Collaborate on Bill Design Format for Non-profit Organizations with Ease Using airSlate SignNow

Bill design format for non-profit organizations

hello and welcome to today's valto webinar titled designing a SharePoint internet for nonprofits my name is douge wood and I'm a solution architect here at valto but I'm also a Microsoft MVP for my Advanced knowledge of SharePoint and Microsoft 365 today's agenda looks something like this I'm going to be talking about challenges that we see facing nonprofits and these questions actually come from nonprofits that we've been working with in the past 12 months we're going to be talking about designing a SharePoint internet and all the different components which go into that quite often we start this process by having A needs assessment through a SharePoint Workshop so we're going to talk a little bit about what is involved with that also we're going to be talking about some best practices that are involved with navigation communication and the use of different types of content such as video of course we're also going to be talking about branding your internet as well as some other useful features of SharePoint that we've built using things like policy management systems onboarding systems and some other features of SharePoint that you would find really useful at the end we're going to talk a little bit about the services that valter can offer and there's also going to be the opportunity for a Q&A using the comments box inside of YouTube so I'll be on standby to answer all of your questions using that comments box throughout the webinar actually you don't don't have to wait till the end you can answer uh sorry you can ask those questions any time you like uh using the comments box either to the right hand side or below however I would recommend using the comments box below because you get way more text in that box compared to the very short uh abbreviated messages that you get on the right hand side so let's jump in and start talking about some of the challenges that we see um at the moment for nonprofits so the first being around Recruitment and onboarding many nonprofits struggle to attract and retain Talent SharePoint can assist in this uh with managing Human Resources um Team from a recruitment to retention process so we're going to be talking a little bit about this later on but we do often see that people are struggling with essentially not just attracting people but also retaining them and there's a number of things that you can do using SharePoint to approach that problem the second is around information and actually having what I refer to as a single source of Truth it can be difficult finding the latest documents or knowing where to find documents you need like forms policies meeting minutes and so much more so using SharePoint as the kind of informational platform to provide that single source of Truth is a vital component of an Internet so that people know that they've got one basically a One-Stop shop where they can go and they can get the latest information from then it's about announcements and and I supp it's more than just announcements it's about latest updates and keeping people in the loop a lot is going on in the world at the moment as well as your organization and it can be a challenge to ensure that everyone stays up to date with the latest updates and knowing what the latest guidance or advice is around certain issues or topics and again SharePoint can bridge that Gap we can use things like news and announcements to make sure that people stay up to dat with the lat latest announcements and updates then final part of this um specifically for nonprofits is this feeling of belonging now when I've spoken to a lot of nonprofits they have a particular problem where they have technically external parties so volunteers trustees and they want them to feel part of the organization they want to feel part of the team so it's not just for Content but also General collaboration um you will have external users whether they be volunteers or trustees and it's important to make them feel part of the organization so again SharePoint can bridge that Gap we're going to talk about creating volunteers portals for example or other types of externally accessible so you don't have to even license these users for them to be able to access and consume information that they need to so we'll talk a bit more about that as we move through so designing an internet now what I would say is every internet has to find the balance and now what I mean by that is there's a balance between functionality of the SharePoint internet and its Aesthetics it it's it's kind of a seesaw to kind of balance to find where it fits best for your users now it will totally depend on the the as I say the users of the internet how technical um how technically competent they are um if they're comfortable using kind of the websites and apps and things like that and and all that's going to really impact the kind of the overall functionality versus Aesthetics so what I mean by functionality versus Aesthetics is the functionality is what can you do there in terms of navigational bars uh what information it's pulling through things like that versus the Aesthetics of what it actually looks like and again you tend to find that it has to look good in order for people to actually want to to use it so you have to find that sweet spot that you're actually making it look good you're providing plenty of imagery and things like that but also it's functional it's got a purpose it's driving people there to actually use it um the second thing as well finding balances is the manual versus automation now what I mean by that is of course content is going to have to be created you going have to create content but what elements of that is going to be manual versus what can be automated what can you put into the hands of the users to create content what can you pull from um external sources um and things like that um maybe pulling out recent documents automatically and displaying them on the homepage so not everything which gets to be on your internet has been manually put there and it's finding that sweet spot between them then it's about navigation and search so we're going to talk more about navigation later on in this webinar but again it comes down to this point of everybody's going to be slightly different depending on their user experience from previous websites apps internets that they've used in the past before and everyone's got some kind of preference whether they want to use navigation in terms of clicking buttons to get to content or the or do they want to use a search bar and you're going to have to weigh up the kind of and maybe even survey your organization to find out how people tend to find things um but definitely having some kind of Middle Ground to find that that some people will use navigation bars some people use search bars and making sure that they will appear in in both of these areas next is navigation versus content so on an internet homage when you're designing it you need to think about two things one is about navigation how people are going to find content because that's fundamentally what a internet is about it's about finding information navigating to it but it's also about content about consuming the latest updates announcements news newsletters um updates from senior leaders things like that so you've got to think about balancing that out so navigations will always be quite static so buttons to click but people will use it as and remember oh I know I can get to it from the the internet homepage and then providing content so it's fresh it's Dynamic you want people to go there and expect to see new content on a frequent basis there's nothing worse than having an internet where you you go on it in August and you're still seeing news posts about Christmas parties which happened um from the previous year there's nothing worse it looks stagnant looks boring and it puts people off from coming back in the future and that brings me on to my next point about when you're thinking about designing your internet it's about how much content you assume there to be and actually reverse engineer the amount of content you expect so how much content will you personally be creating how do you have an internet manager that's going to be creating content do you expect heads of department or or delegates from each department to be creating content if so how much is reasonable is one a month reasonable is it once a quarter reasonable you need to figure this out so that you you can actually create this now you tend to find um that people often very eager to begin with and like yeah yeah we'll have loads of content we'll be creating loads of things for that but actually that kind of motivation will die down after a period of time and the reason why I say you need to figure all this out is because it will depend on the layout of your say internet homepage say you you could display eight news articles on there if you wanted to but if you think about it if you're only creating One news article a month then that's eight months worth of content you're displaying on the homepage and it's not like much is changing and and again you're going to end up with that problem where you're logging in in August and you're still seeing a post in January about the Christmas party for example so you need to think about that and I would suggest that you you need to be thinking how often are people are going to be coming on to the homepage how much content is going to be creating and then reverse engineer that again the final point there is where is content going to come from who is going to create that who's going to have the responsibility and that shouldn't just fall in one person it should be spread across multiple people to make sure that you're getting not only fresh content but also content from different areas using different topics and things like that so what I want to do now is I want to jump into a bit of a demonstration and I've put together a bit of a proof of concept of what a charity internet portal or nonprofit portal could potentially look like so let's dive in and take a look so here's a bit of an example now as I say it's just a proof of concept this is just a testing area so a lot of this is just dummy data that we've got um in here but I should also mention everything that we're looking at here is just native SharePoint there's no third party products there's no additional boltons or add-ons or anything like that everything you see here I have built using native out of the box SharePoint so starting off across the top um you can see we've got this navigation bar now the navigation bar essentially is designed so that people can move around between internet pages and they've got this Central kind of place that they can come back to so that they don't have to keep going back to the homepage to navigate around we've also got some other navigational areas down here and we'll come back to talk a bit more about navigation later on in the webinar further down the page you can see although it's set pretty to scroll pretty quickly on this particular demo and I wish I hadn't said it that fast it's making me a bit dizzy to be honest um but this is a new news feed so this is a news feed which we can actually choose to manually skip back through some of these posts if I wanted to and what you tend to find is if you're going to use a very large Carousel like this um quite often it's it's news which is related to everybody that everybody would want to see within here so these are often sort of uh maybe almost like self-help type guides information um latest updates of what's going on progress updates from certain programs and schemes which are being run and things like that often combined with this as I say there's a combination between content and navigation and you want to find that balance so this is content this is slider content but you can also see I've got a little navigation bar on the right hand side and I quite like this approach of how do I and then providing it's a bit like an FAQ to a certain extent frequently asked questions and within this you can see say how do I I find the performance review how do I take leave how do I prepare for my new job blah blah blah blah so these are just essentially some sort frequently ask questions that you can help people navigate to but as I say it's a nice balance because not only we got content appearing across the top here we've also got a navigational bar appearing as I scroll down we've got more navigational options so these are maybe things like vision and values of the organization your career benefits for working for the organization things like that again on the right hand side under this secondary kind of content area there might be events there might be S events and things like that which are coming up that you want people to be aware of the cool thing about this is well if you click into an event there's no created here this is just mockup but if you were Tock click into them you can also choose to add a reminder into your own calendar of that event coming up further down this again is using the news kind of functionality of the site but you can see we've got senior management team so we talk a bit more about communication and how news feeds work but essentially we can roll together a bunch of content which have been created directly from the senior management team for updates and things which are going on in their world again we could maybe have some links of navigation so some topics by role so maybe we want to jump into some specific articles which relate to managers or new employees mentors volunteers whatever it needs to be we can jump in into those particular topics further down some other topics again things like culture um Learning and Development things like that people might want to jump directly into we've got some Dynamic content here so if you remember when I was talking about manual content versus Dynamic content this is dynamic content it's pulling out the most popular documents which are being searched for and opened with inside the internet so nobody has to go in and manually specify these um in the same way that we probably have to go in and manually specify these news articles um this is just automatically being pulled through dynamically so again this helps us find that balance between having Dynamic content and manually entered content maybe some buttons here as well so maybe it's taking us to celebrations so promotions work anniversaries birthdays things like that content which also goes down quite well on an internet homepage at the bottom right corner we've got how can we help so quite often there are forms there are feedback things like that now you can embed what they call Microsoft forms which is a product from Microsoft 365 directly into your internet if you wanted to but I tend to find it a bit clunky it takes up a lot of space and actually quite often it's better just to have what we call a call to action button which when you click on it will open up that Microsoft form in another tab so actually gives you a bit of a flavor of what is possible again there's no third-party products being used here this is all Native SharePoint it's all out of the boox SharePoint it's a sort of thing that we help our our customers build to make them look really nice and again we can brand it all up using your colors um to make it look like it's your organization's brand and part make them sort of feel part of the the the the overarching organizational um culture and theme and on that note of kind of including people I also want to talk a little bit about um potential of having a volunteers portal now we talked brief briefly before about making sure that people feel part of the organization and actually having a volunteers portal is an excellent way of doing that so A volunteers portal is something which um if I just click on here this should take me through to the portal volunteers portal is essentially what we refer to as an externet which means that people externally can get access to it and I would recommend that you create this as something that's slightly separate to your internal kind of employees internet so that you know that any of the content here is specifically for volunteers of of course you could make a portal for other types of external people like Trustees for example or contractors or whoever else you're working with if you wanted to provide them information and an area to drop off documents if you're wanting them but on volunteers portal you might have things like um a bit of information a welcome pack for example um signing up for volunteer days and information on program uh and other kind of projects which are running maybe some information on donations and how they're collected and any FAQs and volunteer toolkit so a bit of information specifically designed as a pack for volunteers to go and access on the right hand side we've got things like countdown to maybe an event or something that's going on that you want people to be aware of as well as more kind of upcoming events again we've got things like news and updates and we can actually pull news and updates into this from other areas if we wanted to now we would have to open them up um for these people to get access access to but again it just reduces down that duplication of creating content and just having that content in one place and then pulling through into multiple portals as I scroll down we've got more things like volunteers um information so maybe some general stats of what volunteers are doing how they're making a difference and again that just helps volunteers feel part of the organization and make sure that they feel like what they're doing is actually making a difference to The Wider organization there might be some links to active programs and things that they could sign up to um and how they get involved more kind of training so maybe it's some training that you want to provide around first aid or how to use particular systems like logging and tracking hours and things like that um again we could um embed things at call to actions so maybe it's linking up to a learning portal if you don't have all of your learning materials embedded into SharePoint sometimes people have third party learning portals as well on the right hand side we could have latest tweets now this could pull in from your your Twitter feed but it could also pull out pull out tweets from um other feeds as well so I've just got this set to Microsoft for now but it could be um any other T type of Twitter feed which is maybe providing updates which relate to your specific organization and the kind of mission that you have further down again we got a bit of a how do I so bit of an FAQ section like we saw previously before and these could link to PDFs they could L link to Pages they could link to ex external resources and websites as well anything that's got a hyperlink a URL we can link off to nice and easily um and again a bit more content here so learn a bit more about us or maybe even having a volunteers managers area so people can click on them and find out contact information for people they can reach out to if they've got any questions about being a volunteer for your nonprofit so those just a couple of examples and we're going to come to some more examples later on in the webinar as well but that gives you a bit of an idea about what what maybe an internet homepage would look like for your internal employees as well as building out maybe an external facing platform with it within SharePoint for volunteers trustees um to make them feel part of that organization so when designing out your SharePoint internet the the first place you want to really start with this is having A needs assessment now we can help with that you can do it yourself internally um but valto also provides a dedicated structure in which you would get a senior consultant to sit with you and understand exactly what your current situation is so maybe you've got an old internet that needs updating maybe you don't have an internet maybe you've got a big pile of documents stored on a server somewhere and people just can't find them they're ending up with duplicates and old versions and things like that again we can help we can assess this and we can come up with a plan to get you a really nice beautiful looking internet like we were just looking at before we'll talk with you to understand what what does success look like so as part of your plan as part of your need assessment you need to Define what does success look like what is you're looking to achieve are you trying to make it easier for people to find documents are you trying to make it easier for people to consume information and find latest updates from senior leadership and things like that um it's also worth think about where do your documents currently live and probably if you're just starting out this process the answer to that would be there'll be all over the place there'll be some on servers there'll be some stored on people's computers maybe even in third party um products like um Dropbox for example um and the problem with having documents stored outside of the organization is that there's no governance there's no structure to this where having all of your information documents stored inside of SharePoint means they're properly secure and you have full governance over who has access to these content and if someone wants to leave the organization you can remove access easily whereas if the documents are sprawled all over the place in different apps and different websites it becomes a real real security issue to actually then control who has access to it especially if someone wants to leave the organization um other things we talk about is who will maintain the internet so again it's it's not as easy just say okay we're going to build an internet there you go and run off with it you need to think about who's actually going to maintain who's going to take responsibility for making sure people have access to it who's going to take responsibility for making sure content getss up to date um and maintaining the information which is on there so that kind of brings into who would come to a workshop so typically there will be an internet manager or S comms marcoms marketing team um and you'll get somebody from their side involved and they will often be quite useful to help determine what the overall brand of the internet would be um and how it's going to be presented to users um quite often we would recommend that heads of Department come to this as well because they need to buy into this they need to understand why the the an internet is being proposed what is going to be include on there what benefits are to them and and things like um reducing the amount of inbound questions that get asked to a department by having an FAQ section in SharePoint that they can provide information to and point people to before their staff get bothered by answering repeated questions um of course we need to include the it Department because they are going to be the ones that are going to have control over the overarching security and governance of Microsoft 365 so we need them on side we need them to understand what it is that we're going to be doing what access that we all need and working uh alongside them to achieve that and then also we' recommend bringing somebody from like HR or a people type of department so again they can assess um how this is going to be kind of used maybe if there's somebody from learning development as well so they can be part of that kind of process ESS and what information is going to be stored on there how they're going to be navigated to Key Systems and what the overall impact is going to be on your employees uh and users of this internet we'll also discuss identifying common process issues so we'd want to look at with you anything which has got like an approval process um that's involved or any kind of automation steps a lot of the time people aren't aware that SharePoint can actually build out these applications and these processes inside of SharePoint so anything which has got any level of kind of document automation reviews reminders or tasks that are involved with it you can build these all into SharePoint again we will help identify anything that we can do to automate and make your life easier using SharePoint one of those things like we discussed at the beginning is on boarding now this is something which is quite a Hot Topic because a lot of people are sort of recruiting maybe having problems with um staff uh attracting staff in the first place but then actually retaining them now I'm going to show you a bit of a demo in a moment of the onboarding system but there's a couple of different components to it we've got the ability to have a database of all of our employees inside of that now you can make this run from active directory but if you don't have access to active directory um you can also have a list of users inside of SharePoint there's also what we call a pre- onboarding section so you can share access to this portal before even an employee joins your organiz ation and then we have the actual onboarding process itself the onboarding portal which has a set of task lists that people can work through to ensure that things like laptops are being deployed to the user in a timely manner and then when the user themselves joins um they have a set of tasks that that they need to do like reading policy documents and providing ID and things like that so let's jump in and take a little look at what this onboarding system looks like so starting off in this onboarding we have what we call our pre- on boarding portal now this again is using the externally sharing features of SharePoint so we can bring people in before they even have a license now the benefits of this is that you can actually share this with somebody um so they can get information on your organization before they've even joined now you can see from here that there's different types of information that you might want to share with them so let's just like have a quick look at the homepage so it might be a bit of a welcoming message a bit of information about things like what the organization does the purpose of it um how you sort prioritize things like balancing work and life and what your overall company values are you could choose to give them an opportunity to meet people and know who they are provide bio sections and things like that um and then General kind of information about um maybe values that your organization has and how it works maybe some examples of of projects and schemes which are currently going on and um progress updates and that sort of stuff also something which is very common inside of here is the ability to um give information to users about preparing for their first day so as an employee joining you could get them prepared of what they need to do what they need to bring what what they can expect um on their first day U maybe even some contacts are who they can reach out to if they've got any questions and things like that you can also provide a document drop off area so if there's anything you need from them ahead of time so things like um um let's say for example uh copies of ID previous CVS all that sort of stuff you can have on there now the benefit of having this kind of pre- on boarding is one of the challenges of recruitment is that you can potentially lose people before they've even joined now what I mean by that is a lot of people have kind of notice periods that they have to work out and sometimes it can be one month but they could be as extended as three months at times and a lot can change in one month never mind 3 months so what you want to do is try and keep those people sticky now a lot of kind of recruitment um kind of teams they will reach out to people and try and stay in contact with them maybe they'll try and get calls books in with a line manager with that person before they join or maybe even invite them on site these are all really good um things to do but also why not have something like a pre- on boarding portal where people can go and get questions answered so if they were on the fence they weren't 100% sure maybe they could still be swayed by an cter offer from an existing employee uh existing employer or maybe a new employer that they're getting offered by you want to keep that them as sticky as possible you want them to be enure they want to be certain that they're definitely going to be joining your organization they don't let you down the last minute um and providing this portal means that they can have questions answered so they feel more secure in their kind of decision and they know what to expect um and they also can find out more about your organization also there's not that many organizations which are providing preon boarding portals in the grand scheme of things we we off obviously try and get as many of our customers to be using this as possible but in the grand scheme of things this will set you apart this will make people that are joining your organization think wow these guys are sort futuristic they're thinking ahead and they've got some great technology behind them and in the grand scheme of things it doesn't work out that expensive to set up and once you've got it set up there's no ongoing license fees or anything like that it's just set up it's ready to go um for you to use now the second part of the onboarding portal is the actual onboarding um site itself so if you imagine the first area was kind of like pre- onboarding so people are seeing the organization and there might be certain information you want to give them before they join but then once they've actually physically joined and they've got sort of sat down they the the fully sort of got their feet under the table now there's more information you want to share with them and this is a typical kind of home pay to a bit more about the onboarding journey so what that looks like maybe a bit of information on the more about the organization the story maybe have sort of what looks like a postal message from a senior management or or CEO a bit of a story about them and who they are and where the kind of organizations come from maybe where it's going things like that maybe meet the team so you can have a bit of information about the organization setting up kind of information on oneto ones with your line manager things like that and general kind of information about events and things which are coming up um around the organization also there might be some more information about things like how to claim expenses corporate cards travel expenses all that sort of stuff which is common questions people have within the first month or two of working for an organization um information about connecting so meeting people bio sections any social medias that that your organization's using tools that you recommend that people um and where to get them and how to use them that sort of stuff but also along with with that they also have a predefined task list now this task list is not just for the new employee that's getting on boarded it's also going to be a task list for existing employees to make sure certain things are complete so things like make sure they've got a laptop uh make sure they've got an office space a desk in the office make sure that they're added to the payroll system and all the things that have to go in place and without a proper checklist to make sure that they're in place I've seen so many organizations falling over where they've got a new employee that's joined the sat in the office but they don't have a laptop or they don't have a login for the system or um all sorts of different issues that can arise so this checklist as I say is not just for the employees so it's asking them for things like make sure that they've they've read their kind of it guidelines and policies make sure they've um sort of read certain kind of information and signed things provided um evidence of CVS and whatever it is you need them to provide that can be tasks but it's also tasks for existing employees to make sure that they're onboarded smoothly and there's things like follow-up tasks for line managers to have oneto ones but all this information is stored in a list they can mark them off as complete they can see a title as with description and when it should be completed as well as who the mentor is for that particular task so if they had any questions they could reach out ask also any relevant links or attachments for the for that particular task can be attached to the task as well now all of this is based on a task config list so the task conf list is somewhere that you can preload in all these tasks and provide days of the amount of days that will need to be completed within who the mentor is relevant links all of that comes from a task configuration list so you can specify that you can also specify it now based on Department as well so certain tasks will only be relevant to certain teams so let's say for example if you are hiring somebody who was a um say a cleaner or maintenance they might need to read the sort handling hazardous materials policy whereas somebody who's working in HR or marketing probably won't need to read that particular policy so you can Define the tasks based on the department or the sort of job type that they're going into as I say we would identifying the needs assessment inside the SharePoint Workshop what kind of processes that you're struggling with and we can assure you that SharePoint will be able to provide a solution for those so the next thing to think about then when designing um your internet and something that we will talk to you about as part of the uh SharePoint Workshop is the navigation so navigation is the key to exploring the Uncharted the gateway to Discovery and the path to understanding so I love this quote because I think it it kind of helps summarize the importance of navigation inside of a share internet um and everyone will find things differently so I was saying before um you tend to find that some people will use more search some people will use more of navigational links and how people find things is going to be different so say for example let's take a document like a working from home policy now it's very common place inside of shareport internets to have a dedicated Library called policies um and and we'll talk a bit about this later in the webinar as well but let's say for example you've got that policies library and you store your working from home policy in there now the way I F might find it is I know that there's a policiy library so I'm going to go into my internet find the policies library and then find the working from home policy within that however say for example Joe blogs my colleague he might not know that there's a policiy library so he's going to use a navigation bar to go and look inside the say human resources department SharePoint site to try and find that policy now he's not wrong in the sense that there's good reason to think that that policy could beit living in there so we we need to provide navigational links in the Human Resources area back to that policy because we don't want to duplicate we don't want to live in a policies area and live in a human resources area we just want to provide a link from the human resources area to the policies area so that's making sure we're not duplicating links and again the second Point here is is ensuring that we're not duplicating links and we're only having what sort of essentially one document um and that that's just sat in in one place now the other thing to think about when duplicating links versus single links is whether or not you have um actually on a page links in multiple places I tend to Le more on the side of the fence to say actually I think it's fine to have sort of links um across the top and in buttons on the page and things like that the only downside to that those if those locations change you have to remember to update it in multiple places but quite often you tend to find when you're sort of linking to something it's very rare that actually it's going to change all that often so if it is just provide one navigation link maybe in the top bar so you know where it is whereas if it's something that's going to be quite static then it's fine to have duplicate links because again I might be looking in the top sort of bar where somebody might be looking for a large image kind of navigational button to go and click um also when you think about navigation think about that actually it's Studies have shown that eyes naturally go to the top uh right um of a page when it first loads and then they move to the left and then they move down so there's kind of like a upside down kind of L shape that people do with their eyes when they're looking and that's where typically people expect to see navigation so that's why on websites you tend to find the navigation bars are either at the top or they're on the left hand side so again use that when you're planning out the navigation of your site now there is actually two different Navigation bars we've talked about so we got Hub navigation bar and we got a site navigation bar so let me just jump in and quickly um explain those so across the top we have what we call our Hub navigation bar now this is designed to be consistent throughout our internet no matter where we go it'll stay exactly the same it can also have up to three layers of navigation so it can have news and then under say public it might have a link to say our website it's really easy to add that I'm just going to edit in here go into public um type in whatever the website will be so let's just say this is our website click on okay and then say make sublink so you can see one two three layers click on Save and there we go we've got now our link there so you can it's nice and simple to update links change it around and this Mega menu type approach means you can have up to three layers so you can split those out the second layer here is what we call the site navigation now this is specific to the current site we're looking at so if you see if I move to a different site like volunteers that navigation bar is going to completely change because these links relate to the specific site we're currently looking at where is the Hub navigation bar will stay exactly the same so understanding that and then thinking about what the types of links are you can expect to see across the top compared to the specific site links is something that you should be considering as part of the design process something else which is commonly used as a a hero web part now actually don't have a demo of this set up but you can see in this actually this is a real picture um from one of our clients that we've been working with and this is actually a hero tile so very large tiles again makes it nice and easy for people B to use it takes up a lot of space on the screen though so this will encourage people to land on the page and sort of navigate straight from that page to something else but if that's your intention then that web part is a great way of doing it again it's really useful to use for people that maybe are not so techsavvy um because it's large images large buttons makes it nice and easy to use um we've also got things like highlighted content web part uh I've skipped over one there so quick links web Parts the quick quick links web part if you remember on the page that I was showing you before this is what we call a quick links web part so we can provide icons on here we can add um links to both internal and re uh external that's the same for all these navigation bars actually I should stress that actually you could link anything that's got a URL it doesn't have to just be SharePoint we also had highlighted content web part which is this down here so this is pulling out documents now this is showing most popular documents but it could also be showing most recent documents so if there was say a set of different documents which are changing quite often updates or reports or things like that you could show the most uh recently uploaded documents in there as well there's also a different set of filters and things like that we can apply to it to only show certain types of documents or images or things like that as well but essentially this is a highlighted content web part which pulls out content dynamically we've got the call to action web part so again this is another navigational button where we can jump off to uh other areas so it might be forms things like that this again is actually a quick links web part so just like we have up here but it's actually just displayed in a different way and actually every web part has a handful of different display options so you can change the look and feel but essentially it's just the same with defining either an image or an icon as well as a link uh of where it's going to and a bit of text of what it's going to display but I've just displayed this as large kind of images rather than uh like on here this is the same web part quick links where we can have smaller kind of maybe even two lines of text if we wanted to there are other types of navigational web Parts as well um so we can use things like uh images so these images here these could be used as navigation we can actually display a bit of text on top of the image if we wanted to there's also buttons so we can just bu just a single button onto the page if we wanted to um and actually it's really simple really easy to do if you just click on edit um let's say for example we want to add some buttons on under here um all I need to do is click on this little plus type in the word button and there we go here's a button so it might be um let's say for example call this more info and that's again obviously this would actually be linking to a real resource in real life but there we go and actually I'll duplicate that a couple of times and then I can drag and drop that that button so if I was wanting more information oops put this one down too low more information on vision and values I could click on there career there benefits there and again just by clicking republish there we go we've now got some nice buttons which accompany those particular blocks as well so there's loads of different areas that we can have um sort of navigation options inside of SharePoint um so it depends on what look and feel you want to go with how easy the navigation is compared to the the Aesthetics and the look and feel um but essentially the another question that I often get asked is about well how do you know where people are going now you don't necessarily know a huge amount from the kind of the the the the Clicks in volume there is actually some um products that you can add on top of SharePoint um for things like heat mapping so you can see where people are actually clicking and maybe some buttons are getting more clicks than others so you can refine over time also SharePoint itself has a basic Analytics tool built into every single SharePoint page so when you go to one of these pages that you you're linking to you can actually see how many views it's got in the last 7 30 90 days the average time spent per user and also you can see um based on the the days as well so when it was accessed what time of day it's accessed things like that so you can get some very basic analytics um from this but it's not going to be as of detailed as like Google analytics but it will give you um a good high level that you you you can use to make sure um that that you're refining the nav navigation over a period of time so that was navigation the next thing when we're designing on internet is to think about is actually communication so you you remember at the beginning I said that that that SharePoint internets are split into two parts navigation and the second being communication so it's about making sure that good communication on an internet Fosters transparency boost Employee Engagement and streamlines information sharing across the organization so to do this a news feed is crucial for employee engagement it provides realtime updates and announcements and as we've seen we've got a couple of different types that we could have we could have things like um a new scroller here for everybody it might be that we we create I mean this this example here is very very news uh and Communications focused but it might be that if you've got a lot of that you could have a dedicated page specifically for announcements that people can go and see updates um related to everybody maybe some senior leadership updates messages from the CEO things like that maybe if you're very large International siiz Company you might have different people in different offices or different countries even and you can break the news down based on where they are in the world or maybe what sort department they work in or something like that as well so we can show Department related news so you can slice and dice that dependent on job roles departments and different things like that um but essentially good communication and news feeds Foster this kind of knowledge sharing so you can use this as well for giving out latest information updates and making sure that people are staying up to date um people can also engage via comments they can like and they can share posts as well um and and having this reduces the duplication and increases productivity so people um Can essentially reduce the amount of kind of times that they have to post something maybe they have to send out an email or they send out um a teams message they send out a SharePoint thing they can just put it all inside of a SharePoint news article and and as long as people going there they can get access to it and in fact you could even embed SharePoint inside of Microsoft team so if you're already using Microsoft teams you can combine share but and teams to have a One-Stop shop kind of inside of teams um the news web Park can displayed in in many different ways as we've seen before um and it could also pull from multiple locations so if I just jump back into my example if I scroll down this news is pulling from this site so it's news which relates to everybody but this senior management team is actually pulling from a site that we've set up called leadership updates if I go onto leadership updates I can see all of the news updates have been created from the leadership team um by clicking on it I can then see the full article and details of that that particular post but all of this is coming from the leadership update site so this could have more information on there it might have um almost like an archive of all these news articles it could have some documents but it's pulling from a separate site and that's why when I go back to my um of internet homepage you can see the news that's being pulled out here it will it will show you the source it shows you exactly where it's being pulled from so news as I say it can pull from the whole internet from one particular location from multiple locations or it can be based on the user as well now this is a little bit of kind of black magic in the sense that um you don't have any control over that it just basically knows based on that user's activity what content they're consuming what SharePoint sites are going to it presents to them what news it thinks that that user would want to actually see we've also got the ability as I say to provide metadata filters now that sounds a bit confusing but essentially it means you can tag news with labels and then you can use audience targeting to filter that so that's what I mean by saying country based news or Department news so it's altering the experience of the news and the communications that that user is seeing dependent on how that news has been labeled um it also allows you to communicate key dates um so communicating key dates I would suggest using the events web part like we were looking at before which is actually based on a calendar in the background so you can provide a calendar of updates and then you can see upcoming updates presented nice easy to understand manner using the events web part so that is communication so as I say the the communication is a vital component when you're designing your your Internet to think about how this is going to be balanced and as say this particular layout we've seeing here this is just 100% news there's nothing else on there there's no navigation it's just 100% news and some people like a kind of very news heavy Communications kind of based uh internet and some want more kind of functionality more navigation and things like that um so you've got to find The Sweet Spot between the two but the other thing when we're thinking about communication and there's different types of content that we can create um it's to think about going forward is integrating video now I've actually heard people say that 2024 is the year of the video we're going to see more video content created this year than we've ever seen before and that goes across the board for all sorts of different types of topics it's not just internal um it's not just training but also marketing and all sorts of stuff so integrating video um is going to become not just kind of useful and beneficial it's also going to become kind of expected from users because they're used to using things in their personal life like Facebook and Twitter and Tik Tok and Instagram where there's loads of video content being shared and they'll expect to see that in the workplace as well and research conducted by Cisco found that video traffic within Enterprise networks was projected to account for 60% of traffic within corporate networks um so video content is expected more and more as we go into um the the future of technology um instead of text newsletters create a video it it doesn't take long I'm not saying it has to be polished in fact actually if anything it doesn't have to be Hollywood studio quality often people find that Raw videos are more trustworthy so researchers found and that's why you you tend to find um videos of people online like adverts where people are walking down the street recording themselves and things like that because researchers found that that Raw videos often um tend to be more trustworthy so potentially think about having your senior leadership team after they've had their kind of meetings and things like that and quite often it can take time for a newsletter to come out and show updates and stuff rather than that maybe get some of the senior leaderships just to get a mobile phone they can get a camera light they can get a little tiny kind of um holder like a a tripod type thing for their phone stick it on their desk with a nice sort of like lamp to to make them look um nice and pretty and then they can just quickly record a couple of minutes just a quick offthe cuff hey guys this is what's going on here's a latest updates this is what we're doing blah blah blah blah blah and then you can get that on your internet and and not only is that content better it's more likely to be consumed it's more trustworthy it also takes a fraction of the time to to actually create okay you might take you a little bit of time to get into the swing of things with with it but trust me it it's a lot quicker to to create that than it is to go through a rout of creating a newsletter a big email a load of summary bits of text which is unlikely that a lot of people are going to end up consuming all of that content compared to a few minutes of video you can then embed that video into your SharePoint internet either using the out of thebox stream web part from SharePoint so stream is a bit like an internal YouTube essentially where you can create channels of content whether it be training or updates or whatever it is um you can have videos in that and you can embed them into SharePoint also you can embed YouTube natively into SharePoint you can see here on the right hand side I've embedded um one of our kind of most viewed uh videos on our YouTube channel top 10 SharePoint examples but that's just to show you that you can embed SharePoint uh sorry you can embed YouTube videos directly into SharePoint nice and easily um so maybe those videos they're a combination of things that you want to be externally shared and internally shared if it's internal you stream if you want also to double up the content two birds of one stone you want it to be externally accessible as well then maybe create a YouTube channel again nice and simple to do and you can post on there and then you can bed it onto your SharePoint internet from there so that is video content and the next thing I always wanted to talk about was actually branding your internet so branding is a really important part of an Internet because your brand is your organization's identity and there are several ways to express it you can make SharePoint feel like your own through the use of creating um a sense of of belonging identity um through use of colors tone of voice icons imagery and things like that so this is especially important for for people um as I say for external parties to feel like they're part of the organization to feel like they're part of something so you can use your colors tone of voice icons and try and sort of marry it up so it looks maybe a bit like your website as well so again it all just feels kind of consistent through that and I've just put a top tip on here about actually using Microsoft stock image Library so I'm just going to quickly jump into a demo of that anyone that's watched any of my videos previously will know that I'm a big advocate of using Microsoft stock image because there's loads of really good images in there now let's say for example I'm creating a uh a news um article and I'm selecting a background image I can select browse IM stock images and then I can jump into the stock image library now you can see there's loads of new images which get added almost on a weekly basis and there's hundreds if not thousands of imagery in here now and they're all really high quality royaly free images that you can use as part of your internet you can search it based on color so let's say for example if if your brand was red you could search for red and find red images in there let's say for example you're looking for something as a topic to say for example you're looking for pictures of an office or meetings or stuff like that you can search via topic as well so I would suggest go and check this out because a lot of organizations um are using third-party products um like pixels.com or um some other kind of stock image libraries where they're paying to use imagery so I would suggest go and check this out first you might even be able to save yourself money and obviously in the nonprofit world saving money is vital so go and check this out go and see what imagery you can use and save a bit of money on stock imagery as well so the next thing that I want to talk about then is design when we're thinking about designing on internet is the the use of documents uh and obviously we've talked about navigation people finding things we've talked about communication updates and news and things like that but fundamentally again documents is a key part of a share internet whether it's people looking for forms uh branded marketing materials templates handbooks training materials policies things like that we want to make it nice and easy for people to find documents so thinking about where the documents will sit quite often from an architecture point of view and this is again something that we talk with you a part part of a workshop is well who's got the responsibility of these documents to update them maintain them and where do they best sit do they sit into Department site would there be a collection like a policies Library for example and we can talk about that with you we also offer a policies management system that's pre-built that can be installed directly into SharePoint and it's based on a SharePoint library with a certain amount of automation so let me just quickly jump in and give you a two second overview of that as I say this is using native SharePoint and it's also using power automate for a certain amount of automation now we built this because we were getting a lot of requests from people that they needed to be able to manage their policies but not only manage them and stay on top of them but also they needed to be able to evidence that people are reading their policy documents as well so just as a quick high level overview of this this Library would store all of your policies within there you would have version numbers you be able to keep track of what has happened on those documents and even see a full audit history of who has changed what and when on those documents each document has a review date and when it comes up for review it would send an email to the reviewer to ask them to come and update the document once they're happy with the document they would then um submit it for approval which goes to the approver and they would then either reject it and go back to the reviewer or they would approve it and it would go and update the review date based on the review period let's say for example if this was 12 months and I was to approve this document today it would say for example um uh let's say if this was the first of the first 2024 and it added 12 months on top of it it would then be the first the first 2025 that it would then come up for review again then it looks at the track tracker group so the tracker group can be all sorts of different audiences of people it could be based on Department it could be based on geographical location it could be based on a job title but essentially what we're doing is we're saying when this policy is um approved we need to go and contact this group or you can even tag multiple groups if you wanted to and ask them to confirm that they read this document so what then happens is a email is sent to everybody in that group and at the same time um a link is uh sorry an item is added into this record so say for example the data protection policy has been uh updated it sends out an email to everyone in the IT team in that email will contain um a button approve button and a reject button so we're basically saying to them um sorry not approve reject button because it's not approval process in that email it will contain a button which says something along the lines of I have read and accepted this so everybody in the it team has had that email they have the option of then clicking a link within the email to read the document and also there's that button that confirms that they read it when they click on that button it would then come back and update this item say yes they read it and the date and time that they read it so this gives us two things one a list of everybody that's read it so say for example if there was ever a data protection leak um and we found out it was Chris that leaked our data we could pull you into a meeting say Chris you should know better because at this date in time you read it it also gives me a bit of a hit list of people to go and contact um if um say for example I can filter by say show me everybody that has not read um policies and here we go I can expand that out and I can see everybody who has not read individual policies so I can then chase them up and find out why they've not confirmed and read that particular policy now of course we can also provide a kind of user experience of this so people can easily navigate all these documents and go and find them so not they're not just using it Direct ly from a uh from their emails they could use a policy portal like this to say okay show me all the policies which relate to human resources and then they could drill down through this to find recruitment or staff handbooks or equal opportunities they can use this as a navigational portal as well so hopefully you can see that SharePoint is not just about of a document Dumping Ground you can also use it for as I say review processes approval processes notifying people collecting signatures there's all this that SharePoint can do as well and all of this should be considered as part of the design process when you're building out your internet so I hope you found this video useful if you did like the video subscribe to our channel for more videos in the future um I'm also going to give a bit of an opportunity now for you to ask any questions um again this is uh going to be in live time for the next 5 minutes so youve got any questions you us a comment box below use a comment box on the right side if it's just a short question um and we'll answer those if you would like any more information about what we can do and what we offer for uh for our customers you can email us at ww. valtoco /youtube and then there's a a contact form there that you can fill out and somebody will be in touch fairly shortly afterwards but thank you very much for watching this as I say I'm now going to leave this running just for the next uh few minutes just if there's any final questions um we'll be answering those questions for you um again use that comments box um and we'll be able to answer those questions and we look forward to hearing from you if you are looking at building out a SharePoint internet um and you have any questions feel free to contact us go to the website there fill out the form and we'll be in contact thank you very much