Viva Amplify is part of the Microsoft Viva employee experience platform, alongside apps like Viva Engage, Viva Connections and Viva Goals.
We take a closer look at what Viva Amplify is, how to access it, key features, and how much it costs.
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What is Viva Amplify?
Viva Amplify is an app within the Microsoft Viva suite; Microsoft’s employee experience platform. It’s an internal communications tool that centralises campaign publishing, management and reporting.
Email, intranets, social communities – there are more digital channels to share internal information via than ever before. Viva Amplify streamlines that workflow by providing a single platform to manage the lifecycle of multi-channel campaigns.
Viva Amplify is designed for internal communications teams, but can be useful for anyone responsible for promoting internal messaging, including HR and business leaders.
From a single platform, you can;
- Manage Campaigns: see an overview of all your campaigns in a single view, manage approvals and schedule posts
- Publish Content: collaborate with colleagues on content, tailor messaging to audience groups and publish to multiple channels at once (including Outlook, Teams, SharePoint and Viva Engage)
- Measure Campaigns: see how audience groups are engaging, compare channel performance and understand sentiment
Before we delve into the specifics, let’s be clear on what we mean by campaign.
What is a Campaign?
In the eyes of Viva Amplify, a campaign is a ‘series of publications that are interlinked’.
For example, let’s say you need to send out messaging on your company’s new ‘Work from Anywhere’ policy. You might send an email, write a news story in SharePoint, and post a Teams message in your company-wide channel. This is a campaign.
Or, perhaps you have a long-term content theme around your company’s values. Each month, you publish a news piece to your intranet that showcases how people across the business are living your values. Every quarter you send an email that summarises all of these stories. This would also be a campaign.
Where to Access Viva Amplify?
Viva Amplify is currently only available as a web experience. Log in at microsoft365.com, and use the search bar to find the web app.
Viva Amplify is closely integrated with Microsoft Teams. Every campaign you create will allow you to set up an associated Teams channel. This means you can collaborate with everyone involved in the campaign directly from Teams, without having to navigate to Amplify each time.
Viva Amplify Key Features
The core features are broken down into three areas; campaign management, authoring and publishing, and reporting and analytics. We’ll take a closer look at each area, and the available functionality.
Campaign Management
Viva Amplify is a central platform to manage all aspects of your campaigns. Key campaign management features include:
Campaign Brief
The campaign brief gives you space to define your campaign strategy, and make it transparent across your campaign team.
In the campaign brief you can outline objectives and goals, and add key messages and tone of voice.
Once saved, your objectives and key messages will be visible when any campaign member is writing new campaign content in Viva Amplify. This helps make sure everyone stays on track.
Coming soon, you’ll also be able to define and track progress on specific campaign goals as part of the campaign brief.
Invite Collaborators
You may be working with different stakeholders across your organisation on each campaign. Perhaps you’re working with HR on a campaign around company benefits, and with Marketing on a campaign about a rebrand.
Invite key collaborators to your campaign, and assign them as an Owner, Editor or Approver.
Manage Approvals
As an approver, you can review all publications that are pending approval. You can add comments, and choose to approve or reject each publication.
Approvals can be managed directly in Viva Amplify, or via Teams for easy access.
In August 2024, Microsoft are introducing ‘Required Approvals’. This means you can adjust your campaign settings to make sure every associated publication goes through an approval process before it’s published.
See Recent Publications
See an overview of recent publications within your campaign. At a glance, you can see:
- Campaign Status – is it published, in draft or waiting approval
- Channels – which distribution channels is each publication planned for
- Views – basic performance metrics for published content
Authoring & Publishing
Create New Publications
When adding new publications to a campaign, you can start with a template, or create your own. Current templates include newsletters, events, and status updates. If you create your own, you can save it to reuse in the future.
Templates can be customised – if a ready-made template doesn’t tick every box, you do have the flexibility to adjust it.
When creating your publication, you can choose to add images, change the layout, make sections collapsible…there are lots of options. The publication builder also uses web parts that feel familiar to the SharePoint experience.
Choose Distribution Channels
For each publication, you can choose which channels to publish to. Currently, the options are SharePoint, Outlook and Teams. The option to publish to Viva Engage is coming soon and there will be more channel options added over time.
This means you can post to multiple channels within your Microsoft 365 environment in one go.
Customise Publications
Once you’ve chosen your channels, you’ll be able to customise your content to suit each platform. Preview how your content will look across SharePoint, Outlook and Teams and make changes to suit the channel format.
You can also choose which audiences receive your publication through each channel. You can choose specific email addresses or distribution lists, SharePoint sites and Teams channels.
Tip: With a few campaigns under your belt, analytics will start to show patterns in how different channels are performing and which content does well on each channel. Use this data to inform your channel customisation choices.
Schedule Publications
If you’re not ready to post straight away, you can schedule your publication for later by choosing the data and time. Or, send your publication for approval.
Reporting & Analytics
Reach & Engagement
See basic performance data for your campaign, like number of unique viewers and shares. You can see these stats for your campaign as a whole, or for individual publications within your campaign.
Channel Data
Compare how different distribution channels are performing. See views, shares and comments for each channel within your campaign.
Sentiment Analysis
See data on positive, negative and neutral comments and reactions across channels to understand how employees are feeling.
Audience Data
See how different audience groups are engaging with and responding to your campaign. Filter reporting data by attributes like location – but Viva Amplify will need to be configured to use organisational data to do this.
Viva Amplify & Copilot
Microsoft’s Copilot is quickly being introduced to the M365 tools we all know and love, including SharePoint, Outlook – Viva Amplify is no exception.
A range of AI-powered features will be available in Viva Amplify. Some are already available, and some are currently in development.
Some of the features include:
- Copilot for editing: Copilot will make recommendations on content, tone, and style – similar to other AI content writing tools you may have tried before
- Pre-built campaigns: For organisations looking to adopt Copilot more widely, Viva Amplify will come with two ready-made campaigns aimed at driving Copilot adoption across your company
Viva Amplify is one of the more recent additions to the Viva Suite – so there are lots of new features currently in development. Here’s some of the key highlights, as of July 2024.
How Much Does Viva Amplify Cost?
Viva Amplify is part of the Communications and Communities licence, priced at £1.64 / $2.00 per user / month. This bundle also includes full access to Viva Engage and Viva Connections.
Or, the full Viva license is priced at £9.90 / $12.00 per user / month. This option includes access to every app in the Viva suite, like Viva Goals and Viva Insights.
Viva Amplify is not available to purchase as a standalone app.
An Internal Communicator’s Guide to Microsoft Viva
For a more in-depth look at Viva Amplify, Viva Engage, Viva Connections and Viva Goals, including key features and real life use-cases, download our guide to Microsoft Viva especially for internal communicators.
On Demand Webinar
Alvin Ashford-Quaye, Microsoft EX lead, covers Viva Amplify, Viva Connections, Viva Engage and Viva Goals in our on-demand webinar.
Silicon Reef are people-first Microsoft 365 experts. We help organisations make the most of M365 to elevate the employee experience. Get in touch to learn how we can help with Viva Suite, including Amplify, or other Microsoft tools like SharePoint or Power Platform.
