National Geographic's Socially-Charged Intranet, Powered by Celerity, Wins Nielsen Norman Group Award for World's 10 Best Intranets

MCLEAN, Va., Jan. 10, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- Celerity's Web and Mobile team has helped National Geographic win a Nielsen Norman Award for Best Intranet. During a year-long project engagement, Celerity helped build "ngconnect," a highly visual, social and content-relevant intranet experience that has made employee collaboration easy and exciting.

With this new internal communications platform, the company's 2,000 employees can interact with one another using real-time information exchanges and social collaboration tools.

"Our employees are now interacting and engaging in entirely new—and more relevant—ways," said Keelin Vaccaro, Director of Internal Communications at National Geographic. "Celerity's problem-solving techniques and collaborative partnering strategy helped us make informed project decisions each step of the way."

To make the new system intuitive, Celerity's user-experience design focused on best-of-breed social enterprise components that allow employees to have open, real-time conversations, follow/like one another's customizable profiles, and build common circles. Integration tools with LinkedIn allow employees to automatically load contact and background information, and add directory information like skills, interests, and languages.

Employees can collaborate using a micro-blogging tool or by sharing and promoting posts, pictures and videos. Search features allow employees to target and connect with colleagues based on profile information.

"Connections are key on the National Geographic Society website. The intranet team built a custom social tool, ng+, to encourage communication and collaboration across the organization. It also paid attention to details throughout the site to make engagement and participation easy. An emphasis on visuals takes advantage of and reflects the organization's rich history," said usability expert Jakob Nielsen, principal of Nielsen Norman Group.

This project reflects a growing trend in the corporate world of using social media technology to build more productive, networked enterprises. To learn more about Celerity's work on this project, read our blog post about developing engaging intranets.

About Celerity

Celerity is a business acceleration consultancy devoted to helping companies break through key stuck points and solve critical problems. We deliver proven solutions in four main areas: technology adoption and integration, business process efficiency, strategy and alignment and talent. Headquartered in McLean, VA, Celerity operates nine regional offices with more than 600 employees and $83 million in revenue.
www.celerity.com

SOURCE Celerity