The tech company used Axios HQ to reimagine internal communications and drive change.
The challenge: When Yahoo spun out from Verizon in 2021, it faced a complex transition. The nearly 30-year-old company was a lot like a startup again — new leadership, new mission, new goals, and no real internal comms infrastructure or channel strategy. It needed to build a foundation that could:
- Reinvigorate culture: Employees from different eras — having joined Yahoo, AOL, Oath, or Verizon Media — had different ideas about what Yahoo's identity was or should be in this new era.
- Deliver strategy, transparently: The company’s global employee base needed to understand the structural and strategic changes happening and know where to find updates about them.
- Modernize communication: Share the information people need, when they need it, how they want to receive it — without sacrificing personality.
The solution: Yahoo's internal communications team launched a strategic newsletter program using Axios HQ to create a centralized, engaging channel for company updates, including “The Weekly Download,” an all-employee newsletter, sent weekly with product launches, press coverage, tactical action items, and culture-building people stories, and “Manager Memo,” a people-manager newsletter, sent weekly with leadership guidance, resources, and reminders.
How it worked: A dedicated member of the internal comms team manages the end-to-end newsletter process, ensuring a seamless balance of content, tone, and brand consistency. They work closely with Yahoo's internal comms business partners to surface key updates that align with the company's goals and priorities. The broader internal comms team then collaborates to refine and enhance the content, delivering newsletters that are clear, engaging, and reflective of Yahoo’s vision and culture — all through Axios HQ.
📊 Key comms and business results:
- Trust and engagement: Employee surveys show greater understanding of company direction, buy-in to the company’s vision, and trust in leadership decision-making.
- Staff upskilling: “Effective communication is about what’s received, not just what’s said. You could write a flawless 10,000-word blog post, but if no one reads it, it’s a failure. True impact comes from delivering the right information, to the right people, at the right time, in the way they prefer. Axios HQ helps me train the internal comms team to focus on this audience-first approach.”
- Comms performance: “Open rates are strong at 72%. The Weekly Download provides all the context employees need upfront — no clickbait required — thanks to Smart Brevity. Even with this approach, we still see an impressive 8% click-through rate.”
💭 Sarah Smith, VP of Global Internal Communications:
- "Our CEO loves our newsletters and reads them the second they come out. We have a new VP who recently joined us, and he said they’re better than anything he saw in his 15 years at Google.”
- "In a hybrid environment, it can be difficult for employees to know what others are working on. This newsletter gives a regular drumbeat of our progress and success. Without actively bringing these stories to employees, they might not see how the changes we’re promising — and making — are paying off."
🧠 Closing thoughts: "You need to communicate 10 times more than you think, especially during periods of change. Leaders often feel the pressure to craft lengthy, formal executive emails, but this format proves you don’t have to. It lets you be informal yet highly informational. Clear, concise, and visually engaging messages are not only easier for leaders to create but also far more effective for readers.”
Yahoo earned Axios HQ's 2025 Best-in-Class award for Employee Comms Team of the Year. See our other award winners: