Turning a corporate intranet into a company-wide platform for people, knowledge and news
Updated: Sep 24
Since 2018, I have helped turn Vox from a conventional intranet newsfeed into a company-wide editorial, cultural and knowledge-sharing platform. The important change was not publishing more content. It was creating an editorial model that made useful information human, gave colleagues visible ownership and made the organisation easier to understand.
At a glance
Role: Editorial and creative direction, content strategy, publishing governance and engagement analysis
Timeframe: 2018 onwards
Scale: 1,223 total posts, with 878 developed and published through me
Visible authorship: 147 posts published in my own name
Platform: SharePoint/Vox, later strengthened through Viva Connections
Outcome: A shift from corporate broadcasting towards a more participatory internal communications and knowledge platform
The problem was not a lack of information
A growing company generates plenty of news. The harder problem is making people care about it.
Teams had achievements, client stories, operational updates, useful resources and expertise worth sharing. But the information often arrived as plain text, formal announcements or material written for a specialist audience. Publishing it unchanged would technically communicate the information without necessarily making it useful internal communication.
I began treating submissions as raw material rather than finished content.
My remit developed into setting the editorial direction for Vox, encouraging contributions from across the business, finding the story within them, creating the visual presentation, governing how content appeared and using performance data to improve the platform over time.
Centralising quality without centralising ownership
Since 2018, I have developed and published 878 of Vox’s 1,223 posts, 71.8% of the total. But only 147 were published in my own name.
That distinction is important.
Where the expertise, achievement or story belonged to somebody else, the post appeared under their name. I might restructure the information, identify the strongest angle, ask for more useful detail, develop the headline, create the imagery and prepare the final publication, but the visible authority stayed with the person closest to the subject.
If hundreds of posts had appeared under my name, Vox would have looked like one person broadcasting at the company. Instead, colleagues became recognisable contributors. Their expertise became visible, their teams had a reason to engage and the platform gradually developed a broader organisational voice.
I used my own name where I was genuinely the appropriate author, including creativity, social media, client communications and feedback.
The model therefore centralised editorial standards without centralising organisational voice.
Human stories beat corporate language
The performance data gradually made one principle difficult to ignore: internal engagement is driven by people, not process.
I moved Vox away from simply repeating announcements and towards stories centred on recognisable individuals, specific outcomes and practical relevance.
In October 2023, personalised testimonial stories received 35% more views than the equivalent September posts. A later testimonial became the strongest-performing share in several months after I named the adviser, created an individual thumbnail and reframed the client outcome as a short story rather than a formal statement.
The underlying information had not changed. The editorial treatment had.
That became a useful creative constraint. An organisationally important subject did not automatically deserve a long article, and a corporate tone did not make information feel more important. The format had to match what staff actually needed to notice, understand or respond to.
Measuring attention rather than chasing reach
I also became more selective about what counted as success.
Views showed exposure, but likes and comments revealed a different kind of behaviour. In April 2024, a recognition post for Tom Pardoe received 98 views, 21 likes and nine comments. Two other posts reached larger audiences, but generated substantially less visible interaction.
That changed the way I assessed Vox. The most-viewed post was not automatically the most successful.
Different content had different jobs. Some posts needed reach. Others needed participation, recognition, understanding or action. Vox developed accordingly, with quick announcements, narrative stories, leadership updates, educational material, resources, community features and recurring formats rather than one standard publishing template.
Treating distribution as part of the creative system
The introduction of Viva Connections in 2024 increased visibility by bringing Vox notifications into Teams.
It also created a new problem: greater reach could quickly become notification fatigue.
I responded by managing scheduling more deliberately and considering whether a subject justified interrupting people. The £1 billion SIPP assets-under-management milestone reached 297 views, 18 likes and four comments in July. A Christmas party update later exceeded 350 views, compared with 66 views the previous year.
The lesson was not that more notifications produced better communication. Distribution, timing, subject and presentation had to work together.
Turning publishing into governance
As Vox matured, my focus moved further beyond individual posts.
I began gathering stories more proactively from department heads, developing recurring formats, experimenting with more visual ways of surfacing resources and using board reporting to analyse engagement patterns. Rather than treating performance changes as proof of one creative theory, I considered subject matter, tone, timing, volume and notification behaviour together.
By April 2026, Vox published one fewer post than in March, yet total likes increased from 112 to 176, a 57.1% increase. Average likes per post rose from 10 to 17, an increase of 70%. Even the lowest-performing post improved from one like to six.
More content was not the answer. Better judgement about content was.
What changed
The most visible evidence of my contribution is the volume: 878 of 1,223 historic posts developed and published through me.
But the system around those posts matters more.
Colleagues gained a route for turning local knowledge into company-wide communication without needing to become writers, designers or SharePoint specialists. Individuals retained visible authority over their own expertise and achievements. Leadership had a credible channel for important updates. Useful resources became easier to discover, and editorial decisions became increasingly informed by evidence rather than habit.
The technology provided the infrastructure. My role was to establish the editorial judgement, creative standards, contributor model and governance that made that infrastructure useful.
Vox became less dependent on a single organisational voice precisely because I did not make myself the visible author of everything. The stronger outcome was a platform in which more people could be seen, more knowledge could travel and the organisation could recognise itself.