Firstup
Firstup · Marketing
Firstup is an employee communication platform that uses AI to target, translate and measure messages for frontline and desk teams across app, email and screens.
About Firstup
What Is Firstup
Firstup is internal communications software built for companies whose staff don't sit at a desk all day. It arrived in September 2021, when SocialChorus and Dynamic Signal merged and relaunched under one brand. The company says the platform now reaches more than 15 million workers at organizations such as JetBlue, Hilton, Big Lots and Swissport. It competes in the workforce communication market alongside intranet suites and standalone employee app vendors.
The problem it goes after is familiar to anyone who has run comms at a hospital or a distribution center. A policy update lands in email, half the night shift never opens it, and nobody can prove who read it. Firstup pulls campaign creation, audience targeting, delivery and measurement into one place, then pushes the same message out through employee email, a mobile app, personalized web pages and screens in break rooms.
There are limits worth knowing before a demo. Pricing isn't public, contracts are annual, and the platform leans on clean employee data from your HR systems. Teams of a few hundred people usually find lighter tools cheaper.
Getting Started
- Talk to sales and pick a plan. Essential covers targeting and multi channel publishing, Professional adds the AI tools and translation, Premier adds journey building and cross journey metrics.
- Connect your people systems. Workday, SAP, ServiceNow, Microsoft and Dayforce feeds populate the universal employee profile with role, site, shift and language.
- Build your first audience with Audience Builder, using attributes from those systems plus past engagement behavior.
- Create a campaign in Creator Studio, or start from a branded template, and publish once to email, app and web at the same time.
- Check reach, acknowledgements and sentiment after the first send, then let retargeting chase the employees who never opened it.
Product Information
A quick look at Firstup's pricing, supported platforms, and performance.
Best for
The users, tasks, and scenarios where this tool fits best.
Users
- Internal comms teams at companies with 1,000 or more employees
- HR and people operations
- Frontline operations managers in healthcare, manufacturing, retail and hospitality
- IT and digital workplace teams
Tasks
- Sending safety and compliance updates that require proof of reading
- Translating a policy change into each employee's language
- Onboarding new hires across scattered sites
- Answering repeat HR questions
Scenarios
- Running comms across dozens of locations with different shifts
- Responding to a safety incident
- Open enrollment or a benefits deadline
Key features
Universal Employee Profile
Every employee gets a single record assembled from HR systems, directory data and their own behavior in the platform. That record carries role, location, language and past engagement, so targeting and personalization work from facts rather than a static mailing list. It's the foundation the rest of the product sits on.
Audience Builder and Retargeting
Audience Builder combines attributes from multiple systems to define who sees a message, and it doesn't require SQL or a data team. You can segment by site, job family, contract type or past opens. Retargeting then re-sends to people who skipped the first message, which is the part most comms teams stop doing manually after week two.
AI Content Creator
The AI assistant drafts topics, titles and body copy, and adjusts tone for different audiences. Communicators still edit the output, but the first draft cuts the blank page problem on a Friday afternoon. Employees get the same help when writing their own posts and comments.
AI Search
AI search works across your Firstup content and connected business systems to answer employee questions in plain language. A warehouse worker can ask about shift swap rules and get an answer with a link to the policy instead of searching three portals. The company positions this as its biggest time saver, and for large support desks it usually is.
Automatic Translation
Messages are translated into each employee's preferred language across every channel, not just email. For manufacturers and hospitality groups with mixed language crews, this removes the usual workaround of publishing two or three separate versions.
Journey Orchestration
Journey orchestration replaces one off campaigns with automated sequences that move an employee from awareness to action. A flow builder sets the steps, and triggers fire based on each person's situation, such as a new hire's start date or a missed compliance deadline. Premier plan customers also get a library of journey templates to start from.
Omnichannel Delivery
One publish action reaches employees through the mobile app, employee email, a personalized web home page and digital signage on break room screens. The mobile app carries real time notifications and access to enterprise systems for deskless staff, which is where most frontline employee engagement actually happens.
Analytics and Insights
Dashboards track reach, opens, clicks, acknowledgements and sentiment in real time. Leaders can see which sites acted and where risk remains, and the journey view rolls those numbers up across a whole onboarding or safety program. It's the reporting layer that makes the case for budget renewal.
Pros and cons
Pros
- One publishing flow covers email, mobile app, web and digital signage, so comms teams stop running four tools.
- AI search cuts the volume of repeat HR and IT questions, which is often the fastest visible win.
- Translation runs inside the same campaign, which suits manufacturers and hotel groups with multilingual crews.
- Targeting by role, site and shift reaches frontline workers that email alone never touches.
- A public REST API and prebuilt connectors for Workday, SAP, ServiceNow and Microsoft cover the integrations most enterprises ask for.
Cons
- Pricing sits behind a sales call, so you can't estimate cost from the website before booking a demo.
- There's no free plan and no self serve trial, which makes small team evaluation slow.
- The AI features and translation start on the Professional plan, so the entry plan feels thin for the money.
- Results depend on the quality of your HR data. Missing site or shift fields weaken targeting and reporting.
Frequently asked questions
Firstup is an employee communication platform for sending targeted messages to desk and frontline workers, then measuring who read and acted on them. It combines campaign creation, audience targeting, multi channel delivery and analytics in one system.
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