Quick wins to save you time on your charity intranet

We all know it can be a lot of work to keep your charity intranet vibrant and all used. That said, here are half a dozen really quick and easy ways to improve your intranet and make it more useful and visited by your staff.

Get people to keep their own contact details up-to-date. This just requires a single reminder on your intranet’s home page. We integrate existing HR systems into Sereno Intranet but this information may not always be current. Once staff realise they can keep their own contact details current, they will buy in to the usefulness of your intranet as the canonical directory for your charity. 

Refresh your key images. It shouldn’t be hard to update key banner images on your site and your staff will appreciate a fresh look, especially if this can include authentic pictures of your staff or service users. Getting your staff involved in supplying images rather than relying on commercial or stock photography will make this a breeze.

Make content easy to find with summary fields and tags. Admittedly, this will add a few minutes to your page creation. However, summary fields for content need only comprise a single additional sentence. Use this sentence to succinctly describe your page. This will be indexed by your search and make finding content easier for staff. A couple of clicks to add tags and again you’ll hugely increase the search and structural architecture of your intranet. Better organised and easy-to-find content will make all the difference to uptake and satisfaction. For more on this see this post on better tagging and organisation of your content

Archive old content. Set aside an hour once a month to review old content. Your intranet should enable you to view content by published date. Prune as required and your users will be delighted that they can be sure they’re not wasting time looking at out of date content. See our previous blog for more on developing an arcvive strategy.

Create a simple and manageable content creation timetable and stick to it. Yes, it’ll take you an hour to create a spreadsheet that lists your main types of content and the frequency of publishing - for example, news could be published daily, blog posts once a week and so on - but once this is in place, you can work to a realistic and sustainable timetable. This will save you time and stress in the long term. More on making updates less hassle.

Build a form! Yes, I know this sounds like a lot of work but think about how much time you can save by taking away repetitive form processing from Word documents and just have a simple targeted online form. Sereno Intranet uses Webform functionality to enable you to create webforms through a point and click interface. Hopefully, your intranet has similar functionality that you can leverage to save tens or potentially hundreds of hours. For a quick look at webform, take a look at this blog post on webform or at the module page on Drupal.