Summary: 4 steps to rebrand your intranet from deciding on a new name and persona to redesigning your intranet.
Change is scary, whether it be moving to a new city, starting a new job, or even simply changing up your daily routine. While these changes can be scary, they are often the most rewarding. The same goes for changing your intranet.
Perhaps your organization has undergone a merger and acquisition, or it has just gone stale. Whatever the reason may be, you need to rebrand your intranet. Here at Intranet Connections, we are currently going through an intranet rebrand so I decided to share our process and experiences thus far. Below are 4 tips to help you rebrand your intranet successfully.
1) Ask end-users for feedback
Before you rebrand your intranet, it is important to meet with the rest of the team to discover what exactly needs to be done. For example, at one of our daily huddle meetings, we discussed what changes/improvements we’d like to see on our own intranet. From there, we planned another meeting to further discuss these suggestions in greater detail, ensuring all of us are on the same page.
Sitting down as a team to discuss what works and what doesn’t work on your current intranet should be the first step to rebranding. Start by asking employees what areas of the intranet they use the most, how they navigate to these areas of the site, etc. Simply reorganizing the way things are laid out is a great first initiative to rebrand your intranet.
2) Have a brainstorming session
Once you have received enough valuable feedback, start brainstorming. Have everyone share their ideas for what the new intranet will look like, where things will be, what the new name will be, etc.
Before we rebranded our intranet, we all had to come up with a new intranet name. Once everyone threw their ideas out, we put them into a Quick Poll on our current intranet, and the name with the most votes won. We ended up choosing SQIRL (pronounced like squirrel) for our new intranet, standing for SQ Internal Resource Locator. Prior to this, our intranet was called SQintranet and since our company name is SQ Box Solutions, we wanted to keep the ‘SQ’ in the name. This also gave us the idea to create a squirrel character for our intranet persona.
Tip: Make sure your new intranet name, brand, and persona reflect your core values and company culture.
3) Create your new brand
A big part of rebranding your intranet is changing the intranet design. Your new brand probably requires a completely different intranet theme or a new intranet persona design. You can do this using the Simple Design-Builder or Advanced Design Editor, no graphic design experience is necessary!
It is important to completely redesign your whole intranet when rebranding. You want your intranet to look and feel different than it did before so employees get excited about using it again. Including a new logo, name, persona, and design are really the key elements to rebrand your intranet. From there, you can decide if you want to change the architecture and navigation of your intranet. In some cases, you may not have to change the intranet architecture depending on what feedback you received in step 1.
4) Unveil your new brand
Once you rebrand your intranet, a fun idea is to have an intranet unveiling event at your office. This gets everyone excited to use your intranet again, as well as creates buzz around the new brand. The extra excitement will increase intranet adoption and employee engagement. Your new intranet brand will be a topic of conversation all day after the unveiling. We unveiled our new intranet, SQIRL, at one of our daily huddles in front of all staff and everyone loved it!
Once everyone has seen the new brand, don’t forget to revisit step 1 and ask for feedback again. It is important to build an intranet for your end-users, so making sure they like the new brand is key.
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