Internal Communications Work Sample | Jeanette Pierce | Crane NXT

Comcast NBCUniversal LIFT Labs Internal Communications Strategy

Connecting Innovation Culture to Business Outcomes through Leadership Behavior, Experience and Narrative

Example shared at a strategic level to illustrate approach; details generalized to protect proprietary information.

The Business Moment & Communications Mandate

About LIFT Labs
LIFT Labs is Comcast NBCUniversal’s corporate innovation and startup engagement platform, operating within Strategic Development, to accelerate product innovation, learning, and new capabilities through founder partnerships.

The Business Moment:

  • Comcast was externally repositioning itself from a cable company to a global technology company, with tangible signals such as the new Comcast Technology Center.
  • Internally, innovation was not yet experienced consistently. For many employees, it felt abstract and disconnected from day-to-day work.
  • This gap created a credibility risk between the company’s strategy and the employee experience.

The Communications Mandate:

Design and execute an internal communications strategy that bridges external brand positioning and internal cultural reality, making innovation visible, relevant, and actionable across the enterprise.

  • Translate innovation from an abstract corporate priority into clear, lived behaviors embedded in day-to-day work.
  • Align leadership messaging and behavior so innovation consistently shows up in how leaders talk about growth, learning, and the future.
  • Use communications to reinforce the culture the business needs to compete, positioning innovation as how Comcast attracts talent, accelerates learning, and builds future-ready capabilities that drive revenue and growth.

Operating Model:

  • Owned the communication strategy end to end with responsibility for strategy design, execution, measurement, and ongoing evolution.
  • Lean, central team (me +1 FTE) supported by select, value-driven external partners operating with a startup-sized budget.
  • Partnered with executive leadership across growth, technology, and communications to shape how innovation showed up in enterprise meetings, external narratives, and internal forums.

Strategic Communication Objectives

Create Shared Understanding and Relevance

Ensure employees and leaders clearly understand how innovation support the business strategy and how it applies to their own work.

Align and Activate Leadership Messaging and Behavior

Equip leaders at all levels to consistently communicate, model, and reinforce innovation as part of how the business grows, learns, and competes.

Drive Participation Through Visibility and Experience

Use storytelling, real examples, and experiential moments to move employees from awareness to active participation in innovation.

Communications Framework

Connecting Innovation Culture to Business Outcomes

1

Business Priority First

Communications anchors to a clear business objective and translates into concrete relevance for employees' day-to-day work.

2

Visible Leadership Behavior

Emphasis on leaders showing up as champions, mentors, and learners to build credibility and signal that experimentation is valued.

3

Clear Narrative Drumbeat

A single innovation narrative is intentionally reinforced through leadership forums, storytelling, and real examples of work, aligning external brand positioning, internal culture, business priorities, and talent messaging.

4

Meaningful Participation

Multiple, low-barrier entry points, tailored to each audience rather than one-size-fits-all, allow employees to experience innovation directly, not just hear about it.

5

Designed to Scale

The approach integrates into existing leadership rhythms and enterprise channels so momentum sustains beyond one-off moments.

6

Credibility and Momentum

Trust and participation increase, enabling innovation behaviors to scale beyond a standalone program; reinforced by external validation, including recognition by Fast Company as a top place for innovators to work.

The Framework in Practice

Role of Communications

Clarify the change, align leadership behavior, and reinforce the narrative through experience and enterprise rhythms.

Leadership Partnership

Develop and reinforce the narrative in close partnership with enterprise, growth, technology, communications, and people leaders, enabling consistent reinforcement from the top and through every level of leadership.

Success Looks Like

Employees understand how innovation connects to their work and the company’s future and act on it in small, everyday ways. They test new approaches, raise ideas, and use pilots or experiments instead of defaulting to “how we’ve always done it.” Leaders reinforce this naturally - not just in formal comms moments.

Core Messaging & Audience Strategy

Primary Message:

Innovation is everyone’s job. By learning from founders and applying a startup mindset to our products, processes, and ways of working, we accelerate Comcast’s evolution and ability to compete for the future.

Key Audiences & Entry Points:

Strategy: One enterprise narrative, adapted by audience to drive behavior

Experiential Engagement as a Cultural Accelerator

Strategic Intent
The communications strategy deliberately uses immersive, high-energy experiences to make innovation tangible, social, and exciting, creating emotional buy-in alongside understanding.

What This Looked Like

  • Leadership Learning in Public
    Leaders participate as learners and mentors, in person and virtually, signaling that innovation and experimentation are core to how the business evolves. (e.g., executives mentoring founders, participating in accelerator launches and Demo Days)
  • Direct Exposure to Real Work
    Employees engage directly with founders, products, and new ideas, making innovation tangible, relevant, and credible. (e.g., employee participation in Demo Days, founder-led sessions, internal Lab Weeks and partnerships)
  • Shared Moments that Build Energy
    Flagship experiences create momentum and excitement that sustains the innovation narrative. (e.g., accelerator launches, major ecosystem moments like SXSW and regional tech weeks, video, live streams, docuseries)

Startup founders and Comcast partners ahead of a Demo Day showcase event, illustrating the participatory, high-energy moments that helped embed innovation into the culture.

Integrated Enterprise Communications

How the Strategy Scales Beyond LIFT Labs

Visible leadership is a key driver of adoption. Brian Roberts, Chairman & CEO, attending a LIFT Labs event, demonstrating leadership presence and reinforcing innovation as an enterprise priority.

Embedded in Leadership Rhythms

Innovation shows up in existing leadership forums and business conversations, not just LIFT Labs moments.

Aligned, Not Centralized

The narrative is integrated into enterprise communications through close partnership with internal and corporate communications, without requiring centralized channel ownership. Employees are also invited in to LIFT Labs-owned channels.

Leader-Led Reinforcement

C-level leaders, senior leaders, and people managers are equipped with language, tools and stories to connect innovation to business priorities and reinforce it credibly in their own forums.

Consistent, Not Constant

A single core story is repackaged across enterprise and external communications, reinforcing credibility and alignment without increasing message volume.

Results & Business Impact

Traction and success are primarily evaluated through participation, leadership engagement, program adoption, observable behavior change, and qualitative sentiment from leaders and employees.

Leadership & Culture Signals


  • Enterprise-wide employee engagement in innovation-focused events and programs
  • Active leader participation as mentors and innovation partners
  • Regional ownership enabled through an employee ambassador model
  • Sustained growth in internal audiences and engagement over time

Engagement & Adoption


  • Leaders increasingly engaging directly in pilots and startup partnerships
  • Organic adoption of new communication formats, including podcasts and peer storytelling
  • Employee-led ownership, including an employee-founded startup entering the accelerator
  • Leader-led narrative reinforcement, with innovation showing up in leaders’ own forums and communications
  • Rising pride and identification with innovation, reflected in engagement feedback, participation, and sentiment

Business Outcomes Enabled


  • Startup partnerships progressing into pilots, proofs of concept, and commercial work with internal teams and leaders
  • Adoption of innovation practices beyond technology teams, including HR, Universal, and Corp Comms
  • Stronger talent brand and employer credibility, reinforced through external recognition (Fast Company “Best Places to Work for Innovators”)
  • Executive validation of innovation’s impact on core business functions

CTO: “LIFT Labs has been a strong direct and indirect influence on the Product & Technology organization.”

Communications don’t create these outcomes, but enable leadership alignment and employee experience that make them possible.

Why This Works - Lessons from Enterprise Transformation

Transformation scales through leadership behavior, disciplined narrative, and execution by design. This approach is especially effective during strategic pivots, when employees need a clear, credible bridge between what the company has been and where it’s going.

Design for Scale from the Start

Anchoring the strategy in clear business imperatives, and embedding the narrative into existing leadership rhythms and enterprise systems sustains momentum beyond one-off moments.

Culture Follows Leadership Behavior

Employees take cues from what leaders model, prioritize, and reinforce, and not what is announced once.

Communications Enables Culture

The role of communications is to clarify direction, reinforce the right behaviors, and create credibility through consistency.

Experience as a Catalyst

Immersive, high-energy experiences make innovation tangible and emotionally resonant, accelerating belief and participation across the enterprise.

Alignment Beats Volume

A clear, shared narrative carried by leaders scales more effectively than high message frequency or channel saturation.