Slack launch communications

Communication is key to launching Slack at your organization. We recommend creating a communication plan to set expectations, provide enablement resources, and help your teams navigate through the transition to Slack.

How to build a Slack communications plan

When communicating to your employees, here are important questions to answer:

• Why you have chosen to use Slack
  
• What the benefit is for employees to use Slack
  
• How employees can get started

Design the communication plan around three critical steps for the success of Slack across your team and organization:

1. Assign an executive sponsor to deliver initial communications regarding the launch of Slack.
2. Prepare an initial Slack announcement to be delivered by your executive sponsor to announce the move to Slack and introduce Slack to all employees.
3. Finish with a team welcome sent out by each department leader and further echoed by people managers, welcoming their departments and teams into Slack.

Below, you can find some email templates that you can start with to build your communication plan. These are examples that we recommend customizing to your organization.

Wave 1: Initial communication from executive sponsor

Hi team,

I wanted to share an exciting announcement. As some of you know, we’re moving to Slack for our internal team communications. Slack is a messaging app where we can talk, share files, and work together. It also connects with tools we already use, like [add your examples here], plus thousands of other apps. The date we’re aiming to provide Slack accounts for all employees is [date].

Why are we moving to Slack?

We want to use the best communication tools to make our lives easier and be more productive. Having every employee on one platform will help us work together better and faster, rather than jumping around between emails, IMs, texts and a bunch of other programs. Everything you share in Slack is automatically indexed and archived, creating a searchable archive of all our work.

Questions or feedback?

More information on the companywide Slack launch will be provided in the following days. If you have questions about our Slack workspace, please post in the [#slack-help or another appropriate channel] channel on Slack or send an email to [email address here]. If you have general questions about Slack, its Help Center is a great resource.

Wave 2: Follow-up communication from executive or other IT leader

Hi folks,

As the message from [VP/CEO/etc.] indicated, we will be moving our communications over to Slack on [date]. To recap the initial announcement, Slack is a messaging app where we can talk, share files, and work together. While email will still be used for most external company communication, Slack will be the tool we use to communicate with each other within [company].

Slack is built to be a highly user-friendly tool, and we encourage you to spend a little bit of time exploring it on your own. As part of our transition to Slack, we also have a couple of training resources for you:

• Slack workshop 101
• Slack 101 lessons
• Top 5 tips for getting started in Slack
• Slack on-demand webinars
• Slack Help Center

Wave 3: To send out on launch day

Hi team,

[If your organization uses single sign-on]
It’s our first day on Slack as a company! Everyone should now be able to access Slack as one of your assigned [SSO provider] apps, or you can log in from https://[teamname].slack.com with your [SSO provider] credentials.

[If your organization doesn’t use single sign-on]
It’s our first day on Slack as a company! Everyone should now be able to access Slack via their login credentials. You can download the Slack app at slack.com/downloads or open Slack in your browser at slack.com/signin.

Here are some tips to get you started on the right foot in Slack:

• Download the desktop app from slack.com/download and sign in.
• Follow the steps in the getting started for new users guide and join the Slack workshop 101 to learn Slack fundamentals with interactive activities.
• View the Slack [How we use Slack at our company] guide from our intranet here.

Lastly, here are some of the channels that you can join once you’ve logged in:

• #help-it, #help-etc: connect with the right teams by posting in their channels
• #announcements: companywide announcements will be posted here
• your team channels and your office channels

See you in Slack! ✨