The risk is not that nobody signs up. It is that it stops in week three, in public.
Twelve colleagues say yes at the kickoff. Three post twice, and then the channel goes quiet. The people who watched you ask for the budget are the same people watching it fade, which is what makes this a different kind of risk from a project that quietly underdelivers.
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How do you launch an employee advocacy program so it does not stop after a few weeks?
By deciding, before the kickoff, where the work comes from once the enthusiasm has gone. The launch is the easy part and it is not the part that fails. Four things have to be true by week four, and none of them can be added later:
- Topics cannot depend on you. A program where ideas arrive from the person running it has a supply that stops the first busy month. It also produces posts that sound like you rather than like the person whose name is on them.
- The first post has to be theirs, and it has to take minutes. An empty text box is where a willing volunteer quietly becomes an inactive one, and no amount of encouragement at the kickoff changes that.
- The group has to be able to see itself working. A participant who only sees the likes on their own post is doing homework. The collective result is the thing that makes it feel like a program.
- Decay has to be visible in weeks. Somebody drops from twice a month to once to never, and if you find out six weeks later, that is a conversation. In week two it is a message.
Disclosure before we go further: we build Authira, one of the tools in this category. The four conditions above hold whether you buy anything or not. The four ways a program collapses are set out separately in why employee advocacy programs fail, which is the better page if you are still diagnosing rather than planning.
One design decision belongs up here rather than in the small print, because it is the first thing legal will ask you for. Authira has no approval workflow. There is no review queue, and an admin cannot read a draft before it is published. Guardrails work preventively instead. If mandatory sign-off before publication is non-negotiable in your organisation, you can stop reading here and buy an enterprise suite, and the last section lists everything else we deliberately do not do.
The four conversations you win before you can buy anything
This is the part nobody writes about, and it is the part that actually determines whether the program happens. Before there is anything to show, you have four conversations, and each of them can end the project on its own. What is useful at that stage is arguments, not a product tour.
| Who | What they actually ask | The argument that holds |
|---|---|---|
| The budget holder | What does it cost, and what do we get back that I can see? | A published monthly price you can put on a slide before the meeting, and one reported figure: the reach the team produced, valued in euros. Reach, not pipeline. Promising pipeline is what loses the second meeting. |
| Employee representation | Is this a system for monitoring how hard people work? | Participation is opt-in, the data comes from an export each person uploads themselves, and nothing in it feeds a review or an individual target. Those are product facts, and they are the ones worth putting in writing early. |
| Legal and compliance | What happens when somebody posts something they should not have? | Two answers, and you need both. A written posting policy people have actually read, and terms from your own blacklist flagged while somebody is drafting rather than after publication. |
| The participants' line managers | How much of my person's week does this take? | Drafting is minutes rather than an afternoon, because nobody starts from an empty box. The recurring commitment is one analytics upload, and the whole thing is voluntary, which makes it easy to end. |
Order matters more than completeness. Employee representation belongs before the pilot rather than after it, because a program that has already started is harder to renegotiate than one still on paper. What you can put in writing for that conversation is set out further down, as text you can lift into an internal email.
The budget conversation goes better when the answer is a number rather than a position, and you can take the pricing page into the meeting instead of a quote you had to request. That matters more than it sounds. A concept deck with a real figure in it gets a decision, and one with a request-a-quote placeholder gets postponed to the next budget round. What the rest of the category charges is compared in what employee advocacy software costs.
The line managers conversation is the easiest to skip and the one that quietly decides participation. Consider it from the volunteer's side. If their own manager has not been told, posting during the working day starts to feel like something they are getting away with. That is a hard feeling to sustain for a quarter.
The shape of a pilot that survives its own first quarter
A pilot of five volunteers, run for one quarter, with the checkpoints agreed before it starts. That shape is small enough to approve quickly and small enough to stop cleanly, and being stoppable is what makes it approvable. The first two checkpoints deliberately measure activity rather than results, because you control whether people publish and you do not control what LinkedIn does with a given post.
If you are relaunching rather than starting, the shape matters more, not less. A second attempt gets read against the first one, and the fastest way to be read as a repeat is to open with the same all-hands enthusiasm. A smaller, quieter, explicitly time-boxed pilot is a different proposition and can be presented as one.
| Checkpoint | What you look at | The decision it informs |
|---|---|---|
| Before the kickoff | Who volunteered without being asked twice, and whether their manager knows. | Who is actually in. Five willing people beat twelve recruited ones, and the difference shows up in week three. |
| Day 30 | How many people published at all, and how many published more than once. | Whether the problem is the tooling or the invitation. Nobody has meaningful reach data yet, so do not look for it. |
| Day 60 | Whether anyone has gone quiet, and whether that person was ever really in. | One conversation, held now rather than at the end. Re-activating somebody six weeks late is a much larger ask than catching them in the same month. |
| Day 90 | Share of the group still active, posts published, and the reach those posts earned. | Continue, resize or stop. A pilot you can stop cleanly is the one you are allowed to start. |
On picking the five: the useful question is who is already visible somewhere, or has been meaning to be. That is rarely the same list as the org chart, and it is almost never the leadership team, whose posts read as company communication no matter who writes them. Which figures are worth putting in front of leadership at the end, and which are noise, is covered in the guide to advocacy metrics and KPIs.
This is a design, not a benchmark. We have no customer dataset to draw typical numbers from, so this page publishes none, and any vendor who offers you a participation rate to expect is guessing on your behalf.
What holds participation after the launch burst
Four mechanisms, each of which exists because the alternative is you doing it by hand every month. None of them is a promise about your colleagues. They are the parts of the problem that software can take, which leaves the parts that need a person clearly marked.
Ideas that do not come from you
Each person generates drafts from their own expertise topics and their own stored anecdotes, with an idea generator for the weeks when nothing comes to mind. Topic supply is the line that usually runs out first, and it is the one that stops being your job.
A first post that already sounds like them
Setup is four questions about their work plus one tone setting, and that profile is attached to everything they generate afterwards. This is the mechanism aimed squarely at the blank page, which is the obstacle a volunteer meets first and the one they meet alone.
A result the group can see
The team view is visible to every member rather than to admins only: collective reach, the shared monthly target, consistency streaks and a leaderboard carrying colleagues' names. For most teams that visibility is the point. For a few it is a conversation to have before the invitations go out.
Decay you find in week two
The health check lists every participant with posts in the last completed week, their streak and the date of their last data upload, sorted so whoever needs attention sits at the top. It is the screen in the picture at the top of this page.
The third is the least obvious and the one worth arguing for internally. A participant working alone sees the likes on their own post and nothing else, which is a thin signal to sustain a habit on. Making the collective number visible to the people producing it is what turns twelve separate efforts into something that reads as a program from the inside.
It is a category-standard mechanic rather than anything we invented, and it is not universally welcome. A group that would find a named leaderboard uncomfortable should know it exists before they accept an invitation.
Why a specific person stops posting is a different question from why a program stops, and it is covered in getting employees to post on LinkedIn and in the piece on blank page anxiety. What the drafting looks like for a member sits on the content assistant page.
Team Motivation
Streaks, team goals & shared momentum.
18 weeks in a row
weekly goal: 10 posts
Team Activity
You are not signing up to become a program manager
You already have a job, and you can see the version of this that works, which involves somebody chasing eleven people. That job is real, and being precise about which parts of it software takes is more useful than being reassured.
What stops being manual. Topic supply, because members draft from their own profile. The monthly report, because it is a screen you export rather than a slide you rebuild. Noticing who has gone quiet, because that is a sorted list instead of an afternoon spent opening profiles.
What stays yours, permanently. Choosing who to invite and persuading them. The conversation with the person who has stopped. Deciding what the program is for and defending it at budget time. None of that is automatable, and a tool that claimed otherwise would be selling you a disappointment.
One assumption worth correcting now. There are no reminder emails and no nudges. If your rollout plan quietly assumed the tool would chase people for you, that plan needs adjusting before the kickoff, not after it. What the product offers instead is a shared target, a visible team view and a health check, so the nudge you do send is informed and rare.
If the program runs for a year, the job you end up with is the one described on running an advocacy program without software, written for the person already doing it by hand. It is a fair preview of what you are signing up to, minus the parts listed above.
The conversation with employee representation
This is the conversation that most often freezes a program at the approval stage, usually because nobody has written down what the system actually records. Authira does record posting activity per person, consistency streaks, a named leaderboard and a status showing who has gone quiet. That is worth stating plainly and early rather than being discovered later.
In Germany, a technical system capable of monitoring employee performance or behaviour is generally subject to codetermination under section 87 (1) no. 6 of the Works Constitution Act. Whether a given pilot falls under it is a question for your works council, and in many cases the conversation is shorter than expected when the scope is voluntary and small. This is orientation written with German law in mind, not legal advice, and it does not cover other jurisdictions.
What you can put in writing before that meeting is the factual description below. It contains no legal assessment, deliberately, because that assessment is not ours to make. It is four statements about how the product works, which is the part you can actually stand behind.
For your internal email
Participation in the pilot is voluntary. Nobody is enrolled without accepting an invitation, and anybody can leave without giving a reason.
The activity data comes from each participant's own LinkedIn analytics export, downloaded and uploaded by that person. The tool has no connection to LinkedIn, collects nothing in the background, and shows nothing that a participant did not upload themselves.
Nothing in the tool feeds a performance review. There are no individual targets and no manager-facing scoring. The one shared goal is a monthly team target rather than a quota per person.
The scope is a pilot: five voluntary participants, one quarter, with an agreed point at which we decide to continue or stop.
The ceiling on all of this. The four statements describe a voluntary pilot, and that is the only thing they describe. They do not clear a mandatory rollout, and we do not claim they do. If participation in your organisation would be assigned rather than chosen, the conversation is a different one and the answers above stop applying.
There is also a version of this that ends here. If your works council has already ruled out per-person activity tracking of any kind, that rules out Authira, because activity per person is what the team view and the health check are made of. No configuration turns it off, and knowing that now is cheaper than finding it out after an evaluation.
Where the data is processed and how long it is kept is set out on the data privacy page. The document your legal team will ask for next is a posting policy, and there is a template with the clauses that matter. If you are in a regulated sector, the additional blockers are set out in employee advocacy in regulated industries, and if you are in a public institution the clearance, staff council and procurement layer is covered in employee advocacy in the public sector. None of this is legal advice, and a lawyer in your jurisdiction is the right person to confirm any of it.
The number you promise leadership up front
You will be asked what success looks like before anybody has posted anything. Answering with awareness loses the room. Answering with a figure of the same kind as the one you are being measured against does not.
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June 2026
Network Growth: Last 6 Months
The reported figure is earned media value: the team's impressions converted into what the same reach would have cost as paid media, alongside posts published and the share of members who were active. It covers any of the last twelve months and exports as a PDF, from the reporting screen, and earned media value explains the model behind it.
Be precise about what it is when you present it. It answers what the equivalent paid reach would have cost, and it says nothing about applications, pipeline or revenue, because there is no click tracking and no attribution in the product. Presented as reach it holds up. Presented as recruiting outcomes it will be taken apart by the first person who asks how it was calculated.
You can produce the estimate before you buy anything. The earned media value calculator runs on the same figure the product uses.
What Authira does not do
Worth knowing before you build a rollout plan on top of it. These are design decisions, not gaps waiting to be filled, and any one of them is a good reason to buy something else.
- No approval workflow, and no admin view of drafts. This is the one most likely to end your evaluation, so it goes first. Nobody reviews a post before publication, and unpublished drafts are readable only by their author, enforced in the database rather than by a setting. Guardrails are preventive instead: terms from your blacklist are flagged while somebody writes and again before they mark a post ready, and the author decides. If sign-off is mandatory, this is the wrong tool.
- No reminders and no nudges. The product never emails a participant to tell them to post. Chasing stays a human job, informed by the health check.
- No scheduling and no auto-posting. Finished drafts are copied into LinkedIn by the person who wrote them, from their own account.
- No LinkedIn API connection. Every member downloads their own analytics export and uploads it, and keeps doing so. A member who drafts but never uploads is invisible in your reporting, which is the usual reason a dashboard looks emptier than the program is.
- No single sign-on and no HR system integration. People are invited by email address. If your rollout has to run through an identity provider or an existing employee directory, that is not available.
- No click tracking or pipeline attribution. The product reports reach and earned media value, never applications, revenue or website traffic.
- LinkedIn only. No other network, and nothing for paid social.
- It is not an agency. Nobody at Authira runs the program, writes the posts or holds the internal conversations for you. If a managed service is what the situation calls for, that is a different kind of supplier.
- Built for roughly 3 to 30 participants, self-managed. If the plan is 50 or more from day one, a dedicated program manager and enterprise administration start to matter, and we compare that market openly.
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See full pricingLaunching an employee advocacy program: FAQ
How many people should we start an employee advocacy program with?
Fewer than feels convincing in the concept deck. Five is a workable first group, and it is the size Authira is priced around. A small group is easier to support properly, it makes each individual visible enough that nobody quietly disappears, and it keeps the first quarter cheap enough to stop without a post-mortem. The number that matters is not how many people you invite, it is how many were going to post anyway. A large launch group mostly raises the number of people who publicly did not continue.
How do I get leadership to sign off on an employee advocacy program?
By bringing a scope and an exit rather than a vision. What tends to survive the meeting is a specific shape: a named small group, voluntary participation, one quarter, a published monthly cost, and a stated point at which you decide to continue or stop. Ask for a pilot budget rather than a program budget. The promise worth making is reach expressed in euros, because it is checkable. The promise worth avoiding is pipeline, because employee advocacy tooling does not track clicks or attribute revenue, and the first person who asks how the figure was calculated will find that out.
Should participation be voluntary or assigned to people?
Voluntary, and not only for legal reasons. Someone posting under their own name because it was allocated to them writes like someone posting because it was allocated to them, and readers notice. Voluntary participation also removes much of what makes employee representation uneasy about a program like this. It gives you a cleaner read at the end of the pilot as well: if a volunteer stopped, the design has a problem, and that is worth knowing. In Authira nobody is enrolled without accepting an invitation, and there is no way to add a person silently.
Will colleagues actually keep posting after the kickoff?
Enthusiasm at a kickoff predicts very little, which is worth assuming rather than hoping against. What tends to hold participation is not motivation but supply and visibility. People need something to write about that did not come from you, and a first draft that already sounds like them. They also need to see that the group is producing something collectively, and somebody noticing within days rather than months when they stop. Authira is built around those four, and they are mechanisms rather than guarantees. Willingness to be visible under their own name is still the constraint, and it is worth testing before you buy seats.
We tried this once and it stopped after a few weeks. What would be different this time?
Ask what specifically ran out, because a relaunch without that answer tends to reproduce the first attempt. Two candidates are worth checking first. Topic supply: if ideas were arriving from the person running the program, supply stopped the month that person got busy, and participation follows supply. Visibility: if each participant only ever saw the likes on their own post, there was nothing to belong to. A relaunch that changes where ideas come from, and makes the collective result visible to the people producing it, is a different program with the same name. One that fixes only the enthusiasm is the same program with a new kickoff.
Does the tool remind people to post?
No. Authira sends no reminder emails and no nudges of any kind, and this is worth correcting early if your rollout plan assumed otherwise. What replaces the reminder is a shared monthly target, a team view every member can see, and a health check that tells you who has gone quiet in the last completed week. The conversation with a person who has stopped is still yours to have. It is a better conversation than a reminder, and it is a lot rarer than one.
When will we know whether the pilot worked?
Set the checkpoints when you set the budget, and set the first two on activity rather than on results. At day 30 the useful question is how many people published at all and how many published more than once. At day 60 it is whether anyone has gone quiet. Reach only becomes readable around day 90, once there are enough posts for a single strong one not to dominate the total. Judging the program on reach in month one is how a working program gets declared a failure.
What does a pilot cost, and what happens when the program grows?
Authira is € 299 per month flat with 5 seats included, so a five-person pilot for one quarter is € 897 in total. Additional seats are € 49 per month each, which means a 10-person program is € 544 per month rather than the base price. Billing is monthly and cancellable, and every invoice downloads as a PDF, which usually covers a departmental expense line. The figure is published rather than quoted on request, specifically so it can go into an internal deck before anybody has spoken to us.
Keep reading
- Why employee advocacy programs fail: the four failure modes in full, and why collapse is a design problem rather than a people problem.
- The LinkedIn posting policy template: the document your legal team will ask for next, and which of its clauses actually earn their place.
- Running a program without software: what the job looks like a year in, written for the person already doing it by hand.
- The LinkedIn EMV calculator: a euro figure for the reach a group of five would produce, before you commit to anything.
Launch something you can defend in month three
Most of the work sits before the kickoff, and most of it is internal. A demo is the faster way through it, because the questions you are about to be asked are the ones we can answer directly. Flat € 299 per month, 5 seats included, cancel any time.
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