URSSAF: Transforming the Image of Public Service Through Employee Advocacy

Everyone knows the URSSAF name. What is less widely known is that the organization sits at the heart of France’s social protection system. Its 16,000 employees, spread across the country, support millions of users every day, including businesses, self-employed workers, associations, and household employers. URSSAF set out to tackle a threefold challenge: improving understanding of its role, showcasing its impact, and strengthening a sense of belonging across such a large organization. To address these challenges, URSSAF chose to leverage one of its greatest assets: its own employees, by building a structured employee advocacy program with Sociabble.

Transforming the Image of an Essential Yet Often Misunderstood Institution

URSSAF plays a central role in financing France’s social protection system. Yet its image is still often associated primarily with administrative procedures and compliance controls.

Its mission is essential, but not always well understood.

This creates several communication challenges:

• Making complex topics easier to understand
• Giving greater visibility to concrete actions and achievements
• Bringing the institution closer to its audiences

These challenges are amplified by the structure of the organization itself. With a National Office and numerous regional entities, ensuring information flows effectively and maintaining message consistency across the network is an ongoing challenge.

Against this backdrop, one conviction gradually emerged: communication should rely more heavily on the people who bring these missions to life every day.

Raising Awareness of an Essential Yet Often Overlooked Mission

As a cornerstone of France’s social protection system, URSSAF collects social contributions that help fund healthcare, pensions, family benefits, and unemployment insurance. It also supports businesses, self-employed workers, associations, and household employers in managing their social obligations on a daily basis.

Yet these missions are sometimes misunderstood or reduced to common misconceptions.

To make its role more visible and its mission easier to understand, URSSAF decided to empower its employees through an ambassador program. The goal was to provide a more human and tangible view of the institution by:

• Making complex topics more accessible
• Highlighting concrete actions and achievements
• Bringing the institution closer to its audiences

The URSSAF network is organized around a National Office and regional URSSAF entities. Present throughout France to provide support as close as possible to users’ needs, the organization must continuously feed a shared content library to ensure message consistency and amplify its reach.

This is why the ambassador program brings together employees from both the National Office and regional URSSAF organizations, based on a strong belief: employees are best positioned to embody the institution’s mission and promote its employer brand across France.

Giving Employees a Voice: An Obvious Idea That Wasn’t So Easy to Implement

URSSAF had long recognized the potential of its employees as communication ambassadors. The objective was clear: showcase the diversity of its professions and raise awareness of the organization’s mission.

In practice, however, the process remained largely manual. Content was first distributed through internal tools such as Microsoft Teams, then employees had to retrieve, adapt, and publish it themselves. This multi-step process was time-consuming and difficult to fit into their daily routines.

 

This approach required far too many actions for very limited results.

Océane Conchou Corporate Communications Manager, URSSAF

As is often the case with employee advocacy initiatives, the idea was sound, but execution limited its impact. For employee advocacy to succeed, participation needed to fit naturally into employees’ day-to-day work.

Sociabble: When Simplicity Unlocks Employee Advocacy

The deployment of Sociabble in December 2022 marked a turning point. The platform centralized content and simplified distribution. Employees can now access publications, personalize them, and share them in just a few clicks.

What Sociabble brings us above all is efficiency: everything is centralized, and it makes it much easier for us to manage and run our ambassador program.Océane Conchou, Corporate Communications Manager, URSSAF

This operational shift enabled more employees to participate. Sharing became more natural, more seamless, and most importantly, compatible with the realities of demanding roles. Beyond ease of use, Sociabble also helped URSSAF structure and nurture a true ambassador community.

Let’s look at how URSSAF developed this community and built an editorial strategy to engage employees over time.

A Community of Ambassadors Engaged Both in Headquarters and in the Field

Today, the program relies on a community of around 70 volunteer ambassadors from a wide range of professions. Inspectors, subject-matter experts, communications professionals, and support staff all contribute to amplifying URSSAF’s messages. What they share is a deep understanding of the realities on the ground and a desire to showcase their profession. They are spread across France throughout both the National Office and regional URSSAF entities.

Our goal is to identify employees who genuinely want to speak up and promote their profession. They are URSSAF’s best ambassadors.

Océane Conchou Corporate Communications Manager, URSSAF

This choice has a direct impact on communication. Messages become more authentic, more concrete, and easier to understand because they are rooted in real-life experiences and everyday situations. Many ambassadors spend much of their time in the field and are not always working from a desk. This reality is reflected in usage patterns: today, 85% of platform logins come from mobile devices.

For many ambassadors, browsing and sharing content has become a natural habit that fits easily between meetings or during a break, perfectly matching the rhythm of their day-to-day work.

Building Engaging Communication Across the Entire Network

Making Content More Accessible

The growth of the program is also driven by a clear editorial structure.

URSSAF organizes content through nine editorial channels covering the organization’s key topics, including institutional news, human resources, internal projects, user-focused initiatives, and events.

Content highlights:

• Actions carried out to support users
• Results achieved in the fight against fraud
• Corporate social responsibility initiatives
• Internal projects and events
• Recruitment campaigns

The platform is not limited to distributing institutional content. It also enables regional entities to promote their own initiatives, creating a genuine network-wide dynamic.

One of the advantages is being able to showcase initiatives from different regional URSSAF organizations. It helps highlight what’s happening on the ground and share it more broadly.Océane Conchou, Corporate Communications Manager, URSSAF

This approach improves information sharing across teams while giving local initiatives visibility at a national level.

Sustaining Momentum Through Community Engagement

The success of the program also depends on its ability to remain active over time.

To achieve this, the communications team runs regular campaigns and challenges that keep the platform vibrant and encourage participation.

Several initiatives have focused on key employer-branding priorities, including:

• Recruiting inspectors and compliance officers
• Hiring apprentices and interns
• Major awareness campaigns such as International Women’s Day on March 8

These initiatives help mobilize ambassadors and create structured opportunities for content sharing. For Océane, this aspect is critical:

It’s not simply about encouraging people to communicate; it’s a real lever for long-term engagement.

Océane Conchou Corporate Communications Manager, URSSAF

Community involvement has therefore become a key driver of long-term engagement and program sustainability.

A Collaboration Born at a Sociabble Event

The ambassador program also benefits from a broader ecosystem of organizations facing similar challenges.

At a Sociabble customer event, URSSAF had the opportunity to meet the teams from France Travail. Those conversations led to a joint initiative: inviting France Travail to participate in URSSAF’s annual ambassador event to share best practices and lessons learned.

Results That Reflect Real Progress

The ambassador program has steadily gained visibility and impact.

• 100% active users at launch
• 106,472 social media impressions in 2025
• 5,907 social shares in 2025
• 13 campaigns and challenges organized

These results demonstrate measurable progress. Communication is now more human, more accessible, and more closely connected to realities on the ground.

For Océane Conchou, the success of an employee advocacy program starts with listening to employees.

You need to engage with employees, understand their needs, and identify those who genuinely want to speak up.Océane Conchou, Corporate Communications Manager, URSSAF

Once momentum has been created, the challenge becomes sustaining it over time. Regular engagement initiatives, ambassador recognition, and the sharing of best practices all contribute to maintaining participation.

Giving Employees a Voice to Showcase Public Service

By structuring its employee advocacy program with Sociabble, URSSAF has modernized its communications approach, connecting teams nationwide, highlighting local initiatives, and increasing visibility for its public-service mission.

Giving employees a voice creates communication that is more authentic, more relatable, and easier to understand, while strengthening the relationship between URSSAF and its audiences.

By providing employees with a simple and structured framework for sharing content, URSSAF has transformed them into trusted advocates capable of embodying its mission and reshaping perceptions of public service.

Looking to make your communications more accessible and empower employees to amplify your messages?
Discover how Sociabble helps organizations build structured, sustainable employee advocacy programs that drive engagement and visibility.