Children International: one controlled policy library across four continents

By Amber Oakes, Product manager

Children International is a global nonprofit running health, education, empowerment and employment programmes across North and Central America, South America, Africa and Asia, all designed to break cycles of generational poverty. As the organisation grew, its policies grew with it, and they wanted one place where every member of staff could be sure of the current version and where its governance could be evidenced to funders. Xoralia provided a single controlled location, with documents stored within SharePoint and accessible via tools staff already use. The result is a policy estate with accountable owners and a timestamped record of who has attested to which version.

Running programmes across four continents means Children International's staff work in different countries, time zones and, in some cases, languages. Its policies had grown with the organisation, written for individual offices as it expanded, and the next step was to bring them together in one shared home.

A shared home meant more than a single location. It meant an expiry date and a named owner on every document, so that staff anywhere could be sure they were reading the current version. For a nonprofit that answers to funders and regulators as well as its own people, it also meant being able to evidence that its people had attested to the policies meant to govern them.

Children International already ran on Microsoft 365 and Teams, so our team kept staff in the tools they already used and added a controlled layer on top, with the documents staying in the organisation's own SharePoint. The first step was to bring every current policy into a clear library structure, so that “where do I find this” had one answer everywhere in the organisation, organised by metadata whichever continent someone was working from.

Only once that foundation was in place did our team add the reminders and workflows that keep it current. A central source of truth people trust makes every layer built on top of it worth using, and for a workforce this spread out, trust came first.

Xoralia gave Children International controlled policy libraries the whole organisation can rely on, current and findable, with a timestamped record of who has attested to which version. Whenever evidence is needed, Xoralia's reporting and audit trail features mean the compliance team can show who has attested to a given policy, which version and when, straight from the system.

That foundation scales with the organisation. As staff numbers, countries and programmes grow, every policy added to the library carries an owner and an expiry date, so the organisation's governance stays something it can stand behind.

To see how Xoralia can integrate with your SharePoint day to day, take a look at Xoralia's web parts in action.