Mission Australia intranet

Mission Australia is one of the country's largest community-services NFPs — homelessness, family services, youth services, mental health, employment, disability. We've been the Plone intranet partner since 2011, supporting a distributed national workforce across the organisation's program-delivery and head-office teams.

Background

Like most large NFPs running national programs, Mission Australia's internal communications and document management run across multiple physical sites, shift patterns and program teams. The intranet is the central reference point — for policy and procedure, training materials, staff news, program-specific resources, and the operational documentation that keeps a 3,000-staff organisation aligned.

Intranets at NFPs typically get budgets sized for a five-person company and expectations sized for a corporate platform. The trick is making infrastructure that's durable, low-maintenance, and editor-friendly enough that program teams can self-manage without depending on IT for routine updates.

Partnership

From 2011 onwards we ran the Mission Australia Plone intranet under an SLA-based consulting model — flexible support packages sized to the organisation's actual usage, with Plone administration, integration work, plug-in recommendations and ongoing architectural advice covered. The arrangement was set up to be elastic: more support when there's a project on, lower steady-state in between.

The platform itself has evolved through Plone version cycles, content-model refactors, and several rounds of editor-experience improvements, without ever needing a re-platform. The total cost of ownership over a decade-plus has stayed predictable — which for a NFP procurement team is more valuable than headline daily-rate savings.

Why this is the work we like

Long-running NFP infrastructure is the unglamorous end of consulting. It's also where the most public good per dollar of consultancy time tends to land — every hour the Mission Australia content team doesn't spend wrestling the intranet is an hour spent on the people the organisation serves. We've kept the Mission Australia intranet running through staffing cycles, regulatory changes, and platform updates because the alternative — re-procurement and re-platform every five years — would have absorbed budget that's better spent elsewhere.