Youth Horizons
The Problem
At Enlighten Designs, we believe everyone should have access to the tools that enable a digital transformation. That's why we were excited to help one of New Zealand’s largest youth charitable trusts modernise its workplace communication system so staff and clients could share information quickly, easily, and effectively.
The Background: Youth Horizons
Founded in 1997, Youth Horizons is an evidence-based not-for-profit organisation focused on developing programmes to help rangatahi impacted by conduct problems to create better futures for themselves. Youth Horizons delivers programmes to meet the needs of young people from different backgrounds, with a focus on therapy in the home, parenting support, bringing families back together, foster care and group home placements.
The charitable trust has an operating budget of $25 million, and employs over 300 Kiwis. Youth Horizons supports a large community of at-risk youth and their caregivers, who work around the clock.
Youth Horizons’ Challenge
Youth Horizons developed a repository of organisational content – forms, policies, and documents within their Sharepoint 2003 intranet site called ‘Te Kete’. These files were all saved in various formats including PDF which left the site open for duplication. While documents continued to be loaded on to Te Kete, the site wasn’t considered as a point of truth for staff as, following initial uploads of documents, no further work was undertaken on refreshing the site to keep it up to date in either content or design.
Youth Horizons needed a way for all employees to share information quickly, easily, and effectively. The ideal solution would have to offer a single point of truth for the charitable trust; moreover, it would have to be accessible by mobile device anywhere and at any time.
"Staff didn’t have confidence that they would be able to locate up-to-date and relevant information. In addition Te Kete [the content repository] was not easily accessible outside our offices; therapists and other mobile workers who needed to access clinical and operational support information often had to carry hard copy organisational documentation to reference when visiting young people and their families."
The Solution: Te Kete
Youth Horizons needed a way for all employees to share information quickly, easily, and effectively. The ideal solution would have to offer a single point of truth for the charitable trust; moreover, it would have to be accessible by mobile device anywhere and at any time. The guiding principle behind Te Kete is that it serves as an essential part of employees’ workplace toolkit. In Māori, ‘Te Kete’ means ‘basket’ or ‘kit.
Enlighten rebuilt Te Kete on the Microsoft Office 365 SharePoint platform, providing end to end support working closely with Youth Horizons staff. This ensured we understood the charitable trust’s needs.
The results of Te Kete
Since implementing Te Kete at Youth Horizons, Fiona and her colleagues have seen tangible, immediate benefits. One of those benefits is that mobile workers can still feel connected, wherever they go. Fiona commented:
"Our mobile workers, who often work from home and in remote and rural areas, can now easily access clinical and operational policy and procedures together with administration related information and forms."
Additionally, stakeholders can also share information with one another and with Youth Horizons’ staff. "Our Maori Leadership Group and Pasifika Komiti now have a centralised platform to house cultural support information including news/events/resources, karakia, waiata and tikanga," Youth Horizons’ Fiona stated. A significant advantage that Te Kete offers is a uniform platform that the whole organisation can utilise.
"We now have ‘one point of truth’ for our communications – news items, Yammer, Twitter and Facebook feeds [...] Te Kete is now ‘on brand’ and provides an easy platform for staff to load information and connect with each other."
Moreover, Youth Horizons employees have only positive things to say about Te Kete; such as being able to do their job more efficiently, having a central repository that doesn’t have duplicates and incorrect forms and that everything is easier to find.
"Enlighten understands project management and partnered with us from concept design to delivery. Their team understood we needed to deliver a new intranet within a couple of months so our approved budget was utilised within our financial year; they worked hard to deliver this for us, providing guidance around what decisions needed to be made and when, and were proactive around feedback for design iterations. We would recommend Enlighten for intranet development to others principally because the engagement was a very positive one from start to finish and the Enlighten team is professional, creative, and responsive."