Internal Communications & Culture Strategy

01 / Context

When I joined the Ministry of Finance's communications team in September 2025, digital and social communication was treated as an afterthought. It was something bolted onto a press release after the fact, rather than a channel with its own unique value.

The Starting Point

The first Instagram Reel we produced took nearly two months to go from idea to filming, due to friction, hesitation, and subjects misunderstanding the format of social media. The standard sequence until then had been: publish the press release, then ask, almost as an afterthought, “should we also do something for social media?”

Content reflected that. Channels were dominated by handshake photos in front of flags, cluttered template graphics, or stock-style landscape images carrying no intended message. The ministry’s externally facing digital identity was distant, reactive, and bureaucratic.

A similar situation was observable internally. The weekly staff newsletter had run unchanged for years. The same cover image, the same intro, created in Word and awkwardly squeezed into Outlook when sent out. It was the mirror image of the effort directed externally.

01 / The old internal newsletter

02 / An example of prior content

03 / An example of prior content

04 / An example of prior content

Winds of Change

The origin of this situation was twofold. First, it was partly a skill issue in the sense that people in charge simply didn’t know better. Stemming from that, employees internally worked within the limits of what the communications department could produce or suggest.

Summer 2025 brought three new members to the communications department, and as more proactivity was strived for, the realisation sunk in that, due to this prior history, a team of five generalists was expected to generate ideas on behalf of roughly 200 subject-matter specialists across the ministry.

Proactivity was difficult to come by. Ideas rarely originated with the specialists themselves. Much of what came back was dry, routine, and produced with little thought for who the audience actually was or why a given piece of communication existed in the first place because that was simply how it had always been done. Some of this was structural to a five-person team stretched thin; some of it was a comfort zone that had settled in over years, particularly among colleagues who’d been in the role 4+ years.

I joined alongside two other new hires that year, and it was a largely shared initiative among the three of us that started pushing on that comfort zone but, of course, not without some initial friction.

02 / Diagnosis

The core issue was that ownership of communication sat with a five-person bottleneck instead of being distributed across the people who actually had something to say. As long as comms had to manufacture ideas from scratch for every specialist team, output would stay relatively slow, reactive, and generic.

Fixing that meant giving people inside the ministry both a reason to want to communicate and a visible, low-friction way to do it without the communications team stepping back from its own job. The value seeked for was in comms and specialists working together. Comms alone produces texts which sound decent but without much substance and specialists alone produce substance without the appropriate packaging for most audiences. Collaboration was what kept the nuance of a topic intact while still making it land.

“We also used it to create light competitive pressure, naming whose blog performed best that month, which reliably got colleagues coming by to say they intended to write a better one to beat the 'score'.”

03 / What we did

The team's contributions here were genuinely collaborative. Ideas, strategy, and execution were shared across the group, with content production and visual work running through me, and internal communications sitting primarily in my remit (colleagues focused on internal audiences too, when it served their own specialist areas).

Newsletter overhaul (Sept 2025).

Within the first week, we rebuilt the weekly internal newsletter from the ground up: coded HTML to make it actually render properly in Outlook, a cover image that changed weekly to track whatever was actually happening in the building (an in-joke about the office coffee machine, a meme made from a colleague’s photo - always checked with the people involved first to keep it kind), and a tone that shifted from bureaucratic to something closer to a Substack rubric people might look forward to. It was designed to be immediately, visibly different every single week. A small, weekly proof that things could change.

A meme carrying an inside joke

Changing usual news headlines drastically more positive

Spring forecast presentation -> Spring newsletter presentation

The building turned into a coffee machine, carrying political jokes

"Social Media Hits" monthly report (from Oct 2025).

To get specialists invested in social media and find value in it, we launched a monthly intranet report covering performance across LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, blogs, and the top pages on the public website, plus a “monthly surprise” section spotlighting wins (a new employee who’d started posting on LinkedIn, a hard-won piece of content finally published, a colleague’s blog outperforming expectations).

Deliberately, the report favored morale and narrative-safety over full transparency of every metric. It wasn’t the place to discourage someone’s first time on camera by pointing out a post’s negative-comment-driven reach. Genuine underperformance was still noted, but the framing consistently lowered the psychological barrier to participating. We also used it to create light competitive pressure, naming whose blog performed best that month, which reliably got colleagues coming by to say they intended to write a better one to beat the “score.” Visually, we broke from the ministry’s default blue with a bright pink design and a looser, more playful voice. It became one of our best-performing internal pieces, consistently ranking in the top two of roughly 7–12 intranet stories over the first two weeks of every month.

Communications roadshow (Nov 2025).

Once the team had built up more in-house content and creative capability, we took the ministry’s broader communications picture directly to individual departments. We presented market research on who gets covered, when, and why; outside perceptions based on interviews with external experts and former staff; where we wanted the narrative to go; and, critically, what tools and capabilities the team now had (video, design, web, programming) that our specialists could actually draw on.

The goal was first to hand people awareness of where the ministry stood in the public eye and where we wanted to direct it. Just as importantly, we wanted to give them agency by naming the concrete ways we could help them communicate their own domains. It was well-received enough that other departments invited us to repeat it twice more, without us prompting it.

Outside speakers (from Feb 2026).

Starting in the new year, we began inviting outside voices to talk to the ministry monthly, rather than relying solely on our own team to make the case for better communication.

Notably, we hosted SEB bank economist Mihkel Nestor. Known in Estonia for making dry economic topics genuinely engaging, for hosting the country’s most popular economics podcast, and for being the first person media reach out to for comment in that domain.

The second impactful session came from the Ministry of Defence’s Defence Will and Human Resource Policy Department. A small internal team that has, on a modest budget, put camouflage patterns on everyday items like milk cartons, ice creams, Bolt vehicles etc., got their hoodie on Zelensky within 12 hours, built a meme-driven social presence with a wider reach than any other ministry, and made people genuinely proud to be part of the reserve forces on a larger scale.

The point was to let people making a similar case, pursuing creativity in a seemingly dry topic, do some of the persuading for us, with real, local examples.

04 / Resistance and what actually shifted it

The early pushback came mostly from colleagues comfortable with the existing routine, particularly around the tone changes. What moved past that was visible proof in the form of compliments arriving from other departments and institutions, from designers at the State Chancellery, and from the audience itself - it made the change hard to argue with internally. The roadshow reinforced this further by making capability and intent explicit instead of asking employees to figure it out on their own.

“What once took two months from idea to filming now regularly happens in under 12 hours.”

05 / Outcome

In May 2026, the team restructured from five people to four. One colleague left and wasn't replaced, her responsibilities were absorbed by the rest of the team, and department leadership changed to someone better suited to the pace the work now demanded. Despite the smaller headcount, output is higher than it has ever been.

The clearest evidence of the shift is speed and initiative in both directions. What once took two months from idea to filming now regularly happens in under 12 hours, whether the idea originates with comms or with a specialist: a Reel gets proposed, a timeslot is suggested immediately, a script gets drafted the same day, and it happens without the back-and-forth that used to precede it. Idea generation is now meaningfully as specialist-driven as it is comms-driven. Ahead of the state budget, forecasts, EU budget cycles, etc., the people responsible for those topics now come to the communications team proactively, alongside the team continuing to initiate work itself.

The department’s output has also changed in kind, not just volume. Interactive tools and graphics on the public website, including a state budget simulator; content written for a specific audience; and press releases supplemented by proactive explainer content across formats and channels. What was a team producing conventional government communications a year ago now operates leaner and closer to an in-house creative agency by shipping fast, entirely in-house, and making state finance more accessible than it’s ever been.

In May 2026, this approach was recognised outside Estonia. The European Commission's DG REGIO invited me as one of 25 member state communication officers to speak at the INFORM EU thematic seminar on visual communication in Valencia, representing the Ministry of Finance's approach to a best-practices session on what works, what doesn't, and what other member states could replicate.

The invitation itself was a signal of what we had done well since the organisers specifically flagged our shift away from multi-layered approval chains and external procurement toward an agile, in-house model as one of the angles they wanted covered. The resulting talk walked through why visual communication matters for complex EU-funded topics, our audience funnel across platforms, our in-house operating model, and concrete good and bad examples from our own output.

Being asked to present the Ministry’s approach as a model for other member states was the clearest outside confirmation that the shift in ways of working had produced something worth replicating elsewhere.