About Concern Worldwide
Concern Worldwide is an international humanitarian organisation striving to help create a world free from poverty, fear and oppression. For more than 50 years, it has worked on the ground with some of the world’s poorest and most vulnerable people, living in the most difficult situations, to rebuild and transform lives, livelihoods, and communities. With a team of over 3,500 skilled professionals from 50 countries, its work is defined by one goal – ending extreme poverty, whatever it takes.
The challenge
Concern Worldwide’s Digital Workplace team needed a better way to share information with its employees, to keep them informed and updated in various remote locations. Specifically, it required innovative communication tools to make this happen, by leveraging their Office 365 investment to best effect as a replacement for its intranet, which was no longer fit for purpose.
Instead of employees having to access several different systems to find the information they relied on to do their jobs, Concern aspired to evolve to a single platform, capable of offering all these tools in one place, securely and easily.
Having all these disparate systems and locations to wade through, not to mention a heavy reliance on email as a communication channel, made it very difficult for people to find the right content efficiently. What’s more, because many of them were located in remote locations, they faced challenges connecting to the internet in the first place, as a result of little or no bandwidth.
Concern was familiar with Transparity from previous engagements and admired our approach to new intranet deployments. They involved us in a standard tender process and then decided to move forward with us as its partner, to bring this evolution to life.
The solution
With more than 5,000 items/documents to migrate, it was likely that SharePoint’s lists and libraries would not be able to cope with such a large quantity of content. Restructuring would be needed to manage this process. Long folder or file path names were everywhere, all of which needed to be shortened for ease of management. Missing or restricted permissions also made certain folders and files complex to handle.
Transparity used our custom solution, ‘The Hub Intranet’, to create several dedicated SharePoint hub sites so that each individual Concern directorate, function and department had a consistent brand, navigation and search experience to find the information it needed. Google analytics was used site-wide for a richer analytics experience, while all pages were translated into French to meet the needs of Concern’s official corporate languages of English and French.
This intranet provided a central location for all Concern employees to conveniently and quickly access the information they required in their daily tasks and roles. Crucially, this user experience was designed to remain consistent across all areas of the intranet, both on Teams and SharePoint sites, ensuring that all those involved could navigate, discover and action necessary tasks regardless of where or how they work. Consideration was also made to offer a positive user experience for all users in low bandwidth geographical areas, so they would always feel connected.
Along the way, we conducted focused workshops alongside Concern’s team to check that existing requirements were on track and being fulfilled, while also ensuring any new or changing requirements were recorded and addressed. We also provided recommendations for governance and compliance throughout the project, with regard to retention periods for policies and labels, sensitive information and sensitivity labels, data Loss prevention rules, Microsoft 365 security protocols and the external sharing and distribution of files/folders.
The Outcome
Concern’s new intranet has at the time of writing been live for nine months, Initial performance is very positive and the change has been extremely well-received by everyone associated with the charity.
Transparity is continuing to provide ongoing support, sharing relevant information and insights about best practice and advice to make management easier.
"Our new intranet Concern365 has been live now about two months and has been very well received throughout the organisation. I’d like to thank Transparity for all the work you’ve put into it and particularly Lee who worked hard to understand our requirements and delivered technical solutions to meet them. He was easy to work with which made the project run smoothly."