The ClimateWorks Foundation supports public policies that help prevent dangerous climate change tied to global warming. With network partners across the world, the foundation supports a global team of organizations and experts within sectors and geographic regions where there is the greatest potential to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, including the United States, China, India, Latin America and Europe.

With teams focused on transportation, energy efficiency, climate policy, forestry and renewable energy, ClimateWorks needed a central, secure place to harness knowledge and share ideas openly across these sectors. To support this effort, ClimateWorks chose Socialtext’s enterprise social software platform.

The addition of Socialtext is part of a broader knowledge exchange program occurring at ClimateWorks to support their global mission to achieve substantial carbon abatement by the year 2020. Socialtext will serve as a social intranet and private extranet with partners, where ClimateWorks employees and network organizations can connect with colleagues across the globe and access the relevant information they need to achieve their combined mission.

Like many Socialtext clients, ClimateWorks decided to give their social intranet a custom name: CWKX (ClimateWorks Knowledge eXchange).

“CWKX provides the toolkit for optimizing the collaborative creation, capture, organization and sharing of knowledge throughout the entire ClimateWorks Network of partners and affiliates,” says Sarah Nichols, director of knowledge management at ClimateWorks.

Inside CWKX, every group (whether a strategy team, an external network partner, or internal department) has a workspace where members post the latest scientific and technical research, collaborate on important documentation, discuss strategy proposals, ask for and receive expert advice, post updates, or plan regional and sector summits.

Previously, Sarah says, most of this collaboration was done via ad-hoc methods. People would email colleagues with updates or documents. “Reply-all” emails would include various changes, and it became very difficult for people to find the experts and information they needed in order to do their best work.

Now that these interactions are moving into CWKX, “we capture critical institutional knowledge that’s searchable, taggable and easy to find later. Important information doesn’t disappear in an email box or languish on a shared drive. Employees send short messages via Signals, and have deep collaboration inside CWKX workspaces.”

“At any given moment, we want our network partners to be able to pull together the right colleagues and information they need to tackle the incredibly important challenge the world faces with climate change,” Sarah says. “Our new intranet built on Socialtext helps us deliver on that vision.”