Kick off the conference by connecting with your fellow attendees and beginning the day’s conversations led by our chair.

Imagine transforming your company's digital landscape, making it a true mirror of your culture and collaboration, all without writing a single line of code. This session will debunk the myth that SharePoint is solely the domain of IT and showcase how Communications professionals can use no-code solutions to become architects of their digital spaces.

We'll dive into the world of no-code integrations and modular design within SharePoint, providing you with the keys to unlock a realm where creating, managing, and customizing digital environments doesn’t require a tech guru. This is about empowering you, the storytellers and culture creators, to take control and innovate within your intranet spaces, making them more engaging and reflective of the values and spirit of your organization. This session is a call to action for Communications professionals and any non-technical team members who aspire to play a pivotal role in their organization's digital evolution. Walk away with the confidence and tools to start crafting digital experiences that don't just inform but inspire! Key takeaways include:

• No-Code Mastery: Learn how SharePoint's no-code tools can be your best allies in designing spaces that breathe life into your company's digital presence.
• DIY Digital Spaces: Discover the ease of dragging, dropping, and clicking your way through site customization, making your mark without waiting on IT.
• Cultural Catalysts: Find out how to leverage digital spaces to amplify company culture, turning intranet sites into community hubs that foster connection and collaboration.

Intranets are still a central point from which employees navigate their companies, connecting to job aids, career resources and benefits. Often, they also get tangled in a virtual junk drawer of unhelpful content, wasting time and reducing productivity. But with the right planning and governance, it’s possible to create an uncluttered, streamlined intranet that improves productivity and employee satisfaction.

In this session, you’ll gain insights on:

●Applying data to support your case for a solution that aligns with the business;

●Clarifying your true role, scope and governance;

●Conducting user experience testing;

●Planning change management communications; and

●Keeping things simple (even when it seems hard).

American began its journey to modernize its intranet in 2011, transforming it from a conventional one-way communication platform to a collaborative social business tool. While they achieved their goal of fostering connection, communication, and collaboration, today, the journey continues with a focus on creating a digital workplace experience that is more personalized and relevant to their team members.

What you will learn:

• Gain insights into their approach to modernization and things they encountered along the way to achieve a seamless transition.
• Learn about what they measured and how they continuously refined their approach to make meaningful progress toward their goals.
• Evaluating feedback and deciding which suggestions to implement while balancing needs and wants is essential.

With group roundtable discussions and facilitated peer sharing, we will deep-dive into the intranet topics that are top of mind for today’s communicators, such as how to build an intranet that drives purpose and connection, how AI will help communicators and intranets, and meaningful intranet measurement.

From navigation to homepage design to user testing, UX design principles and practices apply to internal websites just as they do to external ones. But as intranet managers, many internal communicators and knowledge managers lack access to UX design expertise simply due to budget limits, time constraints, or project structure. In this session, you’ll learn how to be your own UX designer! The session introduces key UX design principles that are most relevant to internal sites, and equips intranet managers with practices and low-cost tools they can use to ensure their site isintuitive, easy to navigate, and user friendly.

Topics covered include:

●How to design a user friendly navigation.

●Must-do's for optimizing readability.

●How to get actionable feedback about your site

Launching and maintaining an intranet for a global, decentralized organization can be a challenging endeavor. Not to mention, keeping up with new technology adds yet another hurdle to conquer along your journey. In this presentation, David Lee, Senior Manager, Global Intranet & Knowledge Management Operations at Alvarez & Marsal will share how his KM teampartnered with IT, Marketing and other internal groups to replace an aging and neglected intranet with a modern, actively managed site. Come hear about how their intranet has evolved over the last few years based on employee feedback, rapid company growth,and emerging technologies.

You’ll learn:

●How to design an intranet that caters to various audiencesacross the globe

●When to use which technology platform to communicate andcollaborate with your employees

●How we partner cross-functionally with teams around theorganization to manage content

Let’s face it–employees are burnt out. Tragedies dominate the news cycle yet political gridlock reigns; our “always on,”constantly connected lifestyle seems to be making us even busier but somehow lonelier than before. Combine this general state of theworld and throw in the mix some passionate advocates fighting for decades to protect against climate change, environmental justice, and saving wildlife, and you’re bound to hear an employee complaint now and then. But what if–hear me out–it wasn’t all doom and gloom? What if you had the data to prove it?

This session will teach you:

●Qualitative and quantitative strategies to measure the impactof your intranet and other communications tools.

●How to listen to what your colleagues don’t know how to say.

●How to reframe communications challenges when the goinggets tough

Your team is what makes your company run–without engaged team members, you're going nowhere. How do you boost and maintain engagement in a workforce with countless items competing for your team's attention? How do you develop a sense of pride in the organization through inclusion and effective communication?

Give them a variety of content–meet your team where they are and speak to them on their terms. Keep evolving and thinking fresh. Make your modern intranet the first place people go in the morning and make it worth their while. Team members want to be in the know and they like the spotlight to occasionally shine on them. Get their attention through compelling content and drive them to your digital platforms. Now you have an audience to communicate important, company-wide information. The best content is organic content–for your team, by your team. Keep introducing new initiatives where your team can actively participate in the discussion.

You’ll learn:

●How to create intranet content that will get attention NOW–no waiting for money for costly campaigns.

●Strategies for sustaining growth in team member engagement and making them feel comfortable communicating.

●Success is when team members feel that internal communications is on their side, interacting with them and answering questions vs one-sided communication that just tells them what to do.

Given SharePoint Online as your intranet and not sure where to begin? Are you an internal comms team with limited staff,support, and budget? Learn from my mistakes! I will share our process from beginning to end to give you some ideas on a ligh tweight roadmap you could adapt, and I will share what we learned along the way, including how we managed some tricky challenges and specific user needs, and how we manage our (now stronger than ever) relationship to IT, HR, and other important departments. I will share some of the (pretty nice!) pages we made using only the built-in resources plus some free tools like Canva. It won’t be all sunshine and roses, though: I will share some of the challenges we still have and are working to address.This session is for the least technical, but most scrappy among us. My credentials in that department? I had never even heard of SharePoint before I took this on last year, now it’s one of my team’s major accomplishments for our organization.

In our engaging panel, experts explore effective communication for intranet changes, crucial for communications practitioners. They'll address key challenges like user-centricity and adoption resistance, sharing strategies for aligning user needs with goals, managing content efficiently, and ensuring inclusivity in change processes.

You’ll learn:

●Strategies for incorporating a user-centric approach in yourcommunication plan to increase intranet adoption and reduce resistance.

●Techniques for defining and communicating clear objectives for intranet changes to align with organizational goals and enhance user clarity.

●Best practices for content management, ensuring mobile compatibility, and maintaining security and compliance to optimize the effectiveness of your intranet.