At a Glance
- Who: St Peter’s Hospice, Bristol’s only adult hospice, with more than 500 employees and around 1,600 volunteers working across care, office, warehouse, remote and retail settings.
- Challenge: Replace an underused classic SharePoint intranet that was difficult to navigate and couldn’t reliably reach people with limited access to a desktop.
- Goal: Create one accessible, easy-to-use digital home for news, policies, tools and the Hospice’s wider mission.
- Solution: Together with Silicon Reef, St Peter’s Hospice delivered a modern SharePoint Online intranet with clearer navigation, targeted content, dedicated strategy and policy areas, mobile access and the Recite Me accessibility toolbar.
The Challenge: Reaching People Wherever Their Work Takes Them
St Peter’s Hospice provides end-of-life care for patients and families across Bristol, South Gloucestershire and North Somerset. Keeping that work moving takes a broad community, with more than 500 employees working alongside around 1,600 volunteers across offices, warehouses, charity shops, home-working environments and care settings.
That mix of roles, locations and working patterns means there’s no single desk or device that defines how people access information, and many have limited time at a desktop. The existing intranet, known internally as Communicate, was built on classic SharePoint. Over time, usage had declined: navigation was difficult, search was limited and outdated content made it harder for people to know whether they could trust what they found.
An internal survey from the Marketing & Communications team confirmed the need for a new approach. The intranet needed to give clinical teams, office-based colleagues, warehouse staff and people working in charity shops quick access to policies, news and everyday links. It also needed to do more than store documents, bringing St Peter’s strategy, values and mission into the everyday employee experience while remaining practical for the teams responsible for keeping it current.
With Microsoft 365 already in place, St Peter’s saw an opportunity to make better use of its existing investment. After considering the available options, the Hospice chose to stay within Microsoft 365 and looked for a partner who could provide a fully configured SharePoint intranet that was ready for people to use.
The Solution: Building a Digital Home Around Real Needs
The aim was simple: create an intranet that people across the Hospice could find their way around, whether they used it every day or only dropped in when they needed something specific.
Listening Before Designing
We began by working with stakeholders from across St Peter’s to understand what different teams needed from the new intranet. Interviews and design workshops helped shape the homepage, content priorities and overall look and feel.
Card-sorting exercises gave us a clearer view of where people naturally expected to find information. That insight informed a more intuitive structure, organised around the way employees think and the tasks they are trying to complete rather than the technology behind the scenes.
Making Everyday Information Easier to Reach
The finished intranet gives people clearer routes to the information they need. The branded homepage brings together news, events and quick links, providing a useful starting point rather than another page to search through.
A few key features include:
- Quick links that are relevant to people’s role, location or team, cutting down the time spent navigating past information meant for someone else.
- Dedicated Strategy and Policy areas that give important organisational information a clear home, making policies and documents easier to manage, trust and find.
- Search functionality which is shaped around the language people use, helping them reach useful answers and resources more quickly.
- Dynamic org charts which stay up to date as teams change.
Accessibility People Can Shape for Themselves
Accessibility was built into the experience from the outset. Working with St Peter’s and Recite Me, we embedded the accessibility toolbar directly into SharePoint so people can adjust how they read and navigate content.
The toolbar includes options like reading content aloud, resizing text and changing colours. Instead of expecting every person to use the intranet in the same way, it gives individuals more control over the experience that works for them.
The intranet was also designed to WCAG 2.1 standards and with mobile use in mind. People can access it through a browser or Viva Connections (the SharePoint app in Teams), helping the same information travel beyond the traditional office desk.
Handing Over Confidence, Not Just a Platform
A new intranet only stays useful if the people running it feel confident behind the scenes. We trained administrators and content authors so they could manage pages, publish updates and look after the platform without needing deep technical knowledge.
Post-launch support gave the team somewhere to take early questions as the intranet settled into everyday use. St Peter’s was left with more than a finished build: a platform the team could continue to own and develop.
The Impact: A More Connected and Inclusive Place to Work
St Peter’s now has one digital home for a workforce that works across very different settings. Clinical teams, office colleagues, warehouse staff and retail employees have clearer routes to news, policies, tools and organisational information.
Targeted links reduce the noise that comes with a one-size-fits-all intranet, while the information architecture, metadata and search configuration make important content easier to find. The Strategy portal gives the Hospice’s direction and values a more visible place in day-to-day communications.
The accessible, mobile-responsive experience also helps more people use the intranet in a way that suits them. Recite Me adds practical choice for individual users, while access through mobile and Teams supports employees who aren’t regularly sitting at a desk.
For the teams managing the platform, modern SharePoint provides a maintainable foundation within technology St Peter’s already owns. Training, reusable structures and post-launch support give them a clearer route to keeping the intranet useful as the Hospice evolves.
What’s Next: Growing the Experience Within Microsoft 365
The intranet gives St Peter’s a foundation it can continue to build on. Because it sits within SharePoint Online, the platform can develop alongside Microsoft 365 without asking the Hospice to start again each time its needs change.
The project also created momentum beyond the initial intranet. St Peter’s has begun exploring Viva Engage as a space for two-way communication and community building. And, over time, capabilities like Microsoft Copilot could offer further ways for people to find and work with information when the team are ready.
By grounding the new intranet in how people actually work, St Peter’s has turned an underused platform into an accessible digital home that connects its dispersed workforce and gives the Hospice room to keep evolving.
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