Case Study: Pine Rest achieves higher employee engagement and fewer emails with Bananatag

How Pine Rest Uses Bananatag Internal Email Data

Pine Rest, a nonprofit behavioral health provider founded in 1910 with a comprehensive center in Grand Rapids and 18 outpatient offices across Michigan and Iowa, faced a communications challenge: most clinical staff had very limited access to email and the communications team had no data on how decentralized employees were receiving or acting on messages. Internal Communicator Matthew Hiskes needed visibility into open and click behavior to stop relying on gut feeling and to reduce the flood of redundant departmental emails. To solve this, Pine Rest turned to Bananatag and its internal email tracking tools.

Using Bananatag email tracking, Pine Rest measured open and click-through rates for newsletters and high-interest messages, tracked traffic to intranet content, and estimated engagement (anticipating roughly 70% of recipients would take action on key emails). The data let Matthew consolidate departmental sends, cut the overall email volume, extend the useful lifespan of messages, and focus follow-up on the disengaged 30%, saving time and improving internal reach and relevance. Bananatag’s insights directly enabled fewer, more effective emails and better-targeted communications across the organization.

Pine Rest

Matthew Hiskes

Internal Communicators