How Happy Money earns 73% open rates on its weekly internal comms

The fintech platform uses Axios HQ to keep its fully distributed workforce engaged.

The challenge: Happy Money had made the strategic decision to shift to a completely distributed workforce, so their team could work where they live — not the other way around. They knew having a regular cadence of communication from the CEO and other leaders would be critical to keep the team connected, energized, and aware of the news they need to thrive in their jobs. It had to be:

• Innovative: They didn’t have any platform for sending internal communications, other than Gmail. They needed a way to polish and elevate leader messages, while keeping them clear, concise, and impactful.
• Transparent: They needed a way to start measuring what employees actually read, were interested in, and would click on or engage with.

The solution: Happy Money transitioned a weekly email from their CEO into a weekly HQ newsletter called “The Winner Report” — inspired by CEO Jeff Winner. As of January 2023, it earns a 73% open rate and 9% click rate most weeks — covering industry insights, company news, leadership perspectives, product launches, and team stories that help employees connect the dots between their roles, the business, and the macro environment around them. 

After “The Winner Report” hit its stride, Happy Money added a product and engineering newsletter, too, letting the whole organization know what’s shipping each week.

💭  Laura Cullen, Director of Communications:

• “HQ is a way for me to extend my capabilities and my reach as a communicator. It makes it easy for me to invite others to contribute content to the weekly newsletter and provides a user-friendly way to help other people create comms that are impactful. It also keeps us organized — knowing there’s a consistent format week to week and a place to house all of the content that we distribute to our organization.”
• “Our newsletters don't look exactly like an Axios news email might. Happy Money is quirky, and we let that brand personality come through in our voice and visuals. At the same time, we have embraced a more digestible approach, breaking up text with bolding, bullets, and Axioms that help people know where to look and what to expect. I get the power of Axios HQ but can still make it fit our brand.”

🧠  Laura’s words of encouragement:

• “Newsletters continue to be a powerful communication medium. Nobody has time to read every article that would be relevant to their lives, but if you can digest information for people and bring it into a concise, actionable, impactful format — that's what a newsletter is designed to do. As a distributed company, our weekly newsletter is one of the primary vehicles for a consistent cadence of communication that helps employees thrive in their roles and stay informed.”
  
  
  

Happy Money earned Axios HQ's 2023 Best-in-Class award for All-Staff Comms. See our other award winners:

• 2023 Best-in-Class Creative Communications
• 2023 Best-in-Class Community Engagement
• 2023 Best-in-Class Smart Brevity Champion