How PayPal finds employee advocates to tell authentic stories

If you want to humanize your brand, start with stories about your employees.

Your workforce is one of your most precious communications resources, whether it’s to help spread brand messages on social media channels or to source great stories about your company’s impact in the community.

However, connecting with these stakeholders requires long-term campaigns and close work with your internal communications colleagues.

Two communications leaders from PayPal shared how they turn employee stories into winning external and internal campaigns—and highlighted how internal and external communicators must work together.

At Ragan’s Writing and Content Creation Conference in New York this week, Ian Cohen, PayPal’s head of global content innovation and creation, and Lenore Feder, director of internal communications, spoke about how they are elevating staffers’ stories.

“Employees are one of the top brand advocates that we can have,” says Cohen.

Feder explains that PayPal turns to employee networks to source great stories. “We have a whole sort of network that we tap into as investigative journalists,” she says. “They find stories that are really compelling and out of the box.”