You pour your heart into your company’s external-facing website, working hard to create a phenomenal online property that will inform and delight visitors. But while your website is raking in the views and gaining accolades, the other vitally important site in your company’s digital arsenal may be languishing: your intranet.
Your internal communications staff likely faces a common problem: Employees simply aren’t tuning in, probably because your intranet doesn’t provide enough value. The best way to fix this is to make your intranet the central conduit of communication and information, an essential tool for your employees’ success and happiness at work.
At Brightspot, we believe your intranet should be built and managed with the same passion and creativity that you bring to your external website. It should present useful digital experiences and allow for sharing content seamlessly among staff and management. It should be attractive, easy-to-use, inspiring and accessible anywhere, on any type of device. Above all, it should serve as the backbone of your digital workplace by providing a one-stop solution that improves communication and truly nurtures your most important and valuable audience: your employees.
The right content management system (CMS) is essential if you’re going to do this right. We developed Brightspot Content Management after helping some of the world's most prominent brands like Marriott International, create, launch and maintain successful intranet sites. This best-in-class CMS allows companies to tailor their intranet to organizational and employee needs while integrating with the company’s external site.
Brightspot provides every technical feature you need to build a first-class intranet, such as:
Authentication/Permissioning: With Brightspot, you can manage users directly in the system and use authentication through social platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google. Roles and permissions capabilities are customizable and easy-to-use, allowing for targeted access settings. Public and private user profiles are supported, with modules you can customize for each view. Even non-technical admins can configure the settings, so your team can make the changes themselves.
Audience Segmentation and Personalization: Brightspot allows you to design custom experiences to reach specific audiences in a personalized way using pre-built audience targets; this enables you to deliver the right message to the right employee at precisely the right time. Because Brightspot empowers you to deliver curated experiences for your employees via audience variants, you can do things like create a distinct homepage for mobile users or construct experiences around specific topics of interest. Set up your targets in settings, and then designate segments directly on content assets.
Taxonomy Paired With AI/ML: Brightspot makes it easy to establish and maintain a robust taxonomy—the essential organizing structure for your site. The suggested tags feature, powered by Amazon Comprehend, allows you to match relevant keywords against existing tags and automatically identify objects, people, texts, scenes and activity via an integration with Amazon Rekognition. Section, tag, employee, department and location pages are built in to the CMS. Meanwhile, all pages can either be hand-curated or set to “dynamic” mode for “set-it-and-forget-it” publishing.
Search/Federated Search: The Brightspot user experience is centered on a robust search function, which you can access at any point in the CMS workflow. You can customize your search options, save searches to complete later, and use seamless federated search to access assets and content on third-party databases. Federated search comes with the platform, and the setup process requires only a simple configuration, with no IT expertise required.
Flexible Content Types: Recognizing that each organization is different, we developed Brightspot Intranet to have the flexibility to create the content that you need to effectively communicate with your employees. A variety of content types, including articles, blogs, galleries, videos, press releases and others, allow editorial teams to create and publish content quickly, while the platform’s tools allow you to fully customize Brightspot's publishing interface to match your team’s needs. These tools include specialized assets and pages, video-as-an-asset, streamlined image editing and cropping, and a large module library.
Rich Text Editing: Designed to be every writer’s favorite tool, Brightspot's rich text editor provides the real-time functionality of a word processor, allowing you to draft, edit, publish and repurpose content more efficiently. It allows your team to drag and drop embedded images, galleries, videos and social posts directly into assets. The live preview feature provides a peek at precisely how your content will appear across devices and orientations once it’s published.
Collaboration & Planning: Brightspot's robust admin features include an built-in planning tools that allow employees to pitch, create, share, collaborate on and track content. They can use the tools to send out assignments for coverage of a topic or event to those on their team, streamlining the intranet’s overall content-management process.
Digital Asset Management: You can encourage employees to log into the intranet daily by establishing it as the central location for storing, accessing and sharing assets. Brightspot supports easy content management and dependable searchability. With AI-enabled tagging abilities and built-in copyright management tools, it makes managing digital assets easier than you’ve experienced before.
Community Features: Employees need to use the intranet to communicate with each other and with management. Brightspot’s affinity features enable this kind of two-way give-and-take through various tools, such as encouraging employees to comment on executives’ posts or embedding tools that allow employees to directly message leadership. In addition, community features let employees bookmark and “favorite” content, while following capabilities encourage them to follow each other, key pages and executive updates.
Integrations: Brightspot's flexible, API-first approach involves a large number of built-in integrations for enterprise applications such as Microsoft Teams, Slack and Google Suite, among many others. Communications teams will be able to easily coordinate written content, multimedia, analytics, marketing operations and print publishing. Custom integrations are available, as well.
As the features outlined above illustrate, an intranet created on the Brightspot platform will become an essential workspace that your employees will find value from. It will be visually appealing, well designed and easily updated. It will be collaborative, easy-to-use and full of helpful resources and tools that make employees informed, valued and productive.
And not only does Brightspot provide every feature you need to build a best-in-class intranet, the Delivery Team will provide expertise that helps build an intranet that aligns to your business priorities.