Since our first Intranet Design Annual in 2001, 10 nonprofits have been among the winners, and two of those are from this year. Might this represent an upturn in intranet budget and perceived importance of intranets at nonprofit organizations?
There's no one-size-fits-all solution to managing key documents like policies and procedures on your charity's intranet. However, there are broadly three approaches you will commonly find adopted. It's likely your organisation follows one of these.
It's challenging to effectively share useful information amongst team members. Very often members of staff find something useful on the intranet or the web they'd like to share with colleagues but the process can be painful. Using social media is often not an option as there might be privacy issues on intranet content and you can't guarantee your colleagues will always be using the same networks. So what are your options to improve sharing on your intranet?
Gaining engagement and effecting outcomes with your website is often the key goal for many organisations and while we've heard a lot of talk recently about chatbots, old fashioned live chat has been around for a while now and seems to be gaining in popularity.
A couple of years ago I noticed a change in priorities for internal comms and HR teams towards better wellbeing promotion on charity intranets. Of course this had always been an important matter but it was given fresh impetus by an article from The Guardian which to some extent pointed the finger at charities as being less inclined towards promoting wellbeing among staff than their commercial counterparts.
If you are a Comms professional commissioning software for your charity,the bad news is: you need to have a basic understanding of open and closed source licensing around the software and services you are buying.
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.