WWF's Confluence Intranet Journey

signal:noise
WWF’s social intranet journey

Adrian Cockle September 2011

Friday, 23 September 11

Hi there, lovely to be here.
Want to talk about the journey we’ve taken over the last 18 months - from creaking old
fashioned intranet to a modern, social intranet powered by conﬂuence.


Just to avoid any confusion - pandas, not wrestlers.
largest and most respected independent conservation organisations – supported by 5 million
people and active in over 100 countries on ﬁve continents.
I head up the online team in WWF-UK - 350 ppl across 4 locations

A little bit
of history...


First, a little bit of
history.

2001


First, a little background. Our intranet, Arena, ﬁrst launched back in 2001


To put that in perspective, in 2001 Facebook, twitter, Myspace and YouTube didn't exist; Google had
only just started making money


Wikipedia launched and


Brian won the second series of Big Brother.

So, in web terms it was getting on a bit...


Beige beauty.
Bottleneck
HTML Transit - published via formatted Word Docs

Formal Informal
Dictated Owned
Tablets of stone Watercooler


There's been a real change in how people use the web - a power shift from the few to the
many.


It wasn't too far back that Encyclopedia Britannica was the font of all knowledge

. These days, Wikipedia is more likely to be the ﬁrst stop - a site edited by tens of thousands of volunteers around the world, and no writers or editors on the payroll.

bit.ly/rockdots

Watch the evolution of a wiki article


Conﬂuence used within the WWF network


Doing all this was a pretty big job, so luckily we had some help. The 40 members of the Grapevine have been great. They've been getting
their teams' content updated and in the new system, acting as guinea pigs and giving us feedback on the progress.


We ran a survey to learn how you all use it - what you ﬁnd useful, what you like, what you don't and
what you'd like to change.

We found that the biggest problem was that it was hard to ﬁnd the information you need quickly.
There was too much out of date stuff, no search engine and navigation that didn't really help. That was
out starting point for the new version.


We ran workshops back in January to design the navigation and one person in particular was
a huge help, although she doesn't know it

WWMD?


- Mary! We tried to keep her in mind as an example of someone using Arena 2 without a
technical background. Making it easy to use by everyone was a key aim.


Here’s the homepage.
The look and feel matched our external site when we launched it - down to using the green
button (donate on wwf.org.uk) as a big signpost to “How do I...?” a bit like FAQs. Survey -
downloading forms.

We used some custom code to create a more editorially controlled version than the traditional
dashboard as user testing showed that quite a lot of testers found it quite confusing. We’re
going to have a play with the new Adaptavist hompage plugin though - the current one isn’t as
ﬂexbile as we’d like. Each chunk is an include from another page.


One of our bug bears is the number of emails we receive. We had a objective to reduce the
number of all staff ones sent. The ﬁrst target was the daily list of sarnies available in our cafe.

Anyone interested can hit the ‘watch’ button to get their own email notiﬁcations.


There are daily ‘LOST MUG’ emails too, so we put together a page for that too!


We’re a global organisation, so we embedded a google map with 180 of our projects around
the world so staff can explore the breadth of our work.


We’re using Arena for much more two-way and peer-to-peer communication too. We’re
embedding polldaddy polls to get quick feedback on all sorts of topics - from the latest
Action magazine to gauging opinions before and after our internal lunchtime debates.


We’re even getting staff from around the org using much more advanced features of
conﬂuence, like creating thumbnail galleries using attached images.


The most complicated bit of in-house development was this google maps hack to create a lift
sharing tool.

Love this - nightly email with everything that’s changed.


Over the 18 months since launch encouraging managers to include elements of sharing in
people’s annual review objectives.


Tracking progress against objectives regularly - 35% of users taking richer action - createm
edit, comment. Needed a bit of custom development to track some of this.

Now track all of that, plus top pages, top edits, #unique contributors


Show one page - indicator of success.


Also, brief note on Yammer.
Looking at integration. R&D
Online weekly updates

also,
bullshit.

“If you try to reduce all the
noise in your system you
eventually lose any signal.
Our attempts to protect
ourselves from rubbish can
mean we lose the gold dust”
Text

bit.ly/semplevid
euansemple.com

Thanks!
@ade_wwf

wwf.org.uk


WWF's Confluence Intranet Journey

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