2012 Digital PR Awards: Intranet

The Nature Conservancy – CONNECT

To enhance and enable the sharing of data and knowledge among its 4,000 worldwide staff located in 35 countries, the Nature Conservancy set out to redesign its intranet, aptly naming it CONNECT.

Settling on the Sharepoint platform because of its versatility, The Nature Conservancy team—including Jim Petterson, Annette Williams, Hilary Toma, Nicole Silk, JL Echochard, Theron Kelso, Karen Hayes, Karen Cook, Brian Payst, Jim Betz, Eduardo Calapiz, Blake Iba, Andrew Courtney, Tara Schnaible, Dave Newman, Shelley Ray, Pat Rice and Rachel Roberts—met with more than 100 different stakeholders over 25 hours of meetings to set the course for the new site.

Setting a launch date of March 6, 2012, a dedicated team focused on migrating 20,000 pages of content from the old intranet into CONNECT; an information architecture team identified tags, metadata and created navigation; a design team created the overall look and feel for the site; a profiles team developed social features including staff profiles and creating a "mysite" for every staff person; and a search team redefined search capabilities.

There was also a launch campaign that included fun videos with "Captain CONNECT" and communications around training.

Launch day attracted more than 50,000 page views, compared to 14,000 on the highest traffic days of the old system. Four months later, 50% of staff accessed the site on a daily basis; 90% of senior managers completed profiles, with 52% of the entire staff having completed theirs.