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How Operation Smile Unified a Global Workforce Across 30 Countries
Operation Smile has spent more than forty years delivering free cleft lip and palate surgeries to children across more than thirty countries. Behind every surgery is a global team spanning Virginia and Morocco and Madagascar and Ethiopia and dozens of places in between. Program coordinators, regional managers, field teams, medical volunteers, and communications staff, all working toward the same goal. For that work to happen well, information has to flow well. And for years, it did not.
Program updates were buried in email chains sent to distribution lists employees had to know about and request access to. The previous intranet was not integrated into the tools staff used every day, creating a separate destination that was especially difficult for regional employees and mobile users to access. Knowledge built in one country never reached the team that needed it in another. Information ownership was concentrated in a small number of people, making it hard for staff to independently find answers or access resources. Leadership had no single place to see the organization whole.
Operation Smile partnered with Valorem Reply to change that. Over twelve months, Valorem Reply designed, built, and launched OneSmile: a global employee portal built on SharePoint Online and integrated with Microsoft Teams through Viva Connections, serving staff across more than thirty countries with 61 department and location sites. The build included a custom Program and Activity Updates workflow, a SharePoint-based Operating Calendar, and a full adoption change management program that ensured the platform would actually be used. Today, staff across thirty countries are not just visiting the platform. They are creating, sharing, and celebrating the work happening across the mission every day.
Challenges
No centralized employee portal, leaving staff across thirty countries without a shared home base for information or communication.
Program updates shared through email distribution lists with no standardized process for visibility or approval, leaving field contributions buried in inboxes.
Previous intranet not integrated into daily tools, creating a barrier particularly challenging for regional staff and mobile users.
Institutional knowledge siloed within regions, with no reliable way to capture and share learnings across the global organization.
Solutions
Designed and launched OneSmile, a SharePoint Online intranet with 61 department and location sites, unified global navigation, and Viva Connections integrated directly into Microsoft Teams.
Built the Program and Activity Updates solution on Microsoft Forms and Power Automate, giving field teams a workflow to submit updates in under five minutes, automatically published as news stories to the entire organization.
Delivered the OneSmile Operating Calendar, surfacing key events and activities across the intranet with automated approval workflows and integrations to existing data sources.
Incorporated Accelerator 365, a suite of custom SharePoint components developed by Reply, extending the platform beyond what standard SharePoint offers out of the box.
Executed a full Adoption Change Management program including twelve global training sessions, office hours, a Content Owner Resource Hub, and a gamified launch scavenger hunt.
Outcomes
92% adoption within the first 30 days, and 75% ongoing compared to 44% on the previous platform.
506 average monthly unique users across 20+ countries and 4 global regions, generating 38,000 average monthly page views.
Sessions averaging 45 to 51 minutes, with 150+ posts published across 10+ departments.
Field teams across thirty countries now have a single, standardized process for sharing program updates that reach the entire organization automatically.
20+ countries and 10+ departments actively publishing and maintaining their own content, shifting from centralized information ownership to empowered self-service.
CUSTOMER
