Brandmuscle is an innovative marketing organization that helps big brand marketing departments execute at the local level. With associates in several cities across the United States, Brandmuscle needed a new intranet platform that enabled easy communication, collaboration, and information sharing.

Brandmuscle searched for a new and complete intranet solution to solve these issues. Brandmuscle selected MangoApps over other enterprise platforms for its consolidated database, all-inclusive capabilities, and scalable success.

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In this video, you will learn how Brandmuscle used MangoApps to:

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1. Increase information sharing and accessibility
2. Promote a culture of interdependence and collaboration
3. Streamline the onboarding and integration process for new employees

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Full video transcript:

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Meghan Bilardo, Director of Learning and Organizational Development:

“BrandMuscle is a highly technical and innovative marketing organization that helps big brand marketing departments execute at the local level. And we do that with 800 associates. We’re headquartered out of Chicago. We have offices in Cleveland, Austin, and Kansas City.

I’ve been involved with Mango for about two years now, but the organization has adapted it for three. And prior to that, two of our offices, two out of the four at that time, were using a SharePoint site. And people were finding it hard to get the information that they need in the time that they needed it to be able to get their work done. So that’s what led us to, “We’ve got to standardized communications. We’ve got to figure out ways to best share files and promote collaboration.”

It was a great value for the features and the capabilities that the tool provides us. We’ve asked people, we did this about a year ago, how Community has helped them. That’s what we call Mango here, Community. How it’s helped them. About half of the people that responded to our survey said they were able to find the information that they needed on Community. Also, about half of them said it was a good way to understand what was going on in the organization from a social or culture-building standpoint. So they were learning a lot that way as well.”

JoHanna Forman, Learning and Organizational Development Coordinator:

“We’ve really enjoyed that there’s a news feed because that just really brings everything that’s happening, whether it’s client-related or a holiday party. Sometimes we highlight different employees, and give them an employee spotlight. And that just really has brought all of our offices together and makes it feel like one cohesive culture.”

Meghan Bilardo, Director of Learning and Organizational Development:

“It’s the first place that people go to now, which is really exciting for me to hear. I’m happy because it’s the one place now where people can feel pretty comfortable at least starting there. “I’m going to start here and try to find out what our holiday schedule is for this year or who our new hire is in Austin.”

JoHanna Forman, Learning and Organizational Development Coordinator:

“Some of the other awesome things about Mango is that it really is a social internet. You’ll see a lot of intranets out there that just give information and their content creation, but beyond that, there’s not much to them. And this really enables employees to be involved in their day-to-day work and also be able to give thumbs up or, “Hey, check out what this person did” and really bring the culture into the work. So I think that’s something awesome that makes MangoApps stand out.”

Meghan Bilardo, Director of Learning and Organizational Development:

“In our research, we decided to look at when people log in and where are they going and how long are they there. We found out that they’re going to their department pages first. The second would be their groups, and the third would be the homepage. That leads us to believe that they’re really going there to either download forms or share information, and work on projects, both in those departments and group levels. And then the homepage really does share a news update, what’s going on from a business perspective, as well as how we’re involved in the community, how we’re giving back, recognizing employees, et cetera.”

JoHanna Forman, Learning and Organizational Development Coordinator:

“We have our onboarding program called Thrive. We’re able to get all our new hires into one group, and they’re able to talk and communicate. So, especially for employees who are remote or site, they don’t feel alone and like, “Hey, I started at BrandMuscle, but I don’t know anyone.” They’re immediately in a group, which is just such a nice feature.

There’s a ton of content that we can upload, but they can also chat with each other and make posts, so that’s been really helpful. Another thing that we really love about the platform is it cuts back on so much administrative time. We have all these links that are super easy to access and user-friendly. So when people forget the URL for something or they want to log in to record their timesheet, they can easily find all of that information right on their laptops. They don’t need to email a friend, “Hey, what’s that link?” or ask someone in HR. It’s right there, and they can self-serve really easily.”

Brandon Tidd, Performance Marketing Associate Manager:

“When I started working at BrandMuscle, I saw signs around the office to download the Community app and to engage in Community, and so I checked it out. Being a new employee, it was a great resource for me to learn the ins and outs of the company, the different departments, and how everybody interacted with one another. The user interface is really intuitive, so I was able to go through it. They provided a little step-by-step cheat sheet on how to access the more frequently used sections of Community. But that search toolbox in the upper right-hand corner proved invaluable to helping me navigate the site and do different searches, try to find the information that I needed quickly.”

Meghan Bilardo, Director of Learning and Organizational Development:

“It’s really a daily habit for me. It’s one of the first things that I do in the morning. I log in and check my email, and then I go right over to Community to see what’s happening. So I’m in the system all the time.”

Jason Stojkov, Graphic Operations Manager:

“How we have it broken down is a lot by departments or inter-office groups, or we have cross-office groups. So what we’re going into is we may be sharing updates on our clients, clients in the news more anecdotally to help internal people know, “Hey, what are your clients doing outside of what you do for them?” We use it as an internal calendar for things like PTO, meetings, and things like that.

The biggest resource I think that we use is file sharing. We already have an internal drive, but you have to know where to go to find certain files. But we can organize things within MangoApps, where you can go to a specific department page and you can find, Oh, these are where these resource documents are,” or “This is where this directory is.” So it’s been a nice hub, I think, of information.”

Brandon Tidd, Performance Marketing Associate Manager:

“Community for me is a great collaborative tool to allow me to work interdepartmentally with other users within our organization; file sharing, idea sharing, and a lot of just quick access to things across departments saves a lot of emails back and forth, which I really like. And it just allows us to engage each other quicker, plus stay up to date with company updates as they become available.”

Meghan Bilardo, Director of Learning and Organizational Development:

“My responsibility here is learning and organizational development. So, what I found really helpful around the Community is to incorporate that in our training programs. What we use it for, the trackers and forms, we use that for registration or to collect questions before a class might start.

I’ll post articles or videos that I want them to read as pre-work. Even during the session, instead of me handing out materials, I’ll ask everyone to log in to Community and to read an article that’s posted there. I’ve had people in sessions actually make posts on Community or answer a poll question. So, I’ve tried to incorporate it in maybe new ways as a means to expand everyone’s awareness around what this tool can do for us.”

Jason Stojkov, Graphic Operations Manager:

“I open it basically every day. And if I don’t open it first thing in the morning, I’m going to open it at some point during the day. And I just leave that tab open and get alert emails that, “Hey, there’s an update on this group” or this department or something, and I’ll go and check that. So it’s kind of an all-day companion.”

Brandon Tidd, Performance Marketing Associate Manager:

“I get push notifications through the mobile app, which I love because I usually find out about company updates before the rest of the company because I’m usually the first one to know about them by receiving those push alerts. And so, I check those as they come in.”

Jason Stojkov, Graphic Operations Manager:

“What I like is the interface. It is just very easy to navigate and to find things in it. I think what I appreciate the most about it is that we’re able to create… We have department groups where we can create other groups as well, and you could add new users. For example, when we were adopting MangoApps, we created a beta group on one of our test clients just as a mock-up. And it was very easy to set up, add certain members, and then have them play around. We change the layout and what it was going to look like. So I think just the usability has been really good.”

Meghan Bilardo, Director of Learning and Organizational Development:

“MangoApps is easy to use, both from an administrator standpoint and a user standpoint. People can obviously read, react, and post to the system really easy. It’s an intuitive process.”

JoHanna Forman, Learning and Organizational Development Coordinator:

“I really love, from an administrative standpoint, how user friendly it is. Not only is it easy for me to teach new hires how to use it, but I can easily update content, specifically thinking about the documents we upload to Mango, and then immediately can share links. And there’s a bunch of different levels of links, so we can either have it only internally, or we can make the links public. That’s just been such a lifesaver because we can link documents to an email that we’re sending out, and it drives everything back to the platform, so the content is always up to date, and we’re always able to upload the newest version. It just makes it really easy and simple.

The funniest thing about when I’m quote, unquote “training” new users is that they pick up on it so fast, sometimes it doesn’t feel like they even need the training. I think that it’s an awesome platform, and it’s more like, “Hey, here are our features and how we use them as a company. Take it back to your desk and work through it.” And I always say, “Let me know if you have any questions.” And there are never questions just because it’s so intuitive and easy for them to use.”

Brandon Tidd, Performance Marketing Associate Manager:

“I like the social component. With the posts, you can interact, you can like things like you do on Facebook or comment and communicate with your colleagues in the comments section of the posts to really start a conversation.”

JoHanna Forman, Learning and Organizational Development Coordinator:

“Yes, definitely. We love it, and we couldn’t do our daily work without it. It’s something that I haven’t seen before. It combines that social network piece with the content curation and makes having projects and group discussions really easy. So overall, I think it’s that awesome mixture of, “Hey, we need to get work done, but we also want to have fun while we’re doing it.”

Jason Stojkov, Graphic Operations Manager:

“We’ve been using this for a few years now, and I think it’s really solved a lot of our issues. It’s been a good solution. We didn’t have a way to communicate in the office. A lot of times, it was just big group emails. This is a very good way that you have a centralized hub to go to.”

Brandon Tidd, Performance Marketing Associate Manager:

“There’s a lot of tools out there that help teams collaborate, and this seems to be one that not only puts everything at your fingertips in an easy-to-use interface but also seems very intuitive and easy to use.”

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