How IC’s financial intranet solution saved time and increased engagement at Hickam FCU

The team at Hickam FCU completing a card sorting exercise for their new financial intranet
110

Employees

90-95

Hours Saved Per Year

Summary 

Improved collaboration: Hickam FCU’s new financial intranet brought all departments within the credit union together to create a dynamic and engaging single source of truth.

Time savings for IT and Marketing: The IT department at Hickam FCU was responsible for the entire document management process on their previous intranet while the Marketing team was responsible for employee engagement and content. Now, with IC, the intranet is governed and managed by individual department site owners instead of relying upon IT and Marketing.

Trusted support: During implementation and beyond, the Hickam FCU team knows they can always rely on IC’s support team for intranet help and for best practice advice. 

After implementing IC’s intranet software, we have an average of two visits per day per employee. Each of the site owners has taken pride in their site. It’s exciting to see site owners taking full ownership. Now we have a lot of employees involved in contributing to the intranet, whereas before it was only the Marketing and IT departments.

– Brian Sawai, VP of Marketing, Hickam FCU

About Hickam Federal Credit Union 

Located on the beautiful Hawaiian island of Oahu, Hickam Federal Credit Union was organized as a financial cooperative in 1936. The community credit union is owned and operated by its members and serves the entire island of Oahu. Employing over 110 workers on Oahu, Hickam FCU was ranked #1 best credit union in Hawaii by Forbes in 2022. Hickam FCU has always been proud to give back to their community through various community outreach and volunteer events.

The problem: a time-consuming and uninteresting intranet 

Hickam FCU’s previous intranet, which was built internally using Microsoft, required that all changes and uploads go through their IT and Marketing departments. Uploading and maintaining all their documents onto the intranet was a time-consuming process. IT would usually spend just under two hours per week (10 minutes on each upload request from various departments and would field up to 10 such requests a week) working out to about 90-95 hours per year taking requests from other departments to update crucial information on their intranet.  

In addition, Hickam FCU’s intranet had a clunky UI and wasn’t very interactive, making the intranet uninteresting and unengaging to employees. Editing a page’s look and feel required greater technical knowledge and certain design and publishing tools that only Marketing could use.  

The solution: IC’s financial intranet software 

Hickam FCU became an Intranet Connections customer in late 2021, and immediately began using our financial intranet software to both provide a more engaging intranet experience and to decrease the burden on their IT and Marketing departments. 

The goal for Hickam FCU’s new intranet was two-fold: save countless hours of time having to upload and manage the intranet, and have their intranet be more fun, engaging, and collaborative. In fact, the two desired outcomes went together. By creating an intranet with a friendlier UI, more customization, and better search and findability, the governance and management of the intranet was shared among departments and other credit union teams.  

The Intranet Connections’ team was thrilled to work with the talented and enthusiastic Marketing team at Hickam FCU. The IC team made suggestions to help Hickam FCU engage the various intranet site owners and users about their expectations, which was a big first step for the intranet project.  

The IC team had weekly onboarding status meetings throughout the launch of Hickam FCU’s new intranet. During implementation, the IC team helped to define the onboarding steps and provided tutorials to the Hickam FCU team on topics ranging from running card sorting exercises, to building various apps, and ensuring organizational-wide buy-in of their home page layout and navigation.  

Through the weekly meetings, IC really helped Hickam FCU bring this project together. Once the capabilities of the apps and widgets were understood, it really helped push the design and navigational envelope. Our meetings helped us stay on task and we accomplished a lot in 3-4 months.

– Brian Sawai, VP of Marketing, Hickam FCU 

The result: a dynamic and engaging financial intranet that inspires collaboration 

When Hickam FCU launched their IC intranet, a few changes were apparent right from the start. Their new intranet was dynamic, colorful, and engaging.  

In place of a static intranet, Hickam FCU was able to create a colorful financial intranet that not only enabled greater engagement, but also allowed greater collaboration across departments, especially with the sharing of documents, forms, and events.  

Individual department site owners are now managing their own documents and content and taking pride in personalizing the look of their team’s website. They are also sharing inspiration with other site owners on how to build a more engaging departmental site with IC apps and widgets.

The entire credit union was brought together to collaborate on the intranet. Now, there are fun and engaging parts of the intranet that help colleagues at Hickam FCU get to know one another better. The event calendar is a big improvement—showcasing community initiatives that, prior to the new intranet, had a complicated sign-up process on a shared drive. Now community service sign-up through online forms on IC’s intranet saves time and no longer clutters inboxes with announcements and reminders. In addition, new employees are welcomed to the credit union team right from the start thanks to Hickam FCU’s new intranet. New employees as well as those celebrating employment anniversaries are recognized on the home page of the intranet, so that everyone at the credit union has a sense of belonging to a greater team.  

Ease-of-use that saves time 

With the new, easier-to-use UI that IC’s software provided, Hickam FCU has intranet admins in each department take responsibility for uploading and maintaining forms, documents, policies, and knowledge-based content on their individual team sites. Since switching to IC, Hickam FCU’s IT and Marketing departments have been mostly hands-off with the intranet. This was a major accomplishment for Hickam FCU, and a main goal from the get-go.  

Other time saving tools also came in handy, such as the powerful search tool, which was missing on Hickam FCU’s previous intranet. There is now greater and quicker ease of access to all the important resources the credit union staff needs to serve its member community. 

Ease of access to everything our staff needs is very important, and the new intranet has helped a lot.

– Melissa Cordner, Marketing & Public Relations Specialist, Hickam FCU 

Learn more about engaging and time-saving financial intranet software 

Interested in learning how IC’s financial intranet software can enrich your organization and boost collaboration like it did for Hickam FCU? Book a demo now and discover how our expert team can make launching an intranet intuitive and easy.  

Your team [at IC] have absolutely helped us along the way. We really appreciate all the support. At first, we thought it would be an overwhelming project, but it went smoothly and we’re very happy with the result.

– Brian Sawai, VP of Marketing, Hickam FCU