Back to case studies overview

Butler Health System opts for a move-in ready intranet

Butler Health System has been tending to the healthcare needs of rural communities north of Pittsburgh for over 100 years. Beginning as Butler Memorial Hospital in 1898, they’ve grown to encompass over 60 offsite locations that include testing facilities, ambulatory centers, urgent care centers, and the recent acquisition of another hospital.

The challenge

In the early 2000s, Butler Health’s Manager of Infrastructure built an internal site for company news as one of their first projects. The site fit their needs but depended on one person to create and publish news for the entire organization. This process worked for a while, but there were a few issues that quickly surfaced:

1. Bottlenecked content: It was tough for one person who wore multiple hats to maintain, organize, and publish the news of an organization that was (at the time) over 2000 employees strong. Anticipating a new cross-departmental project, Butler wanted to quickly eliminate this bottleneck and make it easy for departments and project teams to share updates independently.
2. Irrelevant information: It was common practice for employees to send out company-wide emails whenever they wanted to share information quickly. While well-intended, these emails often landed in the inbox of many irrelevant recipients. Butler wanted to enable this quick communication without spamming those who aren’t involved in these specific matters.
3. Fighting for the spotlight: What had started as a single-page intranet site had, over time, become a collection of pages, splitting news across multiple locations. Along with that, everyone would request the top spot on the home page, which would often go to the executive team by default. Butler wanted a single place staff could go for news and a more democratic way to select featured articles.

The solution

The search for a purposeful intranet to address all these problems began. The team at Butler considered a few options, including traditional intranets and household names like Sharepoint. However, while shopping for solutions, they found that a turnkey intranet like Jostle came pre-built and ready to use on day one. No longer was there a need for their already busy IT team to put in additional hours designing, building, and maintaining this new intranet platform–which was a huge win.

How Butler Health uses Jostle

Since launching their new intranet over a year ago, Butler Health has embraced three key features: News, Reporter Groups, and Links.

What drew Butler Health to Jostle was primarily News. The team used this core function to eliminate their bottleneck in news creation and publication. Everyone at the organization could create their own articles, and the ease of producing articles empowered people to do so. No coding (or customization) knowledge required.

“If you can post to social media, you can post to Jostle. It’s that easy.”

Steven Spachtholz
Director of Information Systems

Of course, enabling thousands of people to publish news to an entire organization needed to be undertaken with caution. Butler needed a smart way to avoid spam and curate content without relying on one person. Enter Reporter Groups.

Reporter Groups are unique to Jostle. This feature enables a group of employees to post to their intranet’s News view while restricting the audience they can publish to, and removing their access to capabilities such as the Feature Banner and email notifications.

Butler Health opted to use this feature to create a small Editorial Board of 5 people to approve and edit content submitted by Reporters. Butler’s Reporter Group publishes content to the Editorial Board first. Then, an Editorial Board member edits and approves the content, updating the audience to the relevant subset of employees, and, if needed, make the article Featured, Pinned, or published with a notification, all while maintaining the original author of the content.

“It’s an easy step for employees to understand. They know, ‘I’m a reporter, but the editor needs to look at my article before it goes into the intranet.”

Steven Spachtholz
Director of Information Systems

Finally, Links maintained an essential function of their original static news site, providing employees with a hub to all other resources they needed. They used Links as a launchpad to their email system, and other essential resources employees need in their workday, keeping their intranet the go-to place for workplace communication.

Results

Deploying content to specific audiences in a large organization has never been easier with Jostle. Butler Health’s new intranet has been a notable success, especially for supervisors and managers. Thanks to the easy flow of content and how simple it is to create articles, the management team now enjoys a new tool to engage and simply inform employees. Finally, thanks to their Editorial Board, content is relevant and always in front of the right people.

“In the end, Jostle is a better tool than anything we could have built.”

Jonathan Eichner
Manager of Infrastructure