You’ve finally made the decision to launch your intranet, and your team is pumped! You email out the first launch announcement, and you can’t wait to see how much engagement you get! But you’re sorely disappointed when not even half of your users log in. Unfortunately, this is typical.
After launching our first intranet, we quickly realized that the most important factor of increasing engagement is showing your users its value. You must make your intranet the go-to, one-stop place for everything company-related, and you’ll see your login numbers climb! Here are some tips on how to increase your intranet engagement and make your intranet the information source that your users can’t live without:
Post Relevant Content
Before launching our intranet, I would email every marketing announcement, supplier special, and product launch to our user base in separate emails; this would often amount to 5 – 10 emails a day. Needless to say, my emails started to end up in people’s junk mail because it was too overwhelming. Your users don’t want to waste their time with an overload of irrelevant content, so we thought of an answer to that – an intranet!
This quickly alleviated our issue with sending out too much irrelevant content to our users because with the intranet, I was able to upload each document and categorize it. Now our users could log in to the intranet, click on the categories that were relevant to them, and read the files that they wanted to see.
I made sure that anything business-related was loaded into there, so no matter what the users were looking for, they could find it.
Create a Newsletter
Our next issue was trying to figure out how to notify the users when a new document was loaded into the intranet. This is how our weekly newsletter was born! Every Friday, I would make a newsletter that gave a short synopsis of the documents that I had loaded into the intranet in the past week and then each article had the intranet link for each document. This way the user could click the link of any document that they wanted to see and get a direct link to it. This quadrupled our engagement numbers because it gave users a quick way to get the information they needed.
Keep Your Content Up to Date
You’ll quickly realize that after a year of posting documents into your Engynn intranet, you’ll need to start removing old files. I found it helpful to make the date that I uploaded the file part of the title to make it easy to go in and delete anything that was no longer relevant: ie: “2022 Spring Supplier Specials.” Cleaning up outdated files will make it easier for your users to use the “Search” tool and easily find the information that they are looking for.
It’s also important to make a habit of keeping all your files in the “Docs” folder updated. Since this is the spot where you will keep permanent files like logos, you want to make sure that these files are always kept up to date. Remember to always post a new news story for your newsletter when you make a change in your Docs file so that your users know a file has been updated.
Grab Their Attention
When creating your title for your news story, make sure that the headline will grab your users’ interest. In your synopsis, you should clearly explain what the document is, but only give away enough information that it will grab their interest; don’t give away all the details. You want to make sure that the user will need to click on the link to read the full file. You don’t want to make the title and synopsis so cryptic that you lose the user’s interest, but you also don’t want to tell them the full story so that they don’t even need to click on the link.
Make It Mandatory
Make your intranet replace individual emails. Instead of sending your user an individual email when they are looking for a file or document, send them the link to the intranet story. If you start letting them off the hook and sending them the files directly, your intranet will start to lose its importance.
Always Talk About It
Anytime someone mentions that they didn’t know about some business-related news, ask them, “Did you read your latest newsletter?” If your user says, “I didn’t see that,” always respond with, “It’s on the intranet.” The more you reiterate that your intranet is the go-to place for all your company’s information, the more your users will get on board with using it.
Ask Questions
It’s important to take in the feedback from your users. Ask them about their experience with using the intranet and if there is anything you can do to make it more user-friendly. Get their input on the content you are posting and the categories you are using.
Engynn intranets are totally customizable and can be morphed into anything you want them to be. If your users feel that their intranet is customized to them, your engagement will go through the roof!
Building an intranet can be a lot of trial and error but following these basic tips can help you increase your engagement and will give your users a great experience. Find out more about setting up your Engynn intranet here!
