It is the second Tuesday of the month and the communications report is due Thursday. Somewhere on your team, a person with a postgraduate degree in communications is copying figures out of the SharePoint site usage report into a spreadsheet. Then they open the Viva Engage activity report and do the same thing. Then they log into the newsletter platform for open rates. Then they spend an hour working out why the three of them disagree about how many people work here. That will take most of two days. It will produce a deck nobody asks a follow-up question about, and next month it will be rebuilt from nothing.
That is the productivity problem in internal communication. It is not writing speed, and it is not the publishing tools. It is assembly.
Four tabs that never agree
Every internal communication team in a Microsoft 365 organisation reports out of the same set of places. The SharePoint site usage report in the Microsoft 365 admin centre gives page views and unique viewers per site across a rolling window. The Viva Engage activity report counts people who posted, read or liked. The newsletter platform counts opens against a distribution list. Teams has its own analytics again[1].
Each of those is a competent report about its own product. The trouble starts the moment you put them side by side, because they do not share a definition of anything that matters to you.
They do not share a definition of a person. The SharePoint report counts a viewer. The Viva Engage report counts an active user, which includes someone who only read. The newsletter platform counts a recipient on a list that HR refreshes monthly, so it still contains people who left in March. Three denominators, three answers to “what percentage of the organisation did we reach”, and no way to reconcile them without a fourth source.
They do not share a period boundary either. Rolling seven, thirty, ninety and one hundred and eighty day windows are not the same thing as calendar months, and the retention windows differ by report, which is why the year-on-year comparison your director asked for quietly became a six-month comparison.
And none of them holds your organisational structure. Not one of these reports knows that a person is a shift supervisor in a plant in Lyon rather than a category manager at head office. That single absence is what turns a fifteen-minute question into a two-day export exercise.
The three rebuilds that eat the week
When teams describe where the time goes, it is almost always one of three patterns.
The rebuild from scratch. The monthly slide is not maintained, it is recreated. Someone reopens last month’s file, discovers the export format changed or the site list grew, and starts again. Nothing about the work compounds. Month twelve costs the same as month one.
The question asked after the meeting. “Did the safety campaign actually land in the plants?” is a reasonable question from a COO. It is also, in the manual setup, a fresh project: pull the site figures, pull the Viva Engage figures, get an HR extract, match on email addresses, discover four hundred shop-floor staff have no mailbox at all, and hand back an answer nine days later that nobody still cares about.
Nine days is the real cost. Not the hours. The answer arrived after the decision.
The reconciliation argument. Someone in IT produces a different number for the same period, and the next forty minutes of an executive meeting are spent on whose spreadsheet is right rather than on what the organisation should do. Every internal communication lead has sat through this. It is the single fastest way to lose credibility for a function that is already fighting to be treated as evidential.
Gallagher’s State of the Sector research has repeatedly found measurement to be the capability internal communicators name as their biggest gap[2]. Read that finding carefully: the gap is rarely a shortage of analytical skill. It is that the skill is spent on data preparation instead of analysis.
| Recurring task | Where the number lives | What breaks when you join it by hand |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly reach across channels | SharePoint site usage, Viva Engage activity, newsletter platform | Three different denominators, so the percentage is indefensible |
| Reach by function or site | Nowhere. Requires an HR or Entra ID extract joined manually | Matching fails for anyone without a personal mailbox |
| Year-on-year trend | Native reports, within their retention window | The window ends before the comparison period starts |
| Campaign performance mid-flight | Each channel separately, at its own refresh lag | The campaign is over before the joined view exists |
| Answering a follow-up question | A new export from every source | Days of turnaround for a question worth minutes |
When doing it by hand is genuinely right
This needs saying plainly, because the opposite claim is what makes vendor content unreadable. If you run one intranet site and one community for a population of a few hundred people, the native reports are free, already switched on, and entirely sufficient. Export them once a month, keep the spreadsheet, and spend the saved budget on something else. Our walkthrough of what SharePoint native analytics does well is a better starting point than any purchase.
The calculus changes on three specific thresholds, not on company size alone: when you publish through more than two channels, when your population is segmented in ways that matter operationally, such as sites, unions, languages or shift patterns, and when someone senior starts asking questions that require a denominator. Below those thresholds, manual is fine. Above them, manual quietly consumes a full-time role that nobody ever budgeted.
The Power BI route, honestly
The usual next step is a custom Power BI build against the Microsoft Graph reporting API[3]. It is a legitimate route and some organisations run it well. It is also more demanding than the first sprint suggests, and three things need to be said before you commit a budget line to it.
The Graph reporting API is not consistently reliable and produces days with missing data. Customers have observed KPI values in Power BI that do not reconcile with the native SharePoint reports for the same period. A dependable build therefore needs a robust ingestion process and scheduled reconciliation against the native figures, with a named owner for both. Budget for the pipeline, not the dashboard. Our longer note on SharePoint analytics in Power BI sets out the failure modes in detail, and if you are scoping the work, the piece on the internal communications analyst role is a realistic view of who ends up owning it.
What getting the week back actually buys
The wrong way to justify this internally is “we will save two days a month”. Finance has heard that from every software proposal it has ever received, and time saved is the least persuasive benefit in the catalogue. Three other things are more defensible.
- You answer in the room. When the question arrives in the meeting and the answer arrives in the same meeting, the function changes status. That is a different conversation from the one where you promise to come back with a number.
- You correct a campaign while it is still running. A three-week campaign that is missing an entire region in week one can be fixed in week one. Under monthly manual reporting, you learn about it in week five, when the only available action is a retrospective.
- The budget conversation survives contact with a sceptic. Gallup’s workplace research has consistently found that a large share of the global workforce is disengaged, and that the gap is widest in frontline and deskless populations[4]. If you can show participation by population rather than in aggregate, you are arguing about where to invest. If you can only show totals, you are arguing about whether the function works.
Embedding Viva Engage in SharePoint is a different problem
It is worth separating two things that get conflated. Embedding a Viva Engage conversation into a SharePoint news page is a genuine improvement to the reader’s experience: the discussion happens where the content is, rather than in a second destination the reader has to remember to visit. Do it where it fits.
What it does not do is join the data. The embedded feed still reports through Viva Engage, the page still reports through SharePoint site analytics, and the two remain separate numbers with separate definitions. Integrating the surfaces and integrating the measurement are unrelated projects, and assuming the first delivers the second is one of the more common planning mistakes we see. The article on measuring cross-channel internal communications covers what joining actually requires.
This is the layer Tryane occupies. It reads SharePoint, Viva Engage, Teams and your newsletter platform together, joins that activity to your organisational structure through Entra ID or an HR file, and keeps history across product transitions so a multi-year trend is one line rather than two disconnected reports. Tryane is SOC 2 Type 2 certified and GDPR compliant by design, hosts in the EU by default with US data residency available on request, deploys in a couple of hours over single sign-on with Azure AD or Entra ID, and installs no agent. If you are rebuilding the monthly pack, our internal communications reporting template and the guide to executive reporting are the two most useful places to start.
Frequently asked questions
How much time does internal communication reporting really take?
Measure it rather than estimate it, because the honest number usually surprises the team that produces it. For one month, log every hour spent exporting, matching, checking and rebuilding, including the ad hoc questions that arrive between reports. Most teams find the ad hoc work is larger than the scheduled report, and it is entirely invisible in any workload plan.
Can we not export everything once and reuse the file?
Only until something changes, which is usually within a quarter. A new site appears, a community is renamed, the HR extract changes column order, or a report’s schema is updated. Manual joins are brittle by design because nothing enforces the keys. That is why the work never compounds: each month is a fresh reconciliation rather than a refresh.
Does integrating Viva Engage with SharePoint improve our reporting?
It improves the reader’s experience and can lift participation on a page, which is a good reason to do it. It does not merge the measurement. The embedded conversation continues to report through Viva Engage and the page continues to report through SharePoint site analytics, with different definitions of an active user on each side.
Should we build this ourselves in Power BI?
You can, and some organisations do it well. Go in knowing that the Microsoft Graph reporting API produces days with missing data, that customers have seen Power BI KPI values that do not reconcile with the native SharePoint reports for the same period, and that a dependable build needs a robust ingestion process, scheduled reconciliation and a named owner. Budget for the pipeline rather than the dashboard.
If we can only change one thing this quarter, what should it be?
Fix the denominator. Agree, in writing, what population each report is measured against and where that population comes from. Almost every reconciliation argument in internal communication is a denominator disagreement wearing a different hat, and settling it costs nothing but a decision.
Sources
• Microsoft Learn, Microsoft 365 activity reports
• Gallagher, State of the Sector
• Microsoft Learn, Microsoft Graph reporting API overview
• Gallup, State of the Global Workplace
Further reading
• An internal communications reporting template you can reuse
• Measuring cross-channel internal communications
• How to build an internal communications dashboard
• Internal communication KPIs for 2026
• Executive reporting for internal communications
Tryane runs a 15-minute working session with Heads of Internal Communication, mapping where your monthly reporting time actually goes and showing what the joined view looks like on your own tenant. Book a slot with Jérémy.