Setting up intranet editors for success
Intranet editors can often feel like they’ve been thrown in the deep end. All of a sudden, someone can be tasked with looking after the departmental site or pages for the company’s intranet with little or no experience in doing so.
It’s their responsibility to keep the site and pages up to date, provide the information colleagues are looking for and ensure everything is 100% accurate. They may not be confident in using the technology, writing for an audience, or creating content that’s not only readable, but accessible too.
Take a moment to think of the lost productivity and wasted time trying to find the right information on the intranet.
However, if every page is accurate and up to date, and searchable, your colleagues can find exactly what they want, as soon as they want it, and people can be confident the intranet is the correct place to go as the source of truth.
This is why it’s imperative to invest in intranet editors by giving them guidelines to help create intranet pages where people get the right information they are looking for, the first time.
Start with dedicated training sessions
The best way to give your intranet editors and content owners the skills they need to produce and maintain accurate and up-to-date pages is to provide training.
Work with your editors and content owners to understand why people will be visiting their pages and how their department or role helps colleagues. Get them to anticipate why people will be visiting their intranet page (note - it’s not to meet the team!).
Use SWOOP Analytics’ SharePoint Intranet Benchmarking goals. Once trained, create a space for all intranet owners, whether it’s in Microsoft Teams, Slack or a Viva Engage community.
In this space you can share guidance and governance, people can ask questions and learn from each other, and you can provide continual training.
Looking after your intranet authors should be an extension of your role as an intranet manager.
Training ideas
To help you think about structuring your training sessions, we’ve pulled together some ideas to help get you started:
Clarify what is expected from people as they take on the role of creating pages for your intranet. Show them available templates, discuss topics like imagery and tone of voice.
Help editors and content owners think about writing for an intranet audience, chunking content and making sure all paragraphs lead with headings.
Avoid using PDFs and other files to host information and content, this is not only for accessibility but for readability. People don’t want to be pinching and zooming PDFs or Excel spreadsheets on a mobile device.
Create accessible content. There are some helpful resources online including an introduction to web accessibility and understanding the four principles of accessibility.
Ongoing support with SWOOP Analytics for SharePoint intranet
The easiest way to track the “health” of your intranet and be alerted to any inaccuracies and out of date information is to use SWOOP Analytics for SharePoint intranet.
Allowing each intranet editor and content owner access to SWOOP Analytics means they have complete autonomy over their pages, with access to data. They can review the pages and files being visited by colleagues, and the ones that aren’t. They can see content that hasn’t been reviewed for more than 12 months, along with any spelling mistakes or broken SharePoint links.
People can fall out of love with intranets quickly. Let SWOOP Analytics do the hard work for you, so you and your authors can spend more time creating great content and having an intranet that people trust and know is their single source of truth.
