Consolidate all your company’s app notifications into a single view

It sounds crazy at first, asking teams with seemingly zero overlap to share updates with each other. Surely, asking the finance team to follow updates from the IT team drags down productivity, right? Not according to Slack’s Future of Work Study, which found that workers want more internal communication updates. 

Then, in a subsequent study, Slack found that employees were more productive and engaged at companies with more asynchronous cross-team updates (e.g., employees could read notifications on their own schedule). The caveat is that updates should be centralized and accessible. Organized in a way that lets employees skim everything in a single glance and then return to work. Like the notification pulldown on your smartphone, but for all the exciting things happening at your company. 

Here are three ways to consolidate updates from multiple apps and make them easily digestible.

Method 1: Connect all of your apps to a Slack or Teams channel

There’s a reason that Slack was studying the effectiveness of asynchronous cross-team updates: chat apps are the most convenient places to share them. You’d be hard-pressed to find a company today that doesn’t use Slack or Microsoft Teams. Most who use team chat have at least one integration installed. 

But when companies connect apps to their chat apps, integrations tend to be siloed. A CRM update goes to the sales team’s channel, or a new invoice is visible only to finance. It gets the job done but doesn’t do much for cross-team collaboration and knowledge sharing. To squeeze more value out of chat integrations, create a company-wide channel with automated updates from every team. A place where employees can see and celebrate what others are doing.

First, you’ll have to add a new public channel and call it something like ‘company-updates-experiment’. Don’t invite anyone to join just yet. Head to the Slack App Directory or Microsoft’s Apps for Teams and search for the tools you already use. Follow the steps to connect them to your chat app and the new updates channel. 

Play around with each integration's notifications settings, making sure what shows up in the channel is understandable and acceptable for everyone to see. If there are any apps that don’t offer a chat notifications integration, but do include email notifications, create a Slack channel email address and set up an automatic forwarding rule. Any time a notification email comes in that includes a trigger phrase, it gets forwarded to your channel’s Slack email address and shows up as a message in the channel.

At this point, you could start inviting people to this channel, but they’ll have access to the entire chat history, which you probably don’t want. Archive the experiment channel and recreate it, including only the safe-for-everyone notifications. Then, start by inviting all the managers and let the channel run for a week or two, just to double-check that an HR integration doesn’t show private information or a project management app doesn’t flood the channel with unengaging updates.

In a perfect world, people will actually enjoy joining in conversations outside of their usual sphere of influence. A designer might leave emoji reactions on closed sales deals, or a receptionist might comment on a meeting update involving a regular office visitor. These are things everyone benefits from seeing, so why not put them up on a TV or monitor mounted on the wall?

A digital signage app like ScreenCloud works with just about any hardware, includes a native Slack and Microsoft Teams integration, and ensures your company-updates channel is almost impossible to ignore. Sign up for a free trial, log in, click the Apps sidebar, search for Slack or Teams, and connect your new company notifications channel. You can preview what your screen would look like before even connecting a TV or monitor.

Now, when employees are too busy to check the channel on their desktop, they can at least see updates and notifications as they walk to the break room for a cup of coffee or to a conference room for a team meeting. People are naturally drawn to digital signage content. And if you can animate it – that’s even better.

Method 2: Create an RSS feed and turn it into a scrolling ticker tape

RSS feeds are easy to repackage and reformat however you like. Originally built to get updates from blogs and news sites, they can also be used to get a stream of notifications from your work apps. Then, you can format your updates stream to look like the ticker tapes on TV news channels.

Let’s say you want to create a company-wide notification whenever a deal is updated in HubSpot.

The easiest way to do that is with a Zapier automation that can build a notifications RSS feed from hundreds of apps—including HubSpot. Log into a free Zapier account and click Create. Choose HubSpot as the App and Updated Deal Stage as the Event. Connect your HubSpot account and pick the deal pipeline and stage that will trigger a notification. Confirm with a test that Zapier can see your deal information, then move on to the Action step.

Search for RSS by Zapier, select that as your action, with Create Item in Feed as the Event, and click Continue. The first thing you’ll see is your Feed URL. Add companyupdates after the trailing slash and click Copy – you’ll need the URL later. In the Feed Title field, add something like ‘Company Updates,’ and pick the maximum number of notifications you want your RSS feed to store at once in the Max Records field.

Since a scrolling ticker has limited real estate on the screen, put all the information you want to display in the Item Title field. It might look something like ‘HubSpot - The [Deal information: Deal Name] deal has moved to the [Deal activity: Deal Stage] stage!’ You can add just about any other variable from the sales pipeline, but for this case, shorter is better. 

Test the Zap to ensure it works, then paste your feed URL into a new browser tab. If you see your HubSpot notification in XML format, it’s ready for you to connect to an internal communications dashboard or digital signage. Log into ScreenCloud, head to the Apps tab, and search for RSS Feed. Click Get App, followed by New Instance, paste your feed’s URL into the first field, and click Save.

To create a screen layout with multiple zones for running apps and content independent of each other, open the Channels tab. Hit the New Channel button, give it a name, choose the orientation, and click Create Channel. Then, in the right-hand sidebar, open the Edit Layout window and select the 3 Zones layout. Adding content to a zone is as simple as clicking on it in the diagram on the right-hand side of the screen or selecting it from the dark gray dropdown menu in the upper left corner. 

Open the Preview window to see how your first RSS-based notification looks. If all is well, head back to Zapier and start creating Zaps for any other notification you want everyone to see. Just remember to use the same companyupdates text after the trailing slash whenever creating a new RSS by Zapier. You'll have two separate RSS feeds if it’s just one letter off.

Method 3: Use Playgrounds to customize your RSS design and layout

Since an RSS feed is little more than structured data, it doesn’t take much code to parse out individual items and run them through some JavaScript and CSS transformations. You could, say, make your RSS feed look like the scrolling text that plays before each Star Wars movie, starting big and wide at the bottom of the screen and slowly narrowing to a vanishing point at the top. You don’t even need to have any programming background.

The first thing is deciding where to host the JavaScript and CSS. That might be a webpage that’s only accessible from your office network or in ScreenCloud Playgrounds, where you can store and run JavaScript, CSS, and HTML that will run on your digital signage. For the latter, you’d add Playgrounds from ScreenCloud’s Apps tab and create a new instance.

First, Playgrounds needs a way to grab data from your RSS feed. One option is to write the code from scratch. But after a natural language explanation of the end goal, ChatGPT eliminated the need for manual coding:

That’ll put your RSS items on the page, they’ll just be ugly. To make your notifications look professionally designed, grab some CSS code that someone else has written and have ChatGPT update it for your use case. For example, css-tricks.com has an awesome snippet for the Star Wars Crawl Text. In the span of about 15 minutes, ChatGPT repurposed the CSS to work with our RSS JavaScript.

With the flexible nature of RSS-style content, you could turn your company notifications into any animation you could find on Replit or Codepen.io. The more your internal communications match your company culture, the more effective they’ll be. The same goes for visibility, and there’s no better way to make important information more noticeable than with digital signage.

Level up your employee engagement with ScreenCloud

Slack’s study on cross-team collaboration found that “innovator” and “early adopter” companies scored better in every category than “tech laggards.” With a few extra screens around the office, you can create powerful hubs for employee engagement. Whether it’s gamification for digital signage or dynamic graphs and charts based on internal data, employees want more chances to connect with their co-workers.

Grab your free 14-day trial of ScreenCloud today and start building a signage program that encourages meaningful communication and collaboration.