Inside St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital’s intranet rebuild and rollout

A vibrant intranet platform can serve as a destination for employees to stay informed about the goings-on at their company and as a conduit for cultural bonding for far-flung teams. But far too often, the intranet is an afterthought for many employees, reduced to a repository for holiday announcements.

That’s why we’re highlighting St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital’s exemplary work for its award-winning intranet rebuild. The reworked platform dubbed “The Hub” won the Best Overall Intranet at the 2024 Ragan Employee Communication Awards. The new intranet allowed employees at St. Jude to more easily connect to their work and one another in a virtual setting.

Regaining leadership confidence with an intranet audit  

With nearly 7,000 pages within its index and over a decade old, St. Jude intranet was aging, cluttered, and difficult to manage. This posed an opportunity to overhaul the intranet to serve the hospital’s employees.

“The intranet was no longer serving as the ’source of truth‘ that it needed to be at an institution doing the valuable work that we do,” said Tiffany Derrick, manager of internal communications at St. Jude. “Our clinicians and researchers don’t have the time to search through all of that noise to find the information they need: they needed it fast and they needed it to be accurate.”

Rather than just moving all the material on the intranet, much of which was outdated and irrelevant after so many years, the comms team knew it needed to secure the blessing of leaders to make the new platform valuable.

“We were able to secure senior leadership support that allowed us to have the time and resources needed to approach this in a valuable way,” Derrick explained. Her team took three months to look at its content, diagnose what wasn’t working, and streamline the migration process.

Communicating the new intranet with employees

For the St. Jude comms team, the first step in bringing the new intranet to life was getting feedback from the employees who would use it every day. A 12-question survey was posted to the old intranet home page, and the team hoped for around 300 responses. They were blown away by what happened next — they got nearly 1,300 survey answers.

“People were very invested in the future of the platform and wanted to give their feedback on their experience, both good and bad,” Derrick said.

“From there, we identified groups of employees from across the institution who agreed to participate in focus groups, which allowed us to dive deeper into their needs for the future of the platform and do some really interesting daydreaming on future-state web parts.”

St. Jude also allowed some respondents to take the new platform for a spin and provide their thoughts. Additionally, the comms team brought the platform to life by giving demonstrations around the hospital’s campus. The demos included:

• A series of pop-up kiosks around the hospital campus that showed off the platform.
• Real-time demonstrations of features and locations of necessary work items.
• Office hours to help employees address new features or potential bugs.

Prioritizing a people-first rollout

With many months of work behind them, the comm team rolled out “The Hub” to the St. Jude employee populace to positive reviews and with no technical hiccups. Derrick described the unveiling as “surreal”, but a valuable process overall.

“It gives everyone on my team a thrill whenever anyone says, ‘You can find this on The Hub’ in a presentation,” she said. “Knowing that the work we did has been so valuable to our colleagues is very rewarding.”

St. Jude focuses on its employees at the center of the rebuild was a key to the success of the platform. The hospital worked with its agency partner West Monroe to give the project a people-first approach thorough active listening.

The willingness to listen led to the addition of one of the most utilized parts of The Hub, the Phonebook. While building The Hub, the team found that employees wanted a way to keep track of their colleagues’ phone numbers. Resisting the temptation to build something that was simply acceptable, St. Jude took employee feedback into account and built The Phonebook to employee specifications. The Phonebook is currently the second highest viewed page (behind the homepage) on the intranet.

“The Internal Communication team here at St. Jude have been absolutely amazing to work with on this project, unselfishly giving their time and energy to continue to make the Hub the center of our internal communication ecosystem,” said Derrick.

Sean Devlin is an editor at Ragan Communications. In his spare time he enjoys Philly sports and hosting trivia.