Intranet Ideas from 2015 Intranet Award Winners

Immense is one of the few words that does the quality of entries this year any justice. Anyone walking around the expos at Interaction could see just how high the bar has been set by so many.

Winning an Interact award should rightly be seen as an excellent achievement, with the ever growing customer base around the world, the level of innovation makes me feel very proud.

Many of the winners have gone on to scoop recognition in leading international awards. The Interact awards are a trusty barometer as to who is producing the sites causing envy amongst the rest of the intranet industry and a great place to get intranet ideas.

So to recap, who were the finalists?

Best Intranet Launch

CitySprint
Maxxam Analytics
Stagecoach
Trafford Housing Trust

Intranet Success Story

Dupaco Community Credit Union
Genius Gluten Free
March of Dimes
Yorkshire Building Society (YBS)

Best Intranet Design and Brand

Breast Cancer Now
Canterbury City Council
Oxford Innovation
Wellington International Airport

Essential Intranet

Dex Media
Futures Housing Group
Maxxam Analytics
Sport England

Following an excellent meal, the audience in London buzzed with anticipation for the awards ready to glean all the intranet ideas that were to follow. First up was the Best Intranet Launch category.

Best Intranet Launch

Our four finalists provided a great variety of intranet ideas. UK courier service CitySprint certainly had fun with their launch, but this fun was the result of a lot of hard work and innovation. Many of you will recognise their excellent launch video, there were also great examples of posters, teaser campaigns, toolkits for remote workers and the brilliant character, Cecil. Check out Katie O’Leary’s blog for a full overview.

Canadian research organisation Maxxam Analytics showed the power of user feedback. As and when, they transformed the architecture and look of their site post-launch based on the analytics and user group feedback. The results are both attractive and clear why their adoption levels have been particularly high.

Stagecoach, one of the UK’s largest transport businesses, took the great work we have seen from Arriva and CrossCountry (amongst others down the years) and shaped a great series of workshops to instantly engage their drivers, a group of workers who don’t have instant access to their intranet. This superbly created not just a need, but a want amongst their users.

Trafford Housing Trust, the Manchester-based housing association, brought a neoclassical taste to this great category. They have used their launch to intrigue users, get people talking and transform that talking into collaboration from a more traditional organisation. A naming competition only amplified this impact. They too found a wonderful tone in their launch video and also found a cheeky, but informative route with their poster campaign.

Best Intranet Launch results

Winner:

Maxxam Analytics

Runners up:

CitySprint and Stagecoach

Best Intranet Success Story

We love to discuss essential intranets, but often on the journey to your site becoming essential you will have success stories that deserve celebrating. This category looks to reward those who can pinpoint a stream of work they are truly proud of and provides a collection of innovative intranet ideas.

American credit union, Dupaco set out to achieve 100% user generated content. Rather than internal comms being gatekeepers, they became facilitators; over 40% of the organisation have seen their content on the credit union intranet’s homepage at some point. They are doing something many would see as brave yet the results are wonderful.

Take one Interact cloud installation, create on it your pivotal product innovation process and launch within two weeks of getting your hands on it, the result is Genius Gluten Free. With one of the most in-depth workflow and forms we have ever seen, Genius Gluten Free has transformed what is often a six month process into something easily contributed to, monitored and measured. To go from concept to live in two weeks takes incredible planning and knowledge, and Genius Gluten Free nailed it.

Collaboration is one of the most exciting and culturally challenging objectives of most organisations. How do you make it simple enough to understand and adopt in a period of massive organisational change? Well you could do a lot worse than following major US charity, The March of Dimes Foundation’s example. By encouraging employees to complete 30 actions in 30 days, March of Dimes has seen a metric rise in collaboration since starting their campaign.

Simple tasks included ‘say hi to someone online you would not normally speak to’, ‘in one line describe a colleague you value.’ These actions take seconds but they bond people, create new networks and build behaviours which encourage collaboration. This is especially prevalent for the Foundation where over 70% of employees are remote. Read more about the challenge in Geoff Garcia’s blog.

Whilst collaboration is an exciting development in the business landscape, corner stones such as effective and improved business process are critical. Whilst Interact makes this effortless with a range of tools, UK-based financial services organisation, Yorkshire Building Society has created a superb user experience, making getting work done remarkably easy and, as importantly, compliant.

Intranet Success Story results

Winner:

March of Dimes

Runners up:

Genius Gluten Free and Yorkshire Building Society

Best Intranet Design

Design is so much more than just a homepage; it’s the theme, the language, the reflection of your brand, personality, the user journey, an effortless architecture. When this all comes together, the results are beautiful.

On their intranet, inow, UK charity Breast Cancer Now has a design and structure any new starter would instantly understand, striking a great chemistry between dynamic content, beauty and rich media. It has enabled them to use their intranet as the vehicle for communicating the merger of two charities with a new brand and identity.

Meet Dot, the character of Canterbury City Council’s intranet iCan. With a beautiful initial launch homepage:

That has now evolved into this:

When Will Burnett was tasked with creating an intranet even more impressive than their website, Oxford Innovation knew they were in good hands. Who would not want Voice welcoming them as they start their working day?

Finally, but certainly not an afterthought, come Wellington International Airport. Whilst we enjoyed the logic behind their homepage…

…I am yet to see a better way to break intranet news than this:

Best Intranet Design results

Winner:

Canterbury City Council

Runners up:

Oxford Innovation and Wellington International Airport

Essential Intranet Award

Who has the best intranet of 2015? This is the ultimate award and to win this category we wanted to see examples of sites whose companies could not live without.

When US digital marketing organisation Dex Media merged two businesses in 2014, they needed to create a new culture, a new sense of enablement and a vehicle to make this effortless. It has brought voices together to explain what a host of new product ranges do and how new teams work, sharing successes as well as fun anecdotes to bring people closer together. They found a way to remove hierarchy, form a two-way trusting relationship between management and employees, and enabled everyone to join in on the adventure.

UK housing association Futures Housing Group has been a long-term customer and no stranger to award success. Now their ‘intranet of things’, The Hub, is a shining example of engaging all employees, from management training on digital comms to converting late adopters with tea and biscuit sessions.

Using The Hub alongside other digital channels, the group launched #getdigital, an internal campaign which aims to make technology and digital communication the first choice for team members and customers.

Maxxam Analytics succeeded in creating an intranet that is not only a resource for their employees to obtain the information they need, a news source to find out what’s happening at the company, and a place where they can connect with over 2,400 colleagues across the country. Maxxam Analytics has also created a social platform that is well branded in appearance and in its consistency of information hierarchy, logic and navigation of menu items.

Finally we have Sport England, a site which can boast 92% user-generated content. They have, in the space of just a year, transformed their behaviours to an intranet-first approach. Now when Sport England faces the unknown, a project or a guaranteed way to share ideas and news, Inside Track is the only way to go.

Essential Intranet results

Winner:

Sport England

Runners up:

Dex Media and Futures Housing

Over the next few months it will be exciting to see which of these great examples go on to achieve international recognition and of course provide even more intranet ideas to help make every intranet essential.