What value does your intranet bring to your franchise network? Are your franchisees more engaged and effective than they would be without it? How important do your co-workers think it is? You spend a lot of time, resources and effort on your franchise intranet, so no wonder you want to know if it’s successful or not. In our last post we discussed why you should measure the success of your franchise intranet. In this post we’ll tell how to do it.

By now, you probably understand why you need an intranet and that it has to be successful. But that doesn’t change the fact that you need to convince your manager why you need it. Keeping track of your success objectives is the key to that. Unfortunately it’s not as simple as a CRM software where you just need to sell more to convince it’s beneficial. Your franchise intranet is used by many different people and in so many ways. Each and every one of them has their way of classifying success, and to nail everyone of them gives you one great headache.

Throughout the years we’ve been working together with plenty of franchise businesses, and helped them set success objectives for their franchise intranet. The objectives are sometimes different, but the working process of defining them usually looks the same. We’ve therefore, put together a step-by-step guide for you on how to determine and start measuring the success of your franchise intranet.

Step-by-Step Guide: How to Measure Franchise Intranet Success

1. What are the success objectives for your franchise intranet?

Start by asking yourself to what challenges your intranet is a solution. Then imagine how your needs will differ from one of your franchisees. You need to understand what your franchise network is using the  intranet for, in which areas do your co-workers find it useful and helpful. This can be done by sharing a survey, individual dialogues or workshops with representatives from different parts of your franchise business. The output will vary a lot, but you’ll notice that some of examples are similar and based on the same essential need. Try to group the recurring needs into themes. These themes are your success objectives. Here is an example from one of our customers who recently did this exercise. They did a workshop with representatives from all over their franchise network, where they discussed what they were using their intranet for. The headlines represent success objectives they came up with, and underneath each objective you’ll find examples gathered by the workshop team.  

Success Objective #1 - Share news and operational changes quickly

• Access important news for my franchise unit
• Inform franchise units about upcoming campaigns

Success Objective #2 - Easily find operational tools

• Access marketing planning and download campaign material
• Search and access the franchise manual
• Find the latest price lists from main suppliers

Success Objective #3 - Create an engaged franchise community

• Share knowledge and experiences
• Discuss common problems with other franchisees
• Inform my employees about local changes
• Read and share fun happenings and events

If you end up with too many objectives, try to decide which of them are the most important based on how recurring they are among your franchise organization. Three to five objectives are a good start. If you’re having trouble defining any success objective at all. Have a look at the result of this recent survey shared through CMSWire, where 218 intranet users defined a successful intranet adoption. Among many interesting results, it highlights what these people use an intranet for. That doesn’t necessarily reflects how you define intranet success, but it’s not a bad place to start. What’s important to have in mind is that your success objectives need to be intimately connected to your overall business strategies and focus areas. Are you a fast growing brand with a lot new people flowing in, or are you a mature brand consolidating and focusing on internal processes and operational details. Your intranet has to be geared and tweaked accordingly.  

2. Connect Your Success Objective With Relevant Metrics

Ask yourself what measurements you could connect with each success objective. It can seem a bit tricky at first, but it’s really not that hard. Let’s take one of the success objective above as an example. You probably don’t want to clock the time it takes for your coworkers at the head office to create and share an item. Even if it would be fun data to have a look at, it would not be time effective nor as relevant. Here are some suggestions on how to measure how quickly news and changes are shared with your franchise network.  

• Check opening rates among different roles 
• Send out a qualitative survey 

3. Schedule measurements

Once you’ve decided your success objectives and how to measure them, you need to schedule follow ups. Here is where it usually goes wrong. You set a goal, then you fall back to your normal routines and forget all about it. We’ve seen it so many times. Schedule at least three to five times in the upcoming six months where you have a look at your success objectives and its metrics. Keep track of changes, good and bad, and try to analyze why they occur. Learn from them and improve your franchise intranet. Most important, someone has to take or be given ownership of the intranet and be accountable for its success. We hope think this short guide was helpful. If you have any thoughts on this write a comment below. How do you know your intranet is successful? Perhaps, you’re using another method? Please share and discuss.