90% of employees at not-for-profit adopt SharePoint Online intranet.

Our client is an Australian not-for-profit charity that provides services to thousands of people with a disability and their families.

The challenge

With every penny going back into the work not-for-profit (NFP) organisations do at making the world a better place, it can often feel that investing in technology feels like a luxury, rather than a necessity. However, our NFP client was aware that in order to fully support their employees, their technology landscape needed to be improved by connecting their dispersed teams digitally and assist them in carrying out day-to-day tasks.

The mission they came to us with was:

“Our intranet will connect our people – as a mobile first front door, it will bring together the support, information and communications they need to work better together and deliver quality services for our clients.”

Our approach

To begin this project we kicked things off through a discovery and research phase. We chatted to employees across the organisation to gather a holistic view of the challenges their existing intranet had, which then formed the basis of what future success looked like.

The 3 main challenges gathered from this research were:

The current intranet has a perception problem

• Their existing intranet usage was very narrow, acting primarily as a content library and access point to other systems. Consequently, it was not providing value to all staff, especially frontline staff
• The discovery sessions uncovered that 80% of staff were not supported effectively by the intranet
• Staff did not think of the intranet as a place to go to find out “what’s happening” with the majority of internal communications occurring via email and meetings

Disjointed and unmanaged employee experience

• With a disjointed and poor user experience, most staff experienced difficulties finding information using the intranet’s navigation or search. The content was not organised, compounding these issues
• There were many and varied locations for staff to store and manage information along with a general lack of standards or governance. This resulted in variable quality of content between sites and business areas along with systems that were competing instead of complementing

Governance and publishing model unclear

• Centralised content authoring was limiting the amount of content updates requested and improvements that occurred on the intranet. A lack of clarity on responsibilities and resourcing also stood in the way of future intranet improvements

Our solution

With a clear understanding of what our client’s challenges were, our project team began designing an employee centred experience that leveraged enhanced search and OOTB functionality in SharePoint Online.

To achieve this, we:

• Migrated their existing intranet – from SharePoint Online to SharePoint Modern.
• Introduced both the Viva Connections Teams app and the Dashboard – bringing the intranet into the flow of work for office-based staff and making it easier for frontline workers to access on the go. By removing access barriers, Viva Connections allowed everyone to be connected to organisation messages, tools and most importantly, other team members. Additionally, the Viva Connections dashboard made it easier for team members to undertake day-to-day tasks, or access key information and systems easier by using audience targeted cards.
• We dedicated a ‘one stop shop’ for approved documents – the modernised intranet includes revised guidelines, templates etc with search and filters enabling users to easily find the right document. By standardising the categorisation of files within document libraries, the team were able to better connect varying file types using document sets.
• Analytics to support ongoing evolution and governance – a Power BI dashboard to compliment the native SharePoint Online usage statistics to support ongoing review of intranet usage.

The result

The technology build component of the project was completed in 3 months by our digital workplace practice.

By introducing a content community, it has made a huge impact on the management and integrity of the information on the site. As a result of the de-centralised publishing model implementation, 70 content authors across the business are now empowered with page templates and content authoring guidelines to create and maintain useful and engaging content.

Key results include:

• Most users are frontline workers with a similar level of adoption and more visits from mobile
• It is playing a key part in building digital capabilities in the organisation
• People are engaging with the content, spending time on it and browsing different pages
• Users are returning to the site daily, showing that the intranet is now a key part of their work life
• On-going optimisation, keeping the content up to date with a focus on top visited and searched pages
• Continued communications around ways to access the intranet
• Change in ‘ways of working’
• More two-way conversations: contribution from staff, article submissions, comments and likes

The impact

At a glance, 6 months since launch:

• 90% adoption of the solution
• 200k+ site visits across their 3,000 workforce
• 6,312 unique views on their news posts
• 29,028 document views and downloads
• 14% mobile sessions
• Maximized investment using M365 licenses
• Daily repeat visits