This article was first published on Response Source, 26 March 2015. Read original article here.

A unique peer to peer best practice sharing event and award, which showcases innovative employee engagement projects from multi- sector internal communications teams has drawn acclaim from participants.

The fifth IC Showcase, hosted by the internal communications practice of specialist communications recruiter VMA GROUP, attracted 13 teams from a variety of sectors including financial services, utilities, charities, life sciences, telecoms, publishing, IT and engineering.

Each of the teams are given the opportunity to present their biggest success story from the previous 12 months which are then peer judged against three criteria: contribution to overall business strategy, contribution to the increase of impact and influence of internal comms within the organisation and the style of the presentation itself.

The winner was NN Group for their project “How to make an IPO relevant for employees”, which charted the internal communications team’s challenge to engage a global workforce of 12,000 employees in 18 countries to an IPO. As Head of Internal Communications Marije Scholma explained “An IPO is a very complex process. It is also the result of the hard work of everybody in the business so we tried to engage all our employees by communicating every single milestone. NN Group is the Insurance and Investment business of the former ING Group, that split its banking and insurance/investment management activities. Employees had gone through an enormous amount of change already – not least a new name – and a new brand. We wanted to involve every single employee in what was the one of the largest European IPOs in 20 years. Working with 18 internal communications teams around the world we developed a campaign with several initiatives. It all culminated on the day of the listing in a unique live broadcast from Euronext, the stock exchange in Amsterdam, so that all 12,000 employees could celebrate at the same tim