Charity intranets: volunteer and share your intranet skills

At Intranetizen, we believe great intranets make organisations better. They improve collaboration, boost engagement, reduce costs, and improve efficiency. Nowhere is that need to do more with less and become more efficient more pressing than in the voluntary sector – yet charities often lack the resources to deliver the intranets they need.

This week we’re calling on intranet pros to volunteer their time, skills and expertise to help make charity intranets better.

Our friends over at Interact Intranet this week announced the winners of their charity intranet competition. Maggie’s, which runs 15 centres offering help to people with cancer and their families, has ambitious plans for the coming years. In their winning submission, they explained how an intranet will help them achieve those. They’ve won Interact software licences, plus project management and consultancy to help them make their intranet plans a reality.

Interact were so impressed by the quality of the submissions, highlighting how these hard-working organisations can be transformed by good intranets, that they’ve given the full prize package to runner-up The Children’s Trust, and handed free software licences to eight more runners-up.

Sarah Guest, VP Marketing at Interact, commented:

Every year we run the Interact Intranet charity competition because we see the amazing impact a collaborative and easy to use intranet can have on helping charities achieve their goals. This year we were blown away by the strength of the entries from around the world and with the challenges these charities face trying to achieve a lot with limited resources. We knew giving the 10 shortlisted entries free Interact software was the right thing to do. We are very excited to work with these amazing people and help them support the worthy causes they work for.

But any intranet manager knows getting your software up and running is only the first step in an intranet journey – every one of these winners will need to engage users, develop their content, design and run their sites, deliver services, and prove their value of their work.

Charities rarely have intranet expertise in house, nor do they have the resources to join paid networking groups in order to learn from others. Yet so many of the large organisations which have exemplar intranets do allow their staff to take time off to volunteer for charities.

We’d like to pair up intranet experts and organisations who could use their help.

If you’re an intranet pro with time and skills to offer, or you’re from a charity and you’d like advice or support with your intranet, let us know using the form below.

We’d like to pair up those whose Corporate Social Responsibility policy allows time off for volunteering with organisations who need some consulting.

But we’d also like to get an idea if there are many intranet pros who can volunteer for shorter periods, as we could consider other ways to help smaller charities too, like advice clinics, email mentoring, or a Google Hangout.

All four of your Intranetizen team will be offering to help smaller charities with their intranets in the coming months. Join us; together we can make charity intranets better.