CATEGORY: Integrations

Entra use cases

Engaging Communities, Delivering Services: How e-shot Empowers the UK Public Sector 

Communicating effectively is the lifeblood of the UK public sector. From local councils keeping residents informed to NHS trusts promoting vital health campaigns and emergency services providing critical alerts, clear, timely, and accessible communication isn't just important – it's essential. However, navigating tight budgets, diverse audiences, and the constant need for trust and transparency presents unique challenges. 

Enter e-shot. As a dedicated UK-based digital communication platform, we understand the specific pressures and responsibilities public sector organisations face. We're designed not just to send messages, but to build engagement, streamline processes, and help you deliver better services, all while ensuring the highest standards of security and accessibility. 

Let's explore a couple of keyways e-shot is making a difference across the public sector landscape. 

 

Streamlining Internal Communications 

Keeping staff informed, engaged, and aligned is crucial for any organisation, perhaps even more so in the public sector where teams often work across diverse services and locations. Effective internal communication ensures everyone is aware of organisational goals, policy updates, training opportunities, and vital wellbeing initiatives.    

Targeted Staff Updates: e-shot makes sending internal newsletters, bulletins, and updates straightforward. You can segment staff lists just like external audiences, ensuring relevant information reaches the right teams or departments.    

Maintaining Accurate Contact Data with Entra: A major challenge for internal comms is keeping staff contact lists accurate, especially in large organisations with joiners, movers, and leavers. Manually updating lists is time-consuming and prone to errors. This is where e-shot’s Microsoft Entra (formerly Azure AD) integration provides a significant advantage.  

Automated Synchronisation: The integration enables scheduled, automatic synchronisation of contacts from specified Entra groups directly into corresponding e-shot groups.    

Up to Date & Accurate: This ensures your internal mailing lists are always current, reflecting the latest staff changes managed within your core IT system. Say goodbye to outdated spreadsheets and bounce backs from former employees!    

Efficiency & Compliance: It drastically reduces administrative overhead for comms and HR teams, improves data accuracy, and supports GDPR compliance regarding employee data.    

Secure Solution: The integration uses secure Microsoft Graph API access and adheres to best practices, ensuring data is handled safely and encrypted over HTTPS. It's fully ISO27001-aligned, making it suitable for secure public sector environments.   

Personalising Internal Comms with Dynamic Subject Lines: In a crowded inbox, making your internal communications stand out is key. Personalisation helps cut through the noise. e-shot's email editor allows you to use dynamic content fields (also known as merge fields or personalisation tags) directly within your subject lines.  

Leveraging Synced Data: Data fields synchronised via the Entra integration, such as 'Department' or 'Job Title', can be automatically pulled into the subject line for each recipient.

For example, imagine a subject line like: Update for the %%Department%% Team. When sent, each staff member sees their specific department name (e.g., "Update for the Finance Team" or "Update for the Housing Services Team"). 

Increased Relevance: This simple technique instantly makes the email feel more relevant, increasing the likelihood it will be opened and read, boosting engagement with crucial internal updates.   

Targeted Emergency Communications When Every Second Counts

In a crisis: Whether it's a localised flood, a public health emergency, or a major incident – getting accurate information to the right people quickly is critical. Blanket alerts can sometimes cause unnecessary panic or be ignored if perceived as irrelevant. Effective emergency communication requires precision.    

Rapid Multi-Channel Alerts: e-shot enables the swift dispatch of urgent messages via both email and SMS, ensuring information reaches people through multiple touchpoints.    

Location-Based Segmentation: Crucially, e-shot allows you to segment your audience based on location data held within your contact records (such as postcodes, wards, or other geographical fields). This means you can send highly targeted alerts only to residents, businesses, or responders in the specific areas affected by an incident. This avoids unnecessary alarm in unaffected areas and increases the relevance and impact of your message. Imagine alerting only the streets impacted by a burst water main, or residents downstream during a flood warning.    

Reliability and Security: During emergencies, platform reliability is non-negotiable. e-shot provides a robust, secure (ISO 27001, Cyber Essentials Plus) platform designed for high-stakes communication, trusted by organisations involved in resilience forums and emergency response.  

 

Automating the Welcome Experience for New Starters 

The Entra integration perfectly complements e-shot's automation capabilities to create seamless onboarding journeys. When a new employee joins and is added to the relevant Entra group, they are automatically synced into the designated e-shot group. This "added to group" event can trigger an automated welcome series – a pre-defined sequence of emails sent over their first few days or weeks. This series can deliver consistent welcome messages, links to essential resources like the intranet or key policies, IT setup guides, and even use the dynamic content fields (like department) pulled via Entra to provide tailored information. This ensures every new starter receives a warm, informative welcome, saving significant time for HR and internal comms teams whilst improving the crucial early employee experience.  

Efficient, secure, and targeted communication is vital for public sector organisations. Whether streamlining internal updates with automated data synchronisation and personalised subject lines, or delivering precise, location-based alerts during emergencies, e-shot provides the capabilities needed to connect effectively and manage communications with confidence.