How top organizations turn their intranets into daily destinations

From freight railroads and credit unions to engineering firms and healthcare systems, these organizations shared a common approach: They treated their intranets as strategic investments whose results show in adoption rates and engagement metrics that outpace industry benchmarks.

The Simpplr Employee Experience Excellence Award winners featured here demonstrate that a thriving digital workplace requires more than good content. It demands a deliberate approach to participation, launch strategy, employee recognition, and measurable improvement. Their stories offer practical strategies any organization can apply.

Foster active engagement with intranet content

An intranet is only successful with active involvement from your people. The winners for Best Employee Engagement have created digital communities where employees not only read but also contribute to content. They help shape workplace culture through impressive participation metrics and genuine involvement.

AAA Mountain West Group

AAA Mountain West Group (AAA MWG) is one of the largest regional auto clubs in the AAA federation, serving more than 6.8 million members across Northern California, Arizona, Utah, Nevada, Montana, Wyoming, and Alaska. Named one of Forbes’ Most Trusted Companies in America, AAA MWG delivers unmatched expertise and value through 24/7 roadside assistance, auto repair, travel, insurance, financial, and home security services. 

Connecting more than 5,400 employees is no small task. The organization’s intranet, the Hub, meets that challenge through a content strategy built around three clear goals: inform, engage, and inspire. In 2025, the team elevated each pillar with thoughtfully designed programs. 

Strategic tools — including a weekly newsletter, direct CEO communications, and centralized knowledge pages — work together to build transparency and trust. By layering monthly photo contests, gamified learning quizzes, and a dedicated feedback campaign, the Hub turns passive users into active participants.

Employee spotlight features connect teams across regions. The Month of Impact campaign drove team members to showcase their volunteer work on the Hub, tying individual action back to the organization’s broader mission.

The results show a truly engaged workforce:

• 98.5% app adoption rate
• 92.3% of users viewed content, averaging 107 views per user
• 65.5% of employees actively contributing and participating, exceeding benchmarks
• 49,589 social interactions, including likes, comments, and shares

“The Hub empowers our team members to break down silos and build authentic connections across the organization, while serving as an information sharing platform. Our engagement strategy drives measurable results demonstrating a highly active and collaborative team member base.” — Sergio Avila, Internal Communications Manager

BNSF

One of the largest freight railroads in North America, BNSF Railway operates a network spanning more than 32,500 route miles across 28 states and three Canadian provinces.

Two years ago, hitting 75% monthly engagement across 42,000 employees and contractors seemed impossible. Most of them work in rail yards or on trains with no regular computer access. Their intranet, myBNSF, helped change the game for employee engagement.

A five-person team published more than 400 stories in 2025, highlighting strategic content that spanned safety, service, people, business performance, innovation, and more. Team members from across their rail network began engaging with the content and sending in story tips of their own, turning one-way communication into an ongoing conversation.

Recognition grew just as fast. BNSF launched a Month of Gratitude each November, pairing weekly newsletters with incentives to encourage peer-to-peer shoutouts. A separate campaign during National Employee Appreciation Week kept the momentum going. Participation from nonwired, union-represented employees was particularly striking.

The numbers from 2025 reflect how far they’ve come:

• 75% monthly average engagement rate across the workforce
• 400+ news and feature content published
• 4,250 peer-to-peer recognition submissions, up from 1,315 posts in 2024
• 457 recognition posts celebrated 729 team members during Month of Gratitude alone

“myBNSF gave us the foundation to not only provide access to their essential digital tools, resources, and knowledge base but also tell the stories of our people and celebrate their work and achievements. Watching employees who rarely have access to a work computer engage and recognize their peers — that’s beyond what we originally imagined.” — Jason Lamers, General Director of Internal Communication and Engagement

Credit Acceptance

Founded on the belief that everyone deserves a path to vehicle financing, Credit Acceptance partners with car dealers nationwide to provide solutions for customers regardless of credit history.

PRIDEnet was already a well-branded intranet. In 2025, the internal comms team turned it into an active engagement hub. They moved the social feed to the homepage, launched role-specific sites, expanded content ownership across departments, and redesigned the weekly newsletter with visual updates and action-driven copy. 

Sales employees — who spend most of their day in their cars — went from the least engaged group to one of the highest site viewers after the creation of a dedicated Sales Hub that emphasized mobile access.

A Great Place to Work campaign showed what targeted, team-member-driven content can do. Using authentic employee voices and consistent internal branding, the campaign reached 83% of the workforce and contributed to a 94% survey participation rate — the highest in company history.

The results reflect a workforce that showed up and stayed:

• Feed posts and comments increased 91%; replies increased 99%
• Yearbook comments increased 176% in 90 days; yearbooks without comments dropped from 68 to three
• Newsletters reduced email volume by 54%, with an 88% average open rate and 17% click rate
• Charity Miles campaign exceeded its goal with 1,100 sign-ups vs. a target of 1,000

“In 2025, we didn’t just communicate — we connected. Empowering team members to tell their own stories and celebrate each other’s wins created a prouder and more informed workforce.” — Matt Johnson, Internal Communications Manager

Create an intranet that employees want to use

Adoption rates matter, but return visits are what prove an intranet has become part of daily work. The winners for Best Intranet Usage built platforms with thoughtful governance and intuitive structure that drove early adoption and kept employees coming back long after launch.

Fortune Brands Innovations

Fortune Brands Innovations Inc. (NYSE: FBIN) is an industry-leading home, security, and digital products company whose purpose is to elevate every life by transforming spaces into havens. The company makes innovative products for residential and commercial environments. Its trusted brands include Moen, House of Rohl, Aqualisa, SpringWell, Therma-Tru, Larson, Fiberon, Master Lock, Sentry Safe, and Yale residential.

In early 2025, Fortune Brands Innovations announced one of the most significant changes in its history: consolidating most U.S. offices into a new headquarters campus in Deerfield, Illinois. The decision affected more than 1,500 associates across multiple phases — from initial announcements and relocation decisions to campus move logistics and office closures extending through 2026. It was exactly the kind of moment where a fractured communications approach could erode trust. Instead, the team built Front Door, their Simpplr intranet, into the backbone of the entire initiative.

 Four dedicated sites organized by phase and audience kept information relevant without overwhelming anyone. Associates relocating to Deerfield found move timelines, parking details, and campus resources in one place. Those whose roles were affected had a separate site with career counseling, LinkedIn Learning access, and EAP information. A Deerfield Campus newsletter added another layer of communication during the move itself.

The results reflect how much associates relied on the platform:

• 78% average open rate on the Deerfield Campus newsletter, well above the 60-65% internal benchmark
• Strong site engagement on the Deerfield Campus hub from launch through move-in
• Consistent traffic across all four One HQ sites throughout each phase of the transition

“Front Door became much more than a communications tool. It was our bridge between leadership and associates, a home for critical resources, and a foundation for trust during one of the most significant changes in our company’s history.” — Fortune Brands Innovations Communications Team

Summit Credit Union

Founded in 1935, Summit Credit Union is Wisconsin’s largest credit union. It serves more than 275,000 members across 58 branches with personal, business, and mortgage banking services.

Summit’s intranet, Spark, launched in summer 2023 with a clear purpose to give every employee — from headquarters staff to frontline tellers — access to the same information at the same time. Nineteen audience-specific sites cover everything from manager resources to DEIB programming, reducing communication silos without fragmenting the experience.

Executive visibility has been a particular strength. The CEO’s annual Launch video series reports year-end results and sets strategic priorities for the year ahead. After adding Simpplr’s must-read feature, viewership climbed 73% year over year. A separate series, Elementary Insights, features the CEO interviewing internal experts on trends shaping the financial sector.

Search is where Spark earns its keep operationally. Employees use it daily to locate policies, procedures, and colleagues across all branches.

Spark’s engagement numbers show a platform embedded in daily work:

• 88% adoption rate today, up from 45% at launch
• 98% of logged-in users viewed content, 60.6% above Simpplr’s benchmark
• 82.8 average content views per user, compared to a benchmark of 5.4
• 1.3 million search queries since launch, averaging 853 per user with a 34% click-through rate

“Spark has become a trusted source of truth and daily tool — a catalyst for connection, clarity, and collaboration. It embodies our commitment to connect people, simplify work, and strengthen our shared culture.” — Josie Russo, Communications Specialist

Build momentum right from the start

A great launch builds the momentum that sustains long-term intranet adoption. The winners for Best Intranet Launch combined effective change management with creative promotion strategies that drove awareness, enthusiasm, and meaningful engagement from day one.

Cohesity

Cohesity is a data security and management company serving enterprises worldwide. Its platform helps organizations protect data, defend against ransomware, and unlock insights across cloud, on-premises, and SaaS environments.

Launching a new intranet is rarely simple. Cohesity did it while simultaneously completing a multibillion-dollar acquisition of Veritas Technologies, more than doubling its workforce overnight. On the first day of the acquisition, more than 5,000 employees across two companies needed a single, unified source of truth.

Cohesity’s new Simpplr intranet, Veracity, launched on that deadline. A program manager coordinated with creative, IT, and communications teams alongside Simpplr’s implementation specialists, while engaging more than 100 subject matter experts from both companies to build over 200 pages of content before go-live.

Enablement was built into the launch strategy from the start. The team produced more than 20 training videos for content editors and six instructional videos to prepare end users for the new platform. Post-launch, the team introduced a weekly digest, two newsletter templates, and manager-only private sites to deepen engagement and support targeted communications.

The platform has grown significantly since launch:

• 750 total pages, up from 204 at launch; sites grew from 24 to 36
• 242 content editors, up from 62 at launch
• 99% of employees have logged in with an average of 77 pieces of content views per user

“Veracity gave thousands of employees across two companies a place to access critical information and navigate change with confidence, delivered on one of the most ambitious timelines we’ve ever worked against.” — Rocco Lungariello, Internal Communications Manager

DeVry University

DeVry University is a private university offering career-focused undergraduate and graduate programs in technology, business, and healthcare. It serves approximately 2,500 colleagues, faculty, and visiting professors across online and on-campus locations nationwide.

When Meta announced the retirement of Workplace, DeVry University had a decision to make. Rather than simply finding a replacement, the team used the transition as an opportunity to build something better. What began as a platform search became the launch of DVU Connect, a fully branded internal community built from the ground up on Simpplr.

The launch scope was significant. The team stood up approximately 20 sites with audience-specific content, integrated critical tools including ServiceNow and SharePoint, established a centralized policy center, and built a network of Change Champions and Site Administrators to drive adoption. Marketing, HR, and training teams all contributed to the effort before go-live.

DVU Connect launched with strong and continued momentum:

• 74.5% of users logged in at least once, with 50% average monthly logins
• 67% stickiness rate, indicating consistent return visits
• 563 pieces of content published since launch
• Engagement and content output exceeding Simpplr benchmarks across the board

“What began as a platform search became a chance to build something that truly serves our colleagues. DVU Connect gives our people a place to learn, grow and thrive together.” — Matthew Henry, Manager, Communications

LifeBridge Health

LifeBridge Health is one of the largest integrated health systems in the Greater Baltimore region. Its five acute care hospitals and more than 150 locations serve more than a million patient touchpoints each year across Maryland.

Connecting 14,000 team members across a large, dispersed health system is a communications challenge with real stakes. When LifeBridge Health launched LBHub, it wasn’t just a technology upgrade. It was a deliberate shift in how the organization communicates and connects. A distributed governance model put content ownership in the hands of subject matter experts across the system. This made the intranet a shared responsibility rather than a centrally managed resource.

The launch itself was built for reach. Multiday kick-off events brought the platform to team members where they worked. Executive demo sessions and on-unit rounding with mobile carts drove adoption from the top down and the floor up. The approach ensured LBHub arrived as something people had already seen and touched rather than something they would have to discover on their own.

Growth since launch reflects how well that strategy took hold:

• Sites expanded from 17 at launch to 73 in under a year
• Contributors grew from 30 to more than 170
• Ongoing governance, analytics reviews, and quarterly engagement touchpoints support continued content quality

Measure engagement with the right metrics

The proof of intranet success is in the numbers. The winners for Best Improvement Metric demonstrated remarkable improvements after transitioning from a legacy system to a modern intranet, showing significant gains in adoption rates, employee sentiment, and content readership compared to their legacy systems.

Ashley & Vance Engineering

Founded in 2005, Ashley & Vance Engineering is a civil and structural engineering firm with nine offices across the U.S. They serve clients in municipal, commercial, and residential markets.

Before launching their Simpplr intranet, grAVy, Ashley & Vance Engineering’s institutional knowledge lived in a disorganized shared server and private email archives that were decades old. Long-tenured staff had to dig through old files to find anything. New hires couldn’t access that history at all. The lack of structure meant inconsistent formatting, duplicate content, and no way to measure what was being used.

grAVy replaced that “search-and-hope” approach with a governed, searchable platform. Technical resources, project knowledge, and social connection moved out of email threads and onto a single destination. The firm went from zero visibility into knowledge usage to a fully measurable system in one year.

The improvement in metrics tells the story:

• 99.2% adoption rate, up from zero visibility on the previous platform
• 91.5% of staff active as contributors and participants
• 400 pieces of content published and 54,643 total views in 12 months
• 10,000+ social interactions generated across all eight offices

“We traded 20 years of digital noise for a single, measurable source of truth. For the first time, we have visibility into how our people find information and connect with each other across all nine offices.” — Nikki Henningsen, Marketing Coordinator

BankPlus

Founded in 1909, BankPlus is a regional bank serving consumers and businesses across Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, and Florida. It offers a full range of retail and commercial banking, mortgage lending, and wealth management services.

BankPlus’s previous intranet, Jostle, had become a bottleneck. It lacked mobile access, newsletters, meaningful search, and analytics. Login rates were adequate, but actual engagement after login was minimal. News items averaged between 0.2 and 0.5 views per employee even when content was featured or pinned. 

In October 2025, BankPlus launched their Simpplr intranet, the Green, with a clear goal of turning logins into sustained engagement.

Four months in, the improvement was significant across every measurable dimension. Search alone improved significantly. Jostle offered no comparable search capability. The Green has logged more than 73,000 searches since November, with a 54% click-through rate and under 1% returning no results. 

The platform comparison makes the growth concrete:

• 39,476 unique content views in the Green’s first 125 days vs. 2,682 on Jostle, roughly 15x more
• 96.8% of users viewed content; average user viewed content 63.4 times
• 14,384 total social interactions, including reactions, replies, and feed posts
• 29 videos published with 3,500+ minutes of watch time

“The Green transformed our intranet from a low-performing news repository into a trusted, daily workplace destination — and the metrics prove it.” — Amanda Turner, Marketing and Communications Director

Nurture a culture of recognition

The right platform showcases employee recognition within the daily flow of work. The winners of Most Effective for Recognizing Employees created digital spaces where appreciation becomes visible, achievements are celebrated, and a culture of recognition is embedded in the everyday experience.

Bay Federal Credit Union

Bay Federal Credit Union is a member-owned, not-for-profit financial cooperative serving more than 97,000 members across Santa Cruz, Monterey, and San Benito counties in California. With over $1.88 billion in assets, it’s the largest locally owned financial institution in the region.

Bay Federal’s employee recognition program, BayBucks, has been part of their culture for more than 20 years. In 2025, the team made a deliberate shift by moving recognition from an occasional gesture into a consistent, organizationwide practice powered by Simpplr’s Recognition & Rewards feature. 

The program now operates across three distinct channels. These include daily peer-to-peer recognition tied to Bay Federal’s PACIFIC values, monthly BayBucks winners selected by a dedicated committee, and twice-yearly themed recognition campaigns that focus on specific behaviors like trust, teamwork, and collaboration.

Each recognition moment connects to a specific company value, reinforcing the behaviors that strengthen Bay Federal’s culture. Leaders participate alongside peers, and the program’s visibility on the intranet makes recognition a shared, public experience.

The difference after the shift is significant:

• 9,791 recognitions sent in 2025, more than double the roughly 4,000 sent in 2024
• 96% of employees received recognition
• 80% of employees participated by sending recognition

“BayBucks reinforces a culture where contributions matter, our values are lived every day, and employees are celebrated for the impact they make.” — Richard A. Roark, SVP/Chief Technology Officer

Hytrol

Hytrol Conveyor Company designs and manufactures material handling systems for a wide range of industries worldwide. The company employs more than 1,600 people across its two locations in Jonesboro and Fort Smith, Arkansas.

Recognition at Hytrol runs deep. The company’s culture of appreciation is rooted in its core values, and its intranet serves as the primary stage where that culture plays out. A dedicated Employee Recognition tile on the homepage centralizes multiple programs, giving every acknowledgement a visible, shared home.

Their programs cover a range of moments and contributions:

• Safety leaders, nominated by supervisors and selected by the safety committee
• Killer Whale awards for employees who demonstrate exceptional teamwork and commitment to core values
• Employee spotlights that highlight individual contributions, sent by supervisors
• Option for departments to acknowledge teammates without the formality of a full award

The most meaningful moments are tied to tenure and legacy. When an employee reaches 40 years at Hytrol, they receive a custom stainless steel plaque presented during a 30-minute ceremony hosted by the president and chief development officer. The event is shared on the intranet with photos to showcase the milestone to the whole company.

Then there’s Loberg Day, celebrated every July 1 in honor of founder Tom Loberg’s birthday. In 2025, Hytrol shared a short video series on the intranet spotlighting each nominee and winner of the Loberg Award — the company’s highest honor.

“We are honored to be recognized by Simpplr. Our people are the heart of everything we do. We strive to be a workplace where employees feel appreciated and supported.” — Matthew Smothers, Corporate Communications Specialist

Medical Solutions

Medical Solutions Group (MSG) is a healthcare workforce solutions company with more than 3,000 teammates distributed across the U.S. and the Philippines. The company operates under five brands: Medical Solutions, Host Healthcare, WorldWide HealthStaff Solutions, FocusOne Solutions, and Matchwell.

Before 2025, recognition at MSG varied by brand. Kudoboard, Motivosity, and Bravo each served separate corners of the organization. Soul Shouts, built into their intranet Soul Central, replaced all three with a single, visible recognition experience — timed deliberately to a year of significant organizational change.

The rollout extended well beyond a platform swap. HR, IT, and Communications collaborated to connect employee data from UKG and ADP so the Upcoming Celebrations tile on the homepage showed accurate birthdays and work anniversaries across all brands. Leaders gained My Team dashboards to track recognition activity. 

A five-week Soul Shouts Bingo campaign seeded early cross-brand participation, and the Weekly Snapshot newsletter added a weekly shout-out that pushed click-through rates from 2–4% to 6%. Ten Employee Interest Groups, the Learning & Development team, and the Clinical team all gained dedicated spaces to recognize their members on their own terms.

The results since launching in late October 2025:

• 2,117 unique recognition posts, totaling 3,769 recognitions
• 46% of teammates recognized, up from 38% just months earlier
• 75% participation rate in the Manager Effectiveness Survey, a record for MSG

“Soul Central is no longer simply an intranet platform. It’s the primary engine powering MSG’s recognition culture.” — Amanda Shapland, Corporate Communications Manager

Craft your own intranet engagement success story

Behind each of these award-winning digital workplaces is Simpplr’s modern intranet. It provides the foundation for exceptional employee experiences. By combining intuitive design, powerful features and advanced AI, Simpplr enables organizations of all sizes and industries to create digital environments that successfully engage employees. 

This year’s winners demonstrate that the right platform can transform how teams connect, collaborate, and contribute. Their success stories prove that with thoughtful strategy and the right technology, any organization can create a digital workplace that employees actually want to visit, not because they have to, but because it makes their work lives better.

Ready to improve intranet engagement? Learn how Simpplr can help you build a thriving digital workplace. Request a demo today.