At Yale University, the intranet serves as more than a place for employees to check the holiday calendar or seek out answers about their benefits. It’s also where university staff can see employees of the school at work.
The visual component is central to how Lalani Perry, assistant vice president of internal communications at Yale University, thinks about Your Yale. The Your Yale site is also accessible to the public, which enables the comms team to help tell employee stories for prospective employees as well.
“Right now, it’s not an intranet per se; it’s an extranet because it is outwardly facing as well,” Perry said. “By putting the Your Yale newsletter content on our site, we’re exposing all the people who go there to what it means to work at Yale. It’s a huge advantage to have it be both an internal tool for our employees and an external marketing tool for those interested in working at Yale.”
The visuals have to do more than fill space. They have to make the employee experience feel specific, credible and recognizable.
“We really pride ourselves on taking arresting imagery,” she said. “There are a lot of organizations that use stock photography, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But in some cases, we want to expose even some of our imperfections because that’s what makes the imagery so unique.”
Photography as strategy
Yale treats photography as an integral part of the storytelling process. Before the team begins work on a piece of content, the story’s writer, photographer and editor talk through what the words and images need to accomplish.
“To maintain alignment, our writers often accompany the photographer on assignments, allowing them to capture the story together from both a written and visual perspective,” Perry said. “This close collaboration ensures the photography strengthens the narrative and creates a more engaging experience for our readers.”
Image courtesy of Yale University. Photo by Robert DeSanto.
Perry said that a quick visual planning conversation can focus on the following subjects:
- What the image helps employees to understand.
- What makes the story specific to this workplace.
- Whether the photo should capture a person, place or moment.
The pics that get the most attention
Perry told Ragan that some of the strongest traffic she sees comes from moments when employees see their colleagues featured visually. Her team puts together a photo gallery Staff Appreciation Day and puts it on Your Yale. In addition to giving the event a longer shelf life, it also gives employees a reason to come back to the platform after the day itself has passed. Employees who missed the event can see what happened, while those who attended can revisit the day and look for people they recognize.
“People love to see themselves,” Perry said. “We do a gallery of photos from that event, and you have a ton of people coming to the site to see whether or not they made the gallery. We didn’t do it intentionally with that in mind, but certainly that was the outcome.”
Yale’s long-service recognition event is a great example of this in action. Not every employee can attend, but the intranet can extend the reach of the moment by turning it into a package of photos and words after the fact.
“Following that event, we have feature articles of those who have 50 years of service,” Perry said. “We do a video, things of that nature, 45 years of service, and then we also post all the content from that event. Because we aggregate all of that on the homepage, the numbers go up.”
The big key for internal comms pros is to treat photography as a storytelling system instead of just a method of event documentation. Great photography can help communicators expand upon their words as storytellers in a few ways, including:
- Showing what the organization values.
- Making employees and their work more visible.
- Helping staff recognize colleagues and shared places.
- Bringing less-visible roles or moments into view.
- Turning an intranet from a resource hub into a place employees want to explore and spend time.
Image courtesy of Yale University. Photo by Robert DeSanto.
At Yale, that planning helps the intranet do what a static resource page cannot. It invites employees into the story of the workplace.
“We believe photography is an essential part of storytelling,” Perry said. “While compelling writing provides context and depth, powerful images create an immediate emotional connection and invite readers into the story. A great photograph should be strong enough to stand on its own. It should capture the essence of the moment and inspire someone to learn more.”
Sean Devlin is an editor at Ragan Communications.
