Wildlife Trusts, a nonprofit organization that works to provide information about wildlife and bring people closer to nature, needed to replace their outdated Intranet system to fix communication and collaboration issues across their 46 UK branches.

Wildlife Trusts sought out an adaptable, intuitive, and modern intranet solution to solve these issues. After extensive research of other intranet platforms, Wildlife Trusts adopted MangoApps for its balanced structure, platform adaptability, and accommodating customer service.

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

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1. Facilitate communication and collaboration on collective projects across different trusts
2. Organize employees into groups and teams
3. Improve and enhance current operations through open discussion threads

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Full video transcript:

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Tim Middlecote, Head of ICT:

“Well, the vision of the wildlife trust is land and sea’s rich in wildlife and people close to nature, so that’s what we work for. We have over 2,000 staff at 46 wildlife trusts and the central team here as well.”

Andrew Rushton, Intranet and ICT Project Officer:

“We actually looked at 12 different systems and we looked at those, and some of them, what we found is there seemed to be two different approaches, so there would be platforms that had very much a social focus, but there were also other platforms that had more of a traditional kind of intranet, top down dissemination of information focus. But what we founded with our federated structure was we required both of those use cases, so we needed something that would enable local trusts to collaborate and work amongst themselves for stuff to happen more organically. But we also had a requirement to provide this sort of top down level of information. And what we found is that MangoApps was the best fit for us in terms of those 12 platforms. It ticked both those boxes and was flexible enough to enable us to work within our federated structure.”

Leanne Manchester, Senior Comms Officer:

“MangoApps has actually doubled the amount of communications that we’ve seen as a movement, and it’s put an awful lot of people in touch with each other who otherwise wouldn’t have.”

Tim Middlecote, Head of ICT:

“Well, I help to support the education officers across the movement, so we have a group that we use to keep in touch with everybody, and we use it for everything from sharing ideas about how to educate children about the outdoors, to signing up for seminars and sharing presentations. So it’s just a really useful way to keep in touch.”

Andrew Rushton, Intranet and ICT Project Officer:

“People use it for all sorts of things. We have project specific areas where we have projects that are running across different trusts, so we might have people who are geographically distributed across the UK in different trusts coming together to work on collective initiatives. And we find that’s a really strong use case for the platform to create these virtual teams where people wouldn’t necessarily always… or don’t have much opportunity to meet up and collaborate and work together in person. Also, we use it for disseminating information about training programs that are being run to enable people to just ask questions, look for information and expertise.”

Leanne Manchester, Senior Comms Officer:

“We have a lot of groups for all the different types of work that goes on in the wildlife trust’s movement. So some groups would be more discussion led for people to coordinate things like campaigns. Others, we store a lot of key files and guidelines and branding information. So quite a variety of situations.”

Sam Gee, Individual Giving Support Officer:

“We use Wildnet for, obviously, communicating with all the 46 different wildlife trusts, but then we use it internally here for just the colleagues in this office as well. So we’ve used it to set up social groups, like there’s a gardening club, there’s a book club, and it’s been really handy for that, just setting up a meeting, sharing photos and stuff like that. We’ve used it as a bit of a social tool as well, and that’s been good. It’s been, again, easy to use.”

Tim Middlecote, Head of ICT:

“I find it really intuitive because it’s got a bit of a social media feel to it. It means it’s quite easy to get used to it, even if you’ve never used a platform like that before. Our old intranet was quite difficult and not very user friendly, so this has been a real shift for us. I was involved with building quite a lot of the groups at the start for the comms team, so I got hands on really early on in the process, building the pages, setting up the discussions, and I did find it really quite easy. And then I trained the rest of the comms team in it as well.”

Sam Gee, Individual Giving Support Officer:

“It’s really easy to set it up in the way it needs to be. It’s really easy to share it with colleagues and make sure that they know how to use it too. So yeah, it’s made my job a lot easier.”

Andrew Rushton, Intranet and ICT Project Officer:

“I tend to use the projects area, so I use it for, actually, as the main collaboration area for two main projects that I run personally. One of those is our developing a shared web platform, the movement. We run a user group where we have a specific kind of subset of people who are really helping to shape and collaborate on the ongoing development of that platform. And we are sharing, we’re having discussions on there, we’re sharing documentations, we’re getting feedback on specific technical requirements. So that’s in there, but we’re also using it with a broader group of trusts as well to share information and updates about new releases of that platform, and also as a support portal, an unofficial support channel. People can go in there, ask questions of colleagues who are also using the system, get advice and best practice on how to use that. Those are key areas for me.”

Sam Gee, Individual Giving Support Officer:

“In my role, the individual giving supports officer, it’s essentially all about sharing best practice. So in a movement of 46 different wildlife trusts, we really want to gather best practice examples of membership campaigns, fundraising campaigns. When a trust has done something really well or not so well, we need a platform to share it with everybody, so they don’t reinvent the wheel. Wildnet’s perfect for that because we can share images of door drops and digital marketing campaigns and so on. There’s discussion feeds, obviously, so all the trusts can comment and get a bit deeper into what went well and what didn’t go so well. And overall, it just makes our job so much easier because it helps us to communicate with the other 46 trusts and, more importantly, for them to communicate with each other. It’s just a really good platform for encouraging sharing of good ideas, finding out a bit more about what other people are doing, and just improving what we do.”

Tim Middlecote, Head of ICT:

“I really like the file system. It’s a really great way of us sharing things like presentations from our seminars, because we run quite a lot of those. Not every staff member can come to them, and we like to share it as widely as we can.”

Leanne Manchester, Senior Comms Officer:

“I like, firstly, the powerful search feature combined with the newsfeed as well. It lets me keep in touch with everything that’s going on throughout the movement.”

Andrew Rushton, Intranet and ICT Project Officer:

“Email inboxes might get pretty messy, I think. You can lose the thread of discussions. Other conversations come up, break the discussions. Information’s lost. Stuff stored in attachments, it’s all in a silo in your individual inbox. It’s not easy to share that information. And essentially, once you’ve dealt with it, it doesn’t go anywhere and it’s not shared. I think the intranet is being great for us in surfacing that information to our end users and making sure that they can access the information that they need. And that openness of communication is really… helps, particularly in our federated structure, where lots of stuff can be happening. But if it’s happening in someone’s inbox, our colleagues over the UK won’t have that knowledge. If we put in the intranet, that’s out there for everyone to see.

So I log in every day. I’m in there checking posts, checking for updates. If I got some key information to release, I’m posting it on there. I use the app as well. It’s less frequent, but I do dip in sometimes, particularly if I’m out of the office for the day, just to see what’s been going on.”

Tim Middlecote, Head of ICT:

“I log in daily from a desktop usually, just because I find that easiest. But yes, I would say every single day I would log into Wildnet.”

Sam Gee, Individual Giving Support Officer:

“Right. Well, I log in every day, pretty much. It’s an essential part of my job, making sure that Wildnet is… But I’m using Wildnet to share what I need to share and encouraging that other people are using it as well. It’s an essential part of my job, so it’s every day.”

Leanne Manchester, Senior Comms Officer:

“I log in daily. I personally, as an office-based person, tend to log in on the web application, but I do have the app on my phone as well, so I can keep track of what’s going on on the move. The support we’ve received from MangoApps has been great. It’s always really responsive, always really helpful and friendly, and it’s been a pleasure to work with.”

Andrew Rushton, Intranet and ICT Project Officer:

“Yeah, it’s been a really good decision for us. I think we’ve found the support from MangoApps to be strong. The flexibility of the platform, I think, has been key in that we’ve been able to use all the tools in there to basically meet that slightly unusual kind of federated structure of our organization, and it serves that really well.”

Sam Gee, Individual Giving Support Officer:

“Like me, I imagine they’d find it very easy to use. It’s very diverse. I can see it working for a lot of different charities. And the support was really good when it was needed. So yeah, I’d definitely recommend it.”

Andrew Rushton, Intranet and ICT Project Officer:

“I would certainly recommend any organization in a similar position with a similar structure to ourselves have a close look at MangoApps. It’s a good, solid platform. There’s a lot of tools in there. There’s a lot of flexibility. The usability is really good, so our end users like it. And the other thing is it’s constantly being developed, so we’ve seen a lot of new features and new functionality added to the system since we initially implemented. Seeing that constant development and evolution gives us some assurances that we’re not going to be in the same position that we work with the old platform where it got out date and our users lost interest and started moving to other systems [inaudible 00:10:51]. We’ve got confidence it’s going to be there for a good period.”

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