Awarding Molly

Molly, the intranet of Mole Valley District Council, won a Gold Award for the Home Counties South Best Website/Microsite category at the Chartered Institute of Public Relations - PRide Awards 2008. This award category was open to both public and private sector companies/organisations.

Mole Valley District Council used GOSS iCM to design and implement the intranet in-house. A staff survey was carried out which resulted in the following objectives being set;

• To significantly improve internal communications across the Council in an easily accessible, up to date format.
• To develop the intranet as an essential business tool by making it 'the' definitive place to go for current information, news and policies.
• To save paper and space by moving many paper-based forms and internal documents online.
• To devise and implement an effective on-line method of two-way communication between the Chief Executive and staff.

Now, all staff and management use Molly for a wide variety of messages ranging from changes to management structure, announcing the next rounders match or just saying thank you. All staff are comfortable with refreshing their browser to get the latest news and as a consequence of Molly, 'all-user' emails are banned.

To keep the pages current, a new system of 'web champions' was initiated across the Council with each department allocating a member of staff as responsible for their intranet and website pages. Training was offered on 'Writing for the Web' and focus groups were set up to test the intranet site before it went live. All information has a named content owner to whom enquires can be directed. Each page has an expiry date and as this date draws nearer, an automated reminder is sent to request that the content owner updates their pages. The day-to-day management of the front page news items falls to the Communications team who update Molly several times a day.

Features developed for communication include "ask Darren" a forum for posing questions to the Chief Executive, Live train times, and interactive map and Molebay

Louise adds, "This is such a fantastic achievement when you realise that the category was open to private companies and all Councils in the area. In presenting the award, Marcella Whittingham of GMTV and Elspeth Graham of CIPR described "Molly" as an outstanding example of internal communications that provides access to corporate documents and keeps staff up to date with daily news. We were absolutely delighted that all our hard work has really paid off."