To inspire and organize the volunteer efforts of Northwestern Mutual’s 5,000 employees during the seven-month Leaving a Legacy: The Million Minutes Project honoring the company’s outgoing CEO Edward J. Zore, the company created a new volunteer Intranet site. Leslie O’Connell, NM’s director of organizational communications, provides five tips to making an Intranet site a cog in your company’s internal communications strategy.
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More heads are better than one: Ask for input from multiple teams. An intranet site needs to be appealing to a wide variety of employees.
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Get all the ducks in line before the unveiling: It’s important to make an impact from the beginning. Make sure everything is ready the first time users visit the site.
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Give them a reason to linger and come back: Include a wide variety of options to explore so that users spend time at your site. Offer them photos, video and well-written copy. Make it visual, compelling content they can’t find anywhere else, then freshen it up frequently.
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Let them leave their imprint: When they’re engaged, employees want to leave their thoughts behind. Enabling comments allows them to take part in the site and see that their opinions count alongside others.
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Build bridges in IT: Whether you want to deliver a simple or more elaborate Web site, contact colleagues in IT early on. Strong partnerships between communicators and IT set the stage to con- struct a Web presence that achieves goals within budget and on time.
PR News subscribers can read about how Northwestern Mutual used an intranet site to log company volunteer hours in the case study: "Have a Million Minutes to Give? Northwestern Mutual Employees Did, as a PR-Rich Going-Away Gift for a CEO."