New Intranet for Feeding America
Posted Monday, September 8th, 2008 at 9:25 am by Lynn (41 posts)
Beaconfire designed a new intranet for Feeding America, formerly America’s Second Harvest. 
Feeding America is the nation’s largest charitable hunger-relief organization. They are a network of more than 200 member food banks and food-rescue organizations, serving all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico.
The new Intranet, named HungerNet, launched at their annual network conference in May to rave reviews.
Feeding America engaged Beaconfire to help them develop a knowledge management strategy and redesign their Intranet. The existing Intranet, used by the network members and the national staff, was not well organized, not intuitive, hard to update and difficult to use. Feeding America needed a new site and system that would allow them to promote 2-way communications and knowledge sharing between national staff and network members.
We started the project by first helping Feeding America define how the Intranet fit into their overall knowledge management strategy, gather input from the network members on content and feature priorities, and establish clear objectives for the Intranet redesign.
A cross-organizational team, with participants from the network members and the national office, worked with us to further identify features and requirements for the new Intranet and select new technology. After considering several options for the content management and intranet features, the team felt that Microsoft SharePoint (MOSS 2007) was the best fit. Making the technology decision before design was critical because it allowed us to design the information architecture, wireframes and business logic around SharePoint’s framework. This saved Feeding America time and money by limiting the scope of customization needed during development. While the main point of the redesign was usability, Feeding America also wanted a new creative design that was engaging, welcoming, and highlighted those features that were priorities for the network members.
For the implementation, Beaconfire worked with Feeding America’s SharePoint vendor, PointBridge, by providing overall project management and quality assurance testing.
