translates is the logic: find out where your members actually are, and build toward that rather than relying on what’s convenient.
In some organizations, that means creating something that doesn’t exist yet. In others, it means tapping into organizational channels that already have reach — internal blogs, manager communication cascades, digital signage in common areas — and working with the people who own those channels rather than building parallel ones. Neither approach is inherently better. What matters is whether the channel connects with the actual member, in the actual context of their workday.
What Ties It Together
Cadence, content, and channels are most useful in conversation with each other. A well-timed communication in the wrong channel doesn’t land. Compelling content sent on an erratic schedule trains members to stop looking. The right channel carrying the wrong message misses the members who needed something different.
What makes ERG communication work across a diverse and distributed membership is the combination of consistency, relevance, and genuine presence in the places members actually are. And the willingness to keep asking whether what you’re doing is reaching the people you’re trying to reach, and to change course when the answer is no.
The ERGs that do this well aren’t necessarily the ones with the most resources or the most sophisticated tools. They’re the ones that talk to their members, pay attention to what they hear, and treat communication as something that evolves rather than something that gets set and forgotten.
Your Next Move
For ERG Leaders
- When did you last ask your members directly what they want to hear from you, how often, and where — and did what they said match what you’re currently doing?
- If a member who joined six months ago and hasn’t attended anything yet received your last communication, would it give them a reason to show up?
For Program Managers
- Are the ERGs in your ecosystem duplicating communication infrastructure that could be shared, and is there an opportunity to build something together that serves everyone better?
- Which channels in your organization already have reach across your full workforce, and are ERGs connected to them? How can you lighten the load for volunteers while exponentially increasing the reach and impact?
For HR Leaders and Executives
- Do ERGs have access to the organizational communication channels that other business priorities use as a matter of course? If not, how can you enable that connection?
- If ERG participation is concentrated in certain populations, have you examined whether communication reach — rather than member interest — is what’s creating that pattern?