Each week in this newsletter I answer a question from a reader. This week's question comes from a Head of Internal Comms in Scotland, who asks:
I'm in the market for a new intranet or digital platform but there are so many choices on the market I don't know where to start. It's a bit overwhelming. How do you pick one (the right one)? Where do I begin?
Great question, I've been exactly where you are and I made TONS of mistakes and wasted a lot of time. So in today’s newsletter let me unpack the mistakes I made and give you practical advice on how to avoid making the same ones.
Let’s start with the story of my many mistakes.
The time I wasted six weeks of my life
Some years back, I was working in-house and we were planing to invest in a new intranet. Our existing setup was clunky, old and had gradually morphed into a vast collection of out-of-date PDFs and multiple versions of the same policy documents. It was confusing for staff and wildly inefficient so it was time to choose a new platform. I had buy-in from leadership and a budget to spend. I was excited!
There was just one problem: I had never shopped for a new intranet before. I had no idea where to start. So I did what any normal person would do. I opened Google and typed in "employee intranet."
And here’s mistake number one: I let my enthusiasm get the better of me. I visited multiple vendor websites, all of which told me (rather convincingly) that their platform was the best on the market. They all looked brilliant and in my excitement I got carried away and clicked “request a demo” on at least 15 different vendor websites.
Well that was a giant mistake because I totally underestimated what I was getting myself into.
That brings me to mistake number two: investing hours and hours of my time into platform demos without making a shortlist of the right ones first.
What followed was six weeks of my life I'll never get back.
I sat through demo after demo after demo. Each one was an hour long. Each vendor showed me their platform, walking through every single feature whether I needed it or not. Each demo blurred into the next until I honestly couldn't remember which platform did what. And each demo was followed up by multiple emails from vendors asking if I wanted another demo, if I wanted a follow-up call, if I wanted to make the purchase.
This was my third mistake really: trying to manage all of this myself ON TOP OF MY BUSY DAY JOB.
My calendar was completely full of vendor meetings. I was trying to take notes during each demo but I couldn't keep track of it all. And the whole time I had this nagging anxiety: what if I'm missing something? What if there's a perfect platform out there that I don't even know exists because they didn't show up on the first page of Google?
It was exhausting. It was overwhelming. And I was struggling to juggle my regular work with finding the elusive perfect platform.
The better way I eventually discovered
Now lucky for you I learned a lot of lessons from this experience, and you can learn from them too. Please don’t make the same mistakes I did. There is an easy way you can skip all my wasted hours and painful mistakes with this super resource: the Clearbox report that compares and reviews all the intranets and employee experience platforms on the market.
This report would have saved me from those six weeks of hell.
This report is produced by ClearBox Consulting, an independent consultancy firm who don't sell any platforms themselves; they independently evaluate platforms based on real-world capabilities and scenarios. They've been producing this report every year since 2016.
When I found this report I literally thought “Where was this when I needed it most?” [Well actually if memory serves what I said was Where have you been all my life?? but that was slightly dramatic to be fair.] I was kicking myself that I didn’t know it existed. It would have saved me literally weeks of wasted time and stress.
Here's a glimpse of how I could have used this report to avoid the many mistakes I made:
Firstly I would have gotten a snapshot comparison of the available tools on the market to quickly see which ones might be a good fit for me based on what I was looking for. For example, if I wanted a platform with excellent analytics then I could look for the ones that do that best, or if I wanted one that had the best user experience and visual appeal then I could focus on that. Here’s the snapshot comparison you’ll find on page 9 of the report:
This report would have also saved me so much time by giving me a one-stop resource to start with rather than spending hours on Google or on vendor websites. This is a really good overview of what tools and platforms are available, which ones are likely to fit in my budget and even which ones are fully standalone tools vs which ones require Sharepoint to work.
Here’s another look at an overview page which gives you hours of research on one page. This page alone would have saved me about a week of my life!
Using these tables I reckon I could probably have pulled together a shortlist of platforms to look at more deeply, at that point then I could skip forward in the report to look at the in-depth review of each platform to get a better understanding of how it all works and if it’s right for me. The product reviews include a summary of the product, information about pricing, screenshots of the product features, information about the company and customer feedback on the product.
And here's something else super valuable that I appreciate a lot; the report includes dozens of screenshots of the platforms that you won't find anywhere else (not even on the vendor's websites).
The reviews are extremely comprehensive, give tons of useful details and basically save you having to trawl through a vendor’s website or have a demo with a sales team. This report serves it all up to you. For free!
For example here’s a few screenshots from the Unily review in the report:
See what I mean? This level of detail means you can really understand a platform before you ever talk to a vendor.
And this is the real value of this report, it puts me in a position to make an informed decision about which platforms to reach out to for demos and makes sure I don’t waste weeks of my time talking to ALL the vendors – just talk to the ones that will be the best fit.
Save time with a customised demo
You can also use the information in this report to get a more customised, less generic demo from a vendor. For example, instead of sitting through generic hour-long vendor pitches, you could go into demos with specific questions about the exact features and workflows you care about. Maybe you want a deeper dive into the analytics dashboard or you want a better understanding of the publishing process; don’t be shy to ask for what you need, rather than let the vendor take the lead.
Here's an interesting nugget, vendors themselves have said that intranet projects tend to be more successful overall when customers use this report to structure their thinking and proposal. Perhaps using this report doesn't just save you time, it can actually help you run a better project.
So if I could go back in time to when I was trying to choose a new intranet, I would have never opened up Google that day. I would have opened up the Clearbox report instead.
You can download it for free here:
Yes the report is absolutely massive at literally hundreds of pages, but it’s well structured and easy to skip to the parts you need and find the reviews you want.
Even if you're not actively shopping for a platform right now, I'd recommend downloading this report to keep you up-to-date with what modern employee communication technology can do, benchmarking your current tools and building your business case when the time comes to propose an upgrade.
Don’t make the mistakes I did - download this report now BEFORE you need it, not when you're already drowning in vendor demos like I was.
Thanks for reading and stay curious,
Joanna
P.S. This newsletter is sponsored by ClearBox Consulting. I discovered their report years after my platform shopping nightmare and have been recommending it ever since.
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