Most internal email goes unread. We think we know why — and what to do about it.
A small Stockholm team has spent four years rebuilding the way companies talk to themselves. The result looks less like a software product and more like a working press desk.
The average mid-sized company sends seventy-two all-hands emails a quarter. The average employee reads sixteen of them. The remaining fifty-six are either skimmed past, marked-as-read out of obligation, or quietly archived without ever being opened. And yet the leadership team that signed off on each of those messages believed it was important. Where, in the gap between sent and received, does internal communication die?
We've been asking that question for four years. We started Internal Announcement in 2021 after a long stretch in corporate comms watching the same well-intentioned messages fail in the same predictable ways. The diagnosis we landed on isn't unique — it's the patterns that caught our attention. Most internal email isn't actually communication. It's broadcast without commitment, sent because the calendar said it should be sent, written without a clear ask, and addressed to "everyone" because targeting felt like work.
The platform we built is a corrective. Every announcement has a stated audience, a stated ask, and a measurable read. The composer asks the writer to declare the audience first, before they write a word. Targeting by location, function, role, manager, or any custom segment is a single field, not a separate workflow. Read receipts aren't surveillance — they're the basic feedback an editor needs to know whether the message landed, and to whom.
What's surprised us most is the cultural change inside our customers. When the platform makes targeting cheap and reading visible, the volume of company-wide announcements drops. Senders self-select out of broadcasts that don't earn the audience. The signal-to-noise ratio of the all-hands channel goes up. Employees re-learn that the platform is worth checking, because what's there is for them.