What are the basic building blocks of a charity intranet?
Smaller or medium-sized charities have often been faced with the difficult task of implementing intranets based on costly, complex large-scale tools that were originally designed for enterprise scale organisations. Sharepoint or other proprietary systems can many take months (sometimes years!) to implement and are practically-speaking impossible for smaller organisations to shape and control. They have hampered the ambitions of many charity communications professionals who have the ambition and drive to want to implement effective internal communications strategies but have found themselves unable to wield the mighty intranet sledgehammer to crack the communication nut.
In point of fact, just getting to base camp with your intranet isn't that hard. If you look critically of the main tasks you need to achieve and build, you can be up and running with a really effective intranet in a very short time indeed. What's more, get the simple stuff right and not only will you be able to kick start more effective internal communications, you'll also have a powerful and flexible base on which to start adding your bells and whistles.
So what do you really need bare bones to get you up and running effectively?
News & Events
Hey, it's a just a page type with an option for feeds. Drupal comes with one of these out of the box. Job done.
People directory
All your staff and partners easily searchable. Your intranet data structure should be able to handle contact details, location, job title.
Alerts
Flag up key alerts and have these automatically sent to staff when you post.
Library
All your documents tagged, searchable and version controlled. Again, this is exactly the kind of thing Drupal excels at. It's not rocket science.
Systems Hub
Most organisations use a range of tools these days that seldom talk to each other effectively - HR systems, IT help desks, e-learning programmes, specialist tools like incident reporting. Bring these together in a nifty little console you control so no one ever has to ask how to access these systems again.
Reporting
If you're intranet is super restricted behind a firewall, you probably can't use Google. There are open source reporting tools you can use on your server plus Drupal comes with modules you can quickly configure to get the reports you need. Report on engagement, effectiveness, sharing of knowledge and best practice.
Social
While many intranets are still focussed on 'push' messaging, I believe even the most basic of intranets can only be effective if it's social and drives conversations and engagement. But once again, this isn't hard to achieve. You can go along way with commenting and alerts on content items. Drupal provides good forum and group functionality. You can even personalise your intranet so users have their own stream of content much like any social media platform.
Where Next?
I believe we are entering a period of disruption for intranets. For too long, intranets have been over-priced, too complex and made out to be far more mysterious than they really are. It's time for a change. We've seen similar changes all over the web, perhaps the best parallel has been in e-learning where five years ago disruptive suppliers cut through the obfuscation and offered significantly cheaper, less complex and yet still effective solutions.
We're building our next generation intranet for charities in Drupal. It's inexpensive, highly flexible, reliable and open source. Please drop us a line if you'd like to get involved in shaping our product and beta testing, or just leave a comment or question.