Key Findings from SWOOP Analytics’ 2024 SharePoint Intranet Benchmarking Report
SWOOP Analytics
APAC | SharePoint Intranet Festival 2024
Join Dr Laurence Lock Lee and Sharon Dawson in showcasing the data from our most recent SharePoint Intranet Benchmark Report, with some truly compelling case studies from Victoria Police and Aggreko! The 2024 SharePoint Intranet Benchmark Report is available for free download right now!
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So I'd like to welcome Sharon Dawson and Dr Laurence Lock Lee to the virtual main stage. Yesterday was a very exciting day for SWOOP because we launched our 2024 SharePoint Internet Benchmarking Report and this next session is the perfect opportunity for you to get up to speed on all of the latest insights direct from the report authors. So Sharon, I'm going to hand over to you to kick us off.
Thank you, Emily, and welcome everyone to our session on how to manage a successful intranet. I just heard that echo too. Has it gone now? Can you go back to the other slide, please, Emily? Well, there's a bit of echo actually.
Oh, I can mute now. Thank you. Well, in this session, we're going to take a look at the key insights from our 2024 SharePoint Intranet Benchmarking Report, which as Emily said, we published it just yesterday.
So our benchmarking data gives real-life insights into how people... It is unfortunately, sorry for interrupting, Sharon, it is unfortunately badly echoed. Could you unshare and share again, Emily, or something? Because it's like when you are changing from the slides, then something strange triggers. We'll see how that goes.
I did have my computer sound shared earlier, so I'm hoping I've just switched it off. Hopefully that makes a difference. Well, just yell out and stop me again if it's echoing again.
So yeah, as I was saying, so our benchmarking data, it's all based on real-life insights. So we can show you exactly when people are reading the intranet, what they're reading, and for how long. And by using this data, we can give you insights that can help you best shape content to get maximum engagement on your intranet.
So in this year's report, we analysed more than 94,000 intranet pages, and the behaviours of more than 177,000 employees. And that was across 20 organisations worldwide. So that's almost tripled from our inaugural SharePoint intranet benchmarking report, which we published last year.
Hopefully a lot of you got to see that one. Interestingly, some of our initial findings from last year's study have been reinforced with this larger sample size. But other findings you'll see have significantly changed.
So first off, I'd just like to start with an acknowledgement of country. And I acknowledge that I'm hosting this webinar on the lands of the Ngarigo people. I also acknowledge the traditional custodians of the various lands on which you all work today, and the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people participating in this webinar.
I pay my respects to elders past, present and emerging, and celebrate the diversity of Aboriginal peoples and their ongoing cultures and connections to the lands and waters of Australia. And I'd like to introduce you to my fellow hosts. We've got Dr Laurence Lock Lee, who's SWOOP Analytics Chief Scientist, and Matt Dodd, who is our Product Director, and also a former intranet manager at Bankwest.
So we'd really like to make this session interactive. So I know you've been doing it in the last few sessions, but please keep all those Q&A questions coming. But differently this time, we're going to go through these findings of the report.
So we'll sort of talk about each particular insight. So pop in and ask your question as they come to you, and we'll try to answer them before we move on to the next finding. We're also going to ask you a couple of questions along the way.
So please join in these little polls. So first off, I'm going to hand over to Laurie to take you through the key insights from our benchmarking report. Maybe Laurie's not here.
I thought he would be. Well, I can go through this. So in our benchmarking report, as I said, we had 177,000 plus intranet readers.
So we broke down those 94,000 intranet pages. There were 57,000 that were news pages and 37,000 content pages. Overall, we looked at 822 SharePoint sites across 20 organisations.
And we're going to move... Are you not on the call? Matt, can I bring you in here just to talk about the purpose of the intranet? Yeah, I think this was... What was really interesting with this was that I find that there's... Oh, Dave, can you hear me? Yes, we can, Laurie, yes. Can you hear me now? Sorry, my ear plugs in. Okay, so let me take over here.
So basically what this data is telling us is that there's quite a variety of ways the intranet is used by the different organisations. So a big organisation doesn't necessarily mean that you've got a big intranet. And you can see the proportion of news is against the content pages is quite variable between organisations.
And I guess my takeaway here is that SharePoint Online is still fairly new. So we don't have sort of the common practices. We haven't really shared enough now to actually develop those.
So I guess we're still in the exploration stage. So sorry. So let's go on, Emily.
So this is where we're going to jump in with the first question for you guys. So Emily, I think you've set this one up as a word cloud. And I'd love for you to just pop in.
Does it come up on the screen? I can't see it, Emily. It's just watching now. So just pop in what percentage of employees access your intranet.
And you know, if you don't know, honestly, just write, I don't know. And we'd just be interested to make you think about the data, what it could be in your organisation. All right, that should probably do it.
Emily, we've got quite a few responses there. Oh, I can't see the answers. Can you? Sorry, I had just reopened the poll.
I'm not sure if it will pop up again. Oh, maybe it has. Technology just hasn't worked.
Oh, that's okay. Oh, view results, view results. I've clicked view results.
Is that showing anything? Not for me. Yeah, okay. Sorry about that.
Oh, we can come back to it later. It was just sort of interesting to make you think about how many people are actually accessing your intranet. But I'll move you go on, Laurie.
And Emily, if it works, we'll jump onto that in a moment. Okay, so the period that we looked at was a three month period, sort of up to the end of February. And on average, 86% of employees were visiting the intranet over that period.
So that's a pretty good number, actually. And I think that tells us that, you know, the original purpose of the intranet has been the enterprise information base. It's sort of actually working, you know.
So now, of that 86%, 87% were visiting the content pages, what we call the content or evergreen pages. 60% were reading news. Now, my first blush on that was that's not a very high number, but that's basically what's coming out.
We can talk a little bit more about that. But if you think back to the Victoria Police situation, a highly distributed editorship, and I must say, compared to other organisations, Vic Pol was by far the most distributed. You might have lots of local news, and therefore your target audience isn't the whole organisation.
So that might be why those numbers are down. But nevertheless, it's an area to explore because really that's where employee engagement gets traction. So engagement's about two-way connections, and people do tend to engage around news more so than static content.
So it's important. And the other point we wanted to make here, like I look at this slide and you go 86% of employees visit the intranet on average, which looks like a really strong number. And you might think, well, almost my job's done.
You know, 86% of people are on there. But probably the key takeaway we have from this entire benchmarking report is that people don't stay long on the intranet. We'll get into this in a little bit more detail soon.
But they have a time budget. So it's important to really showcase the news and the content that you need colleagues to see so you can make the most of their short visit. I think that's fair, don't you think, Laurie? That was sort of the key takeaway.
It's a lot of people on there, but it's a short visit. Yeah, yeah. And we'll go into that in a little bit more detail as we go through the presentation.
So what's next, Emily? So how many people are, well, what targets? I guess one of the things we do in SWOOP is we benchmark. We like to set sort of a target for you to aim at. Typically, you know, it's the 80-20 rule.
We say, well, you know, you want to aim to be in the top 20%. If I look at the readership, I think if you're getting up around that 90% or over, over a three-month period, I think that's a pretty good result. In terms of news readership, you know, we're really a little bit puzzled as to what a target might be for that.
But given the average is 60%, I think if you're below that, then you might want to strive at least to get to that. If you're above that, then you can start to think about what a real target is. And I guess really, as internal communications people, your target would be 100% of your target audience, whatever that audience is.
So if you're publishing news for the whole organisation, of course, your target should be 100% for the whole organisation. If you've got a lot of distributed sort of news, local news, then of course, the number would drop back because you're not looking to share with the whole organisation. So I guess we've still got to work on the news one a bit, I think.
Yeah, and part of our benchmarking, it's my favourite part, is Laurie crunches all the data, but then we contact the high performers. We do this with across Viva Engage and M365 and Microsoft Teams benchmarking as well. And we contact people and we learn from them.
So we can see the data, but what does it look like in real life? So we did the same with this SharePoint intranet benchmarking. We spoke with lots of intranet managers, including Sarah from Victoria Police, who was here earlier. And there's a great case study in the report from Sarah.
One of the tips we got from a lot of these managers is if you're sending all company emails or newsletters, wrapping up news or information for your colleagues, make sure you just share like a teaser of what that story is and then share the link to access the intranet. So it forces people to go onto the intranet. So we found that this is especially effective if there's something that will result in a benefit for employees.
So think about that, what's in it for me approach. So something like accessing exclusive employee benefits or a competition or a message from a senior leader, just put the link into that newsletter or email that takes people to the intranet. So I'm going to hand over to Matt to show how you can find out who accesses your own intranet.
Thanks, Sharon. Yeah, if we can head on to the next slide, Emily, it'd be great. So within the SWIP dashboard, we have some essential stats.
This looks at basically the last month of activity and we'll give you the sort of details around visitors, but the key percentage in that little activity over time report there on the right-hand side of the screenshot there is the percentage of people that have accessed the intranet in the timeframe in that month compared to the number of basically the potential users you have. So the number of people that are licensed for your intranet. Really that straightforward.
And back to Laurie. Oh no, here's another question. Okay, this one's a poll.
So this one's going to work, I'm sure. Let's take a punt here. How much time do people spend on the intranet? So this is different to that question in the break because that was about how much time people read news.
So this is about how much time employees spend on the intranet each day. So this is taking into account content pages and news articles. Are you able to see the answers coming through, Sharon? Or is that only me? Oh, now I can.
Now I can. Interesting, interesting. All right, we move on, Laurie, reveal the answer.
Oh, I think you have revealed it. I didn't actually see the results of the poll, but the average time spent on the intranet was 16 minutes, of which most of it is reading content pages. So only a minute for news.
Now that might not sound much, but the news is actually even more challenging than that because as you might know, news in particular follows that whole long tail digital distribution where you've got blockbuster news that takes up most of the visits. And if we work with the median rather than the average, the median time is only seven minutes and the median time of reading news is 18 seconds. So you don't have a lot of time to work with when you're trying to target your audience.
So we'll move into that a little bit more, but just keep that in the back of your mind that how are we going to get what we want to get to people when they're only spending 18 seconds a day? In fact, the other stat we found was that on average people only read one news article a week. Yeah, so the challenge really is for all of you guys, is for anyone managing an intranet, is to tailor the content to fit that brief time employees are willing to commit to being on the intranet. So for maximum impact, think about what your key messaging is and what you'd like to prioritise for that small window of attention available.
And I'm just going to answer Carolyn's question in the comments about the push email. If anyone wants to put in their own experience in the comments to Carolyn, that'd be great. But Carolyn, what we found with most of the interviews we did, it was roughly about like once a month.
Oh no, some organisations were doing it once a week, on a Monday they do like a wrap-up and a lot of it would include like Viva Engage, what was on the intranet and it would come in on a Monday morning into inboxes. And then other organisations were doing sort of once a month. So be great if anyone else wants to comment on their experience from Carolyn.
Oh, one more questions come in. The employee might come from different countries. Do you have any tips to translate newsletter to different language and share the translated copies? Oh, I just know the perfect person to answer this question.
And he's going to be in the next European webinar if you want to hang around for that one. Let's have a think about that. We'll get back to you.
I did also notice that Michelle had asked around local news and what we mean by local news. And this is the fact that on SharePoint, obviously you can distribute who publishes news items. And this is how we detect it in Suite for SharePoint is by the metadata when you add content to your SharePoint site, you can choose it to be a news item or choose for it to be a sort of standard page.
So obviously some organisations allow lots of people to publish the news and that will aggregate up through SharePoint online to appear potentially on your homepage. So when we talk about local news, it's those sort of divisional sites or those regional sites that are managing content and they're able to publish their own news items that users see. So it's a little bit more kind of restricted in who might see that news.
The health score. So I'm going to pass over to Matt later about to talk about this, but let me quickly go through and say that one of the things that we do quite uniquely at SWOOP is try to measure the health of your intranet page by page. And the score is between zero and 100.
And as you can see, the average is 47. So we've got a lot of scope for improvement. There's three dimensions of health, quality, experience and engagement.
Obviously you can see that engagement's very low. Engagement is measured based on how much time people spend consuming the words on a page and matching that against how much time they need to spend to effectively consume that content. And as you can see, this sort of reflects the whole attention problem because people are not really spending enough time sort of consuming that content effectively.
So let me go to the next page, Emily, and let Matt talk to this. He's the designer of the health, so he'll do much more justice to this than I can. But go for it, Matt.
Yeah, so the health score was really a way to sort of understand how the pages are put together, how they're being used, how they're being engaged with. So as Laurie mentioned, the engagement is really a factor of the time that people spend, or even if they've visited pages at all. So it can really show if you've got lots of, if you like surplus pages that people don't use, you'll get a sort of lower overall engagement score.
The experience is really focused around what does it look like on the page? So we use a combination of a readability score. We use licks. So that looks at how complex the words are, how long the sentences, those sorts of things are.
We also look at how long the headings on each page are. So if you've got really long headlines, we know from research that they're not really well read. They'll focus on the first few characters.
So we try and look at the length of the headings. And then we look at the makeup of the page in terms of how many paragraphs to headings there are. Because again, if pages are well structured, they're well broken down, people can see the headings and rather than being confronted with a wall of text.
So a nice experience is, reflects that how people are reading the pages. And then the quality is very much focused on is the content got any spelling mistakes? Does it have any broken links that we've picked up? Does it have an active author? So the person who last modified that page, are they still in the organisation? And finally, is it how out of date is the content? So was it last modified within the sort of last three months or is it older? And we know that even though you can have policies that might allow content to be only updated every couple of years or whatever, this is really, again, trying to focus a bit like Stephen was mentioning New South Wales on what's that quality like for a user? And as soon as you start to creep over three months, the likelihood is people are gonna ask, is this up to date? Is it relevant? And that creates that sort of quality impact. And so, yeah, really nice way to find that out about your intranet.
There's a question from Richie here about, have we got any data on how news is consumed depending on the platform? So from SharePoint or news hosted on Viva Engage or Workplace. Richie, in the benchmarking report, there's a couple of really good case study examples. And Sarah from Victoria Police who was on earlier has a great example.
What they ended up doing was getting a custom built web page at the bottom of each intranet news story. So the actual news is on the intranet, but for people to comment and get involved in the conversation, they've introduced a web part where they bring that original Viva Engage conversation onto the intranet. We've got another example from the UK and they actually got rid of their intranet news and they've replaced it with Viva Engage for conversation.
But Laurie will touch on a little bit more of that one soon. And then there's another one from Tim here, given news articles can appear in more areas than expected, like, oh yes, Tim, we're gonna answer that one coming up. So Laurie, if you keep going, we'll answer that one, Tim.
Okay, I hope. Oh yes, our last little poll. What's the best day to publish a news article on the intranet? It's a fake survey because Sunday wasn't listed.
Oh yeah, scroll down to Sunday. And in fact, it was interesting. We did have someone from a huge organisation in the US last year who thought Sunday night was the best time to send out their emails with links to the intranet.
But our data didn't back that up, but that's what they found anecdotally. But people have been reading the report because the majority's got the correct answer. Yeah, well, we'd say, well, Tuesday just edges it really.
In reality, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, they're all fine. Friday and the weekend are probably not so good. In terms of what time of the day, people tend to read the intranet when they get to work, maybe eight to nine, and maybe when they're having lunch or just after lunch.
This is pretty much what we found last year. So I think that's a fairly stable finding. Emily, you might just go to the next slide because I think the data is actually there.
Yeah, so that one is really the hours per day and you can see the twin peaks. And if you go to the next one, you can see that Tuesday really just edges out the other days, but yeah, they're pretty close. So I wouldn't worry about that too much.
Early in the week is probably better. Okay, next slide, Emily. Oh, this is just showing, Matt's just showing what it looks like in SWOOP.
You can see where people are being active. So you can see what it is for you. So I've averaged it over the 20 organisations, but I'm pretty sure you'll probably find similar results.
But if you don't, that's interesting. Yeah, there is a real pattern, that sort of morning and afternoon connection. And yeah, anecdotally, when I was an internet manager, we always found Monday people were focusing on work when they got into the office.
So, you know, if you post news items, then it might get mixed up in that kind of effort of what people are trying to do when they first arrive on a Monday morning. Yeah, okay. Next slide, Emily.
Is there an optimal length? You know, this was a popular question last year. This year, I must say it's a bit problematic to look at. You know, the 300 to 600 words is probably like that sort of the middle of the normal distribution, if you like.
Maybe let's go to the next slide, Emily, because we can talk to this through that slide. Now, as you can see here, the red bars are the average word count for the top 10% of news in each organisation. So how long were their most read ones? And you can see that vary between organisations from one organisation at 250, right up to the 750 word one.
And the 750 word one, we actually did interview them. And I'll hand over to Sharon soon. But the point I wanna make here is that when you look at the average of all news articles within the organisation, they tended to be about 100 words on average, shorter than the ones that got read the most.
And that was the 13 out of the 15 that we looked at. But I'll hand over to Sharon, because she can tell us a little bit about the interview that we did with that one on the far left, which was very effective in its news articles. And they had longer articles.
Yeah, yeah. So the key was human interest stories. And especially about colleagues.
And it wasn't just this organisation. It was others as well. But whenever they were stories about colleagues, whether they knew them or not, I guess there's some sort of relationship you have with these people.
But they were the stories that received the most engagement. And it didn't matter about their length. Even up to 1500 words, they were still the most engaged and read the whole way through.
So what we really found, human interest stories, go for it, as long as you like lots of photos. Actually, just talking about answering Evita's question here about more detail about this Viva Engage web part. I can't just copy over the screenshot now, but it is in the benchmarking report, Evita.
Sarah from Victoria Police shared the example in their screenshots in the report of that web part and what it looks like as well. So just download the report, go to the Victoria Police case study and you'll see it. And Sarah, if you're still on there, I'm sure you agree, it was the same for you guys.
It didn't matter when there were stories about people. They could go for as long as they want. But when it's corporate messaging, short and sweet is best.
Okay, next one, Emily. So this is actually something that Matt proposed to me when we were doing the analysis. Maybe less could be more.
And the important thing, so the obvious thing is that news follows the typical blockbuster thing, the top 10% get visited by 72% of all the visit times and so forth. Obviously a lot less for the evergreen content pages, but nevertheless, I think what we found was that people actually do have a time budget for reading news. So if you put more news out there, they just scan it more or they read less of it.
So having more doesn't necessarily mean you're gonna have more people spending more time on news. They just share it more and probably get less engaged with it. So that's something to be really mindful of in terms of how you target your news.
And I think as well, Laurie, it's about not only targeting your news, but how you target yourselves as internal communications teams. I certainly have worked in the past where we had targets for the number of news items we produced, which given this kind of finding is actually counterproductive, it would have been better to say, think about how much content you're gonna put out or look at engagement sort of statistics, as opposed to everybody go out and produce 10 news items or whatever the target is. So I do think it's on internal comms teams to be really careful and think about what are those internal sort of KPIs and measures you might put in place when it comes to creating content.
Okay, so next one, Emily. Oh, this is you anyway, Matt. Yeah, this is just basically if you want to see what are the top news items in something like in SharePoint, in SWOOP for SharePoint, we have all the top news items listed.
We give you the sort of number of visits and visitors that they're getting. And we're trying to move away very strongly from sort of page view and actually think about individuals visiting pages. And that's, yeah, it gives it all there and you can go and look at a lot more detail.
It also gives the health score. So if one of your popular news items does have a few errors in, it'll be a nice way where you can pick it up and go and make sure you get it corrected. Yeah, the device question, what do people connect to the internet with? It's their desktop.
This same as last year, we found 98.37 this year, last year it was like 99 point something. This is quite controversial because people felt, well, you know, we've got to service the people with their phones and the frontline workers and so forth. I mean, I don't want to do this one to death, but we addressed it in last year's report, 2023.
And we had four sort of specialists which we fed this data to. Three of them said, yes, that's our experience. And one said, no, that's not my experience.
So readers and discussions in last year, if you're interested in this, but largely people are still accessing the internet through their desktop based on the data we've been analysing. So next one, Emily. Yeah, you can find the device.
We have it in our, again, it's another report in our device breakdown is one of the reports that we produce. And I think it is, you know, this is one of these chicken and egg situations. Is it because we don't actually provide content in a way that's friendly to mobiles that keeps that? Or is it the fact that as we've already come through one of the findings here, this time budget and people are time poor.
If you're in the frontline and accessing stuff when you're mobile, you're probably doing it to solve a task or a problem as opposed to reading news. So there is that question around how much we can actually expect frontline to maybe engage with some of this optional content. And I'm just going to answer Michelle's question in here saying that Victoria Police was among one of the highest ranking for health scores.
Do you have any stats breaking it down by Australian companies? Michelle, we don't because we keep the report anonymous. So we only reach out to those high performers if they agree to be named. And you'll see in the report, we actually had quite a few organisations who we had interviews with but didn't want to be named as well.
But we've got good news, Michelle. We can, we'll go into details very soon, but we can give you a free trial of SWOOP Analytics for SharePoint. And we can rank your organisation amongst all the others.
The others will be anonymous and you can find out how your data stacks up. Yep, yep. We can do a custom analysis.
So this is the multi-channel thing. This is the Viva Engage, SharePoint. So what I did was I wanted to look at all the channels, at least not all the channels, but the main channels that internal comms might want to try and reach employees.
Of course, there's SharePoint, there's Viva Engage, but there's also email and there's also people that go to meetings and sharing content in meetings. So I took those four channels, I guess, and I looked at who the most active people were in each of those channels. And I then correlated those channels to see what the audience overlap might or might not be.
And the audience, people that are using SharePoint online and Viva Engage are highly correlated. So they're the same sort of people. And what I'm reading into that is that people, in the old days, you could sort of comment and chat on SharePoint, but people didn't tend to do it.
But when people come to Viva Engage, that's why they go. So what we're finding is that the socialization of information on the intranet is more than likely happening on Viva Engage. So that was a very strong correlation.
There was still a significant correlation with people that went to meetings or attended lots of meetings. So people attend lots of meetings also tend to sort of read SharePoint. Not so much for email.
So what we found with email is that people that read a lot of emails don't read that much on the intranet. So that's in some ways an opportunity for internal comms to say, here's a channel of people that really just aren't engaged with the intranet so much. So what can we do? And this is where this whole cross-posting comes in.
And Sharon talked about Vic Police having this ability to cross-post between Viva Engage and SharePoint. I don't know if they go both ways, but that's probably a good idea. I think the same sort of thing we heard about emails that sort of bring you into the intranet and things like that.
So there's lots of tactics that you can do to sort of bring these people that are sitting in different channels, but that aren't necessarily engaging with the intranet that you can do something with. But I guess the big takeaway here is that Viva Engage and SharePoint Online come together as a package. So next one, Emily.
We might have to brush over this one, Laurie. Because we're just about done. So that was pretty quick.
So I guess the message with the AI is that the early winners are gonna be using AI to help create the content. So we've already said targeting content is really critical. I think AI is gonna help some of these editors that aren't professional writers do a better job if you like.
But the other important step about AI is that in the future, it's gonna draw from your content to interact with you, whether it's in a chatbot style or what have you. So if you've got poor content, AI is gonna amplify that, right? So if you've got old content, it'll surface that. So be mindful of that as you go forward with your AI that garbage in, garbage out.
So it's still the rule. So we'd love for you to download our benchmarking report. There's the QR code to do so.
And just what I was talking about with Michelle earlier, Emily, if you can go to the next slide, if you'd like to be part of the benchmarking report, we'd love to give you a free trial of SWOOP Analytics for SharePoint Intranet, and you can be involved in that. And I've just also quickly got to plug, we've got our Viva Engage benchmarking coming up. I know a lot of you use it.
So our cutoff date is August 1. If you're connected for a trial of SWOOP Analytics for Viva Engage by August 1, you can be part of our Viva Engage benchmarking.
Meet the speaker:
Dr Laurence Lock Lee
Chief Scientist & Co-founder
SWOOP Analytics
Sharon Dawson
Director, External Relations & Communications
SWOOP Analytics
