Find out how this global non-profit validated its Microsoft SharePoint investment with AvePoint.
Success Highlights
Customer Location United States
Industry Not-for-profit
Platform Microsoft SharePoint
The global nonprofit organization works in communities across the United States and in 70+ countries around the world. The organization is federated, with about 900 internal personnel supporting thousands of independently run affiliates across the globe.
Critical Needs
- Track adoption, access, and usage metrics for SharePoint Online
- Measure reach and impact of content in knowledge base
- Segment users based on identifying information
- Enable content owners to access analytics
The Challenge
The global nonprofit organization (NPO) maintains a knowledge base that contains mission-critical resources that enable its affiliates to learn how to properly run their organizations. These resources range from operational guides, like how to recruit and manage volunteers and different types of interventions, to crucial governance and compliance information.
Historically, these resources were not easy to locate or access within the knowledge base. The distributed publishing model meant anyone could upload anything, which led to a cluttered, disorganized environment.
To improve the knowledge base, the NPO migrated to SharePoint Online and hired a team to manage it. To validate this investment, they needed to track KPIs and other metrics to prove it was a successful project. They identified three metrics for evaluation: accessibility, findability, and quality.
The analytics available natively in SharePoint were insufficient to evaluate these metrics. The NPO considered Google Analytics, but it was “grossly ineffective,” according to the NPO’s Knowledge Manager. “We needed to be able to segment users based on individually identifying information – so we could distinguish between internal personnel and affiliate users and their organizations – and Google Analytics only offers IP addresses as unique identifiers.”
We are no longer writing guides and building templates, posting them in SharePoint, and hoping people look at them. We know whether or not they are. We can set goals, evaluate, and make changes, all thanks to tyGraph.
Global Non-Profit Organization
The AvePoint Solution
The NPO found its solution with AvePoint tyGraph. tyGraph is purpose-built for Microsoft 365, capturing a 360-degree view of an organization’s tenant and providing advanced analytics and visualizations into user activity, engagement, and sentiment. These analytics detail how users are accessing and engaging with the content through key metrics like unique users, page views, and even page read percentages.
With tyGraph, the NPO has the analytics they need to track KPIs and other performance metrics. The Knowledge Manager says, “Now, we can tell a story that isn’t purely anecdotal. We have metrics around usage and activity – who is looking at what, how much is it being looked at, when they’re looking at it – all the way down to the object level. We can even segment data by user, group, or topic to identify trends and patterns.”
tyGraph’s real-time insights enable the NPO’s content owners to measure the impact of communications and improve content delivery. Now, they can test multiple promotional channels to determine what’s most effective and where to invest more time and resources, optimizing their affiliate communication efforts.
The NPO also uses tyGraph to measure the performance of pages in its intranet. These metrics help them determine what sort of content – like video, audio, or imagery – and how much of this content works best, based on load times.
“We have affiliates around the world with varying connection speeds,” says the Knowledge Manager. “We don’t want someone in a rural area to wait forever for a video or super long page to load. The page performance metrics have really improved our UX and accessibility.”
Using the solution, the NPO established self-service content reviews, requiring content owners to regularly review their sites and pages and make updates or archive as needed. “There’s no way to do it without the tyGraph tool,” says the Knowledge Manager. But with tyGraph, site owners can take a data-driven approach to these quarterly all-site reviews, ensuring that their SharePoint knowledge base isn’t cluttered with low- or no-engagement content and thereby improving user experience.
The NPO’s Knowledge Management team credits tyGraph with elevating its credibility. Internally, they’re now known as “the team who can help you do things you don’t know how to do,” explains the Knowledge Manager. Although the team is there to help, users don’t rely on Knowledge Management to get the information they need; tyGraph is available for self-service data pulls via a Power BI workspace to the NPO’s 60 teams in their central US office.
The Road Ahead
“Prior to tyGraph, it was impossible to evaluate our SharePoint based on accessibility, findability, and quality. While we’re still working on determining the last one, we can evaluate the first two via tyGraph,” says the Knowledge Manager. “We are no longer writing guides and building templates, posting them in SharePoint, and hoping people look at them. We know whether or not they are. We can set goals, evaluate, and make changes, all thanks to tyGraph.”
The Knowledge Manager summarizes, “As a non-profit, every minute and dollar counts so we can drive more mission-critical activities. SharePoint Online, paired with insights from tyGraph, helps us communicate and collaborate with affiliates in a more efficient and productive way. If that’s not mission-critical, it’s a rung just below it.”
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