Bonvenu used ThoughtFarmer to create The Vault, overcoming search frustration and building engagement with an easy-to-use platform

Community banks operate on trust—with their customers, their communities, and each other. But when staff spread across multiple branches can’t easily find information or feel disconnected from colleagues, that internal trust starts to fray. 

Bonvenu Bank found a better way. Here’s how.

Bonvenu Bank: The reimagining of a 40-year Louisiana financial institution

Founded in 1985 as Citizens National Bank, Bonvenu Bank is a Louisiana-based community bank with approximately 215 employees across 14 branches. They serve customers across the state, from Shreveport in the north to Metairie and New Orleans in the south.

The bank completed a full rebrand, taking on the name Bonvenu. A playful nod to the French word bienvenue, meaning “welcome.” The name change wasn’t just cosmetic. It was an opportunity to modernize every touchpoint, including how staff access information, connect with colleagues, and experience their workplace.

The challenge: an intranet that created more work than it solved

For five years, Bonvenu ran its internal communications on Ensemble (a product of Passageways, later acquired and rebranded as NContracts). The platform wasn’t keeping pace with their needs.

The most glaring issue was search. Employees would hunt for a routine form, like a credit card form, and either get flooded with irrelevant results or come up empty. 

“Users would search for a document and end up with everything except what was needed, if any results displayed at all,” recalls Julie Ashbaugh, VP and Corporate Training Officer. “There were certain documents that were simply not searchable.”

Beyond search, the previous intranet platform was slow, unintuitive, and required near-coding-level expertise to maintain. Julie found herself doing nearly all intranet management herself, because training others would take even more time. Making updates to something as basic as the header took three hours. Plus, employee engagement features, like polls, comments, and recognition, didn’t exist at all.

When Onsemble’s pending transition to NContracts promised little more than a name change, the team decided it was a good opportunity to look for something better.

A recommendation that ended the search before it began

Julie’s evaluation process was refreshingly direct. She posted a single question to the Girls Banker Group on Facebook, a community of banking professionals, “What intranet does your bank use?” 

One response stood out immediately. Someone was raving about ThoughtFarmer.

That was enough to start a conversation. ThoughtFarmer was the only new intranet platform they formally evaluated.

After a few reassuring calls with the sales team and reviewing ThoughtFarmer’s comprehensive ebooks and resources, Julie decided Bonvenu didn’t need to look at other options. 

The value was clear: the product was a demonstrably better fit for a lower cost than what they’d been paying, and the personalized attention from the ThoughtFarmer team was second to none. ThoughtFarmer was the obvious choice.

A strategic launch: Aligned to the rebrand

The timing of the ThoughtFarmer intranet launch was deliberately coordinated with the full bank rebrand. While the old intranet still ran under the Citizens National Bank brand, a ThoughtFarmer environment was being built in parallel. The new intranet was populated with new Bonvenu forms, documents, and branding. 

So on the day the bank officially became Bonvenu, the new intranet went live with no messy switch over. There was no confusion. The clean cutover set the stage for 100% user adoption. 

The new intranet was named “The Vault”, decided by employee vote from nearly 100 submitted ideas.  and it is set as the default homepage on every computer.

Implementation: Guided by ThoughtFarmer’s Professional Services

“[The ThoughtFarmer Professional Services team] kind of took me through and just held my hand,” Julie recalls. The team helped migrate everything over, including a link-out to NAVEX, the bank’s policy and procedure platform. The Vault was set up to become a true single point of access for employees.

ThoughtFarmer’s white glove support stood in sharp contrast to their prior vendor experience, where the point of contact changed constantly, and often arrived with little knowledge of the bank’s history or setup. 

Now with ThoughtFarmer, Julie knows everyone by name. When she emails with a question, she often gets a same-day reply that includes a personalized video walkthrough that goes beyond just written instructions.

I will always be ThoughtFarmer’s biggest cheerleader. The customer service is just out of this world.”

Julie Ashbaugh

VP & Corporate Training Officer

Bonvenu Bank

Results: The Vault delivers

The numbers from Bonvenu’s first year on ThoughtFarmer tell a clear story.

From constant requests to 14,000 self-serve searches

In its first year, staff conducted approximately 14,000 searches on The Vault and downloaded approximately 17,500 documents and resources. A scale of activity that would have been unimaginable on the old system. 

Julie also measured the improvement in a simple but telling way: her phone stopped ringing. “The phone hardly rings anymore with someone saying, I can’t find this document,” she says.

53 hours saved every week

The efficiency gains extend well beyond search. Julie estimates that ThoughtFarmer saves employees at least 15 minutes per week through: 

• Faster document retrieval
• Less back-and-forth discussing requests

Across 215 employees, that translates to over 53 hours saved per week, or nearly 2,800 hours annually. For the bank, that’s meaningful productivity ROI.

For Julie personally, as one of the main administrators, the platform has transformed how she manages the intranet day-to-day. Updating the homepage carousel or switching seasonal themes, like Valentine’s Day one week and Mardi Gras the next, takes only about three minutes now compared to a three-hour coding exercise before. 

She has easily trained several other administrators who can confidently manage their own sections, eliminating a stifling bottleneck.

Over 3,500 engagements in year one

Engagement was a pipe dream on the old intranet. There simply were no interactive features to speak of. However, ThoughtFarmer’s employee engagement features changed that entirely.

In the first year, Bonvenu employees made nearly 3,500 likes and comments, created approximately 3,400 pieces of content, and made nearly 2,000 peer shout-outs. Every week, Julie posts a poll or fun survey, such as “What are you doing for Valentine’s Day?”, and consistently sees 100 to 150 of Bonvenu’s 215 employees respond.

What strikes Julie most is who’s participating. “We’re seeing responses from people I would not expect to even give it a second look. We love to see the engagement!”

Bridging miles between branches

The Vault has become the bridge between staff across geographically dispersed branches. Through photo galleries, an up-to-date homepage carousel, and rich employee profiles, colleagues across the bank get to know each other, celebrate each other’s milestones, and feel part of the same team. 

“Likely, many of our Northern and Southern region employees will never meet,” Julie notes, “but they know each other because of the directory. We’re always posting pictures of what everyone’s doing out in the community.”

ThoughtFarmer continues to deliver value supporting an online banking migration

About nine months after launch, Bonvenu migrated its online banking to a new platform. It was a high-stakes transition that previously would have created confusing email chains. However, the team built a dedicated resource hub on The Vault. It hosted every guide, link, and reference document the online banking team needed in one place prominently surfaced on the homepage.

“The questions from employees were minimal,” Julie says. “The guides were right there at their fingertips. We made it very obvious where it was. You just clicked, and you were right where you needed to be with your questions answered.”

ThoughtFarmer is so straightforward that I’ve been able to easily train others to make updates.”

Julie Ashbaugh

VP & Corporate Training Officer

Bonvenu Bank

A new identity. 100% intranet adoption. A better bank.

Bonvenu Bank’s move to ThoughtFarmer wasn’t just a technology upgrade, it was the start of an exciting new chapter. The results speak for themselves: nearly 14,000 searches, 17,500 resource downloads, and nearly 2,000 peer recognitions in the first year alone. The Vault has become the daily starting point for every Bonvenu employee, an irreplaceable source of truth that keeps a dispersed team connected, informed, and genuinely engaged.

Learn more about how a ThoughtFarmer intranet can help your bank connect, communicate, and thrive.

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