Your intranet has a business case. Most people haven't built it yet.
Budget conversations are where intranet investments go to die. Not because the value isn't real (it is) but because "employee connection" and "engagement" aren't line items that move in a CFO's spreadsheet. The people holding the budget want numbers. Most internal comms teams haven't been handed the right ones.
That gap is what Chuck Gose and David Fletcher from Appspace are tackling on June 10 in a free one-hour webinar: Build an intranet business case that wins budget. 11:00 AM ET.
The cost of doing nothing
We've spent time on ICology Insights this year making the case that internal comms is a revenue driver, not a cost center. The data behind that argument is hard to dismiss. Gallup's research puts the cost of disengagement at $438 billion annually to the global economy. Axios HQ found senior employees lose 63 work days per year to ineffective communication — roughly $54,860 wasted annually per person earning above $200K.
Those numbers don't stay in the comms department's budget. They show up in delayed decisions, stalled projects, and frontline workers who don't have the context they need to do their jobs well.
That's the "cost of doing nothing" that rarely makes it onto a budget request. It should.
The language problem
The harder challenge for most communicators isn't finding the data. It's the translation.
There's a real difference between knowing your intranet matters and being able to make that case in a room full of people thinking about infrastructure, headcount, and quarterly targets. Most IC professionals developed instincts for communication strategy, not capital allocation conversations. Those are different skills, and the second one doesn't get taught very often.
That's what this session addresses directly. Chuck and David will work through how to quantify risk mitigation and reclaimed time, how to audit your existing tech stack to find hidden funding, and how to build a coalition across IT and facilities — the functions that often control more of the intranet's fate than comms does.
The platform conversation doesn't start in a demo
This webinar comes at a useful moment for the ICology community. We've recently covered the 2025 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Intranet Packaged Solutions and published a guide to the questions worth asking before you buy. That coverage has been about helping communicators make sense of a market that's crowded and genuinely hard to read without the right frame.
But knowing which vendors are strong doesn't solve the actual problem, which is getting the budget approved in the first place. That's the conversation this webinar is designed to have.
What you'll walk away with
A clearer argument for leadership.
Specific language that replaces IC-speak with the financial framing budget holders actually respond to.
And a way to find funding that doesn't require asking for new money.
Plus a live Q&A at the end.
June 10. 11:00 AM ET. Free.
If you've ever struggled to justify an intranet investment - or you're heading into a budget cycle where you'll need to - this is the session to attend.
Chuck Gose, founder of ICology, is joining David Fletcher, Appspace's expert in workplace experience and ROI, for a session built for practitioners who are tired of having the value conversation without the right tools to win it.