Newsweaver to create 60 new jobs in major expansion

17th December 2015

Global hight-tech leader will focus R & D investment at it Cork HQ

             New jobs to support rapidly growing international customer base                                                   

One of Ireland’s most innovative high-tech companies is to create 60 new jobs to support the expansion of its global customer base.

Newsweaver will see its workforce grow from 80 to 140 over the next two years, with a concentration on high-value jobs in research and development at its Cork HQ.

This expansion is supported by the Department of Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation through Enterprise Ireland.

As part of this project, the company is to double the number of developers it employs as it grows its international customer base and confirms its reputation as the market leader in Internal Communications (IC), providing some of the world’s biggest corporations with pioneering solutions to complex employee communications challenges.

Newsweaver’s clients are companies with workforces in excess of 1,000 people and include Rolls-Royce, Vodafone, Kellogg’s, Experian and Aon Hewitt, amongst several other FTSE 100 and Fortune 1000 companies.

The company expects significant national and international interest in the new positions and has started the recruitment drive. In addition to the developer roles the company will be expanding across other key business areas of customer support, marketing, technical support, and sales in Ireland and the United States.

Announcing the new jobs, Minister for Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation Richard Bruton said:

“At the heart of our jobs plan is growing a powerful engine of Irish enterprise. Newsweaver is a great example of the type of company we are trying to support – a dynamic Irish company, which started in Cork only 13 years ago, providing solutions to problems faced by some of the world’s biggest companies, selling its services all around the world, engaging in R&D here and creating high-end jobs in Cork. I wish Andrew and the team every success as they continue to grow this great business”.

Newsweaver Chief Executive Andrew O’Shaughnessy, who set up the company in Cork in 2002, said the expansion was about building on the company’s success to date and pushing the boundaries for customers.

“Internal communications – or employee communications – are important for any company, but for a large multi-national with tens of thousands of employees operating across several time zones in different continents, it is critically important and a very complex challenge, which is where the unique technology solutions we have developed come into play,” he said.

“It’s exciting to see the impact that our product is having on the world’s leading companies,” he said. “R&D is the cornerstone of our strategy and I’m really delighted that our growth to becoming the global leader in Internal Communications has been driven, and will continue to be driven, by pioneering R&D and new product development coming out of Cork,” said Mr. O’Shaughnessy.

The company established itself as the leading international innovator in corporate IC, having revolutionized email technologies over the past three years and now delivers employee communication solutions to large corporations in 96 countries.

“Our global blue-chip customer base is continuing to grow rapidly, and we are preparing to launch very exciting and innovative products that will underpin our position as the world’s No 1 in internal communications. We need to support that growth and expansion by attracting the best talent that is out there, people who want to be part of an entrepreneurial, innovative, hard-working and ambitious company,” said Mr. O’Shaughnessy.

He praised Enterprise Ireland for its unstinting support over the years, and in particular for its backing of indigenous jobs and what he described as a very exciting phase of Newsweaver’s growth and development.

Welcoming the announcement Enterprise Ireland’s CEO, Julie Sinammon said:‘Enterprise Ireland has been working with Newsweaver since 2006 having recognised its potential as a leading international innovator in corporate communications.  We are proud to be associated with this exciting phase in their development, through the provision of job creation supports, for the addition of highly skills jobs at their base in Cork.  The development of Irish companies of scale is a key priority for us and we look forward to working closely with Newsweaver, to optimise their full growth international potential, consolidating their business in Cork.”

International research has proven that effective employee communication is a leading indicator of financial performance and a driver of employee engagement. A Towers Watson Return on Investment (ROI) survey found companies that are highly effective communicators had 47% higher total returns to shareholders over the last five years compared with firms that are the least effective communicators.

However, effective internal communications requires what is regarded as the ‘Holy Grail’ by communicators: performance insight and measurability. Fragmented Internal Communications channels such as email, Intranet, Enterprise Social Networks and mobile apps undermine the ability to access accurate and measurable performance insight. This militates against effective communication, with negative consequences for financial performance

As the world’s leading IC experts, Newsweaver has pioneered unique technology solutions which have overcome this problem and provide internal communicators with key, accurate and measurable performance insights across multiple communication platforms in a quick, easy to use and highly accessible way.

The technology provides companies with critical information to enable them to know how their communications are reaching their employees, which channels are most and least effective, what type of content is resonating and what is not, and perhaps most importantly, which employees they are not reaching and why not.

• Newsweaver was recently named as one of the country’s best employers, and also one of Ireland’s best ICT companies by the Irish Exporters Association. It was ranked in the top 300 fastest-growing technology companies in Europe and the Deloitte Technology Fast 50 for five years in a row.

/ends/ 

NOTE TO EDITOR: See below background information on Newsweaver.

NEWSWEAVER - WHAT WE DO:

Through major investment in R&D and best-in-class staff recruitment, in 2012 we pioneered the development of a unique and innovative technology, Internal Connect, which delivers relevant, targeted, engaging and measurable employee communications solutions to some of the world’s largest and most successful corporations.

So how does Internal Connect work?

In essence, it’s a deceptively simple, easy-to-use but highly sophisticated technological solution to the complex internal communications challenges faced by large companies, and it adds measurable value to their bottom line.

Take the example of just one of our customers. To get your head around the difficulty it faces in effectively communicating with its workforce, all you need are a few statistics to give an idea of the scale of the challenge: it employs in excess of 50,000 people in more than 70 countries across 24 different time zones.

Ordinary email or Intranet technology falls well short of what is required to meet such a challenge. Issues as basic as the inability to assess employee engagement with internal company email - who’s reading emails and who is not - difficulties in targeting and segmenting communications across markets, countries and time zones; employee feedback deficiencies, have all served to mitigate against effective internal communications using traditional methods and technology.

Newsweaver’s Internal Connect, however, enables and provides:

-       Advanced AudienceSegmentation, creating highly targeted employee lists, segmented by job title, location, seniority, language, time zones and more

-       Content Targeting, enabling personalized versions of the same email combining global and local content unique to the reader

-       Metrics Dashboard, which provides key performance results for every email and takes the guesswork out of a company’s internal communications, providing data that can be acted on.

-       Click Maps, which provide a ‘heat map’ of employee click activity, so that internal communications executives can make informed decisions about how to boost the visibility of important content

-       Social Features, providing companies to start a conversation with every communication sent. It encourages employees to participate, with ‘comments’, ‘ratings’ and ‘likes’ and also facilitates quick employee surveys and polls

-       Interactive Emails, which include video and other rich-media content for an engaging reader experience

And finally…

If there is anything else you would like to know about Newsweaver, we would love to hear from you.

Kind regards,

Mairead     

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