How to run an internal festival

When did you last hold a successful all-employee event? Be honest… was it engaging, stimulating and provoked lots of sparkling conversations, or did it feel scripted, dated and staid?

Westival-1041A housing association here in the UK recently held an internal festival (pictured), to shake up its usual format and give employees a new experience.

I worked in-house as an internal communicator for a decade. During this time I experienced organising and attending a wide variety of events including management conferences, all-employee gatherings and away days.

From cramming employees into a wind tunnel (don’t ask), to rostering off frontline workers and striving to run multiple, identical consecutive on and offline conferences, there’s no shortage of options to consider.

My advice? Ban the beige! Internal events are an opportunity to bring your people together in person or virtually, step away from the day-to-day and enable voices to be heard. (Tweet this)

Or they should be.

I’m going to hand you over to Suzanne Smith, @suzane_westkent, Communications and Marketing Manager at West Kent Housing Association. I hope her story sparks some ideas and you enjoy it.

Don’t forget you can find hundreds of guest articles written by communicators over in the guest article archive. I created this blog in 2009, so there are lots in there! If you have news to share, please see my guidelines and get in touch.

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Over to you Suzanne…

How to run an internal festival

Westival In the noughties, we had established a pattern of annual ‘all staff’ events. Some staff enjoyed it. Others resented the compulsory trip to a hotel off a motorway junction in Kent.

Logistically things were becoming more challenging, as the organisation grew to over 250 employees. In 2012, as part of our work with our cultural change partners Park Sims, we succeeded in introducing more of an ‘invitation’ feel to what remained a three-line whip event, and this was well received.

For the next two years we moved away from the ‘all-staff- in- one –place- on- one- day’ formula, running a series of events throughout the year, which staff self-selected onto.

Belonging to the whole organisation
They were popular, but for 2015, we decided we had the appetite to resurrect the ‘all staff’ idea. Previous year feedback seemed to suggest staff were missing that opportunity to be together and our cultural work made it timely to emphasise the sense of belonging to the whole organisation .

Westival A planning team was put together including partner Janeena Sims, to start the conversations:

What to do? Why do it? What’s the theme? What do we want to achieve?

One business plan objective resonated for us: ‘redefining our relationship with our residents.’

It’s about how we can help people to help themselves and includes targets around channel shift, taking responsibility and being more mindful of each other.

Our internal values are focused on similar themes;

  • encouraging self-awareness
  • taking responsibility
  • breaking down silo working (by being more aware of colleagues’ requests and the working world they inhabit).

An idea started to form.

The start of an idea…
I’ve been to one or two festivals and began to see how we might use the theme to deliver an engaging day. Especially if we asked staff to choose activities which represented how they see their working world, or as an experience they wanted other staff to share.

Westival3Molly Pass, @molly_westkent, who started her #commshero career just 11 months ago came up with the name Westival. All agreed we had nailed the theme, the name and most importantly the WHY. Off we went around the business armed with a list of festival-themed activities.

Here’s a list of what was chosen and the sales pitch we used to hook in our festival-goers:

Archery
Everyone talks about targets. Try your luck with a bow and arrow and aim at a different kind of target. Twang!

Arty zone (mosaic/collage making.)
Ever noticed how easy it is to miss the bigger picture? In this workshop led by Sam Barnes, (professional artist) you’ll put the pieces of the mosaic together. (Absolutely no artistic talent required!) “We deal with people with a myriad of problems and we help put the picture together.”

Meet the creatures and birds of prey
Westival 4Let’s celebrate difference – no-one wants their prejudices to rule them. And you often need to soar above a situation to see it in all its detail. “Like birds of prey, our job requires bravery, fearlessness, soaring above problems, patience, attention to detail, ruthlessness.”

Chillout Zone
What would a festival be without the chance to just relax? Kick back and reward yourselves for your hard work. “Sometimes we all need some space to relax!”

Festival skills
You know the feeling – there’s just too much on your plate. Find out how the real experts spin the plates and keep their balls in the air. “Everyday we’re balancing things and keeping it all together.”

Game zone
You might go round and round, with five on each side or even get stuck in the mud. The gamesmaster has the rulebook – and the whistle. Don’t argue with the ref! “It’s about team work with a clear purpose and aim”

The sales pitch
Look after yourself and others – Want to find out how to look after yourself when the going gets tough? “It’s about thinking ahead and taking proactive steps to prepare yourself”

Screen Shot 2015-05-18 at 14.24.30The truth about teams and tribes – There’s no “I” in “team”. But there is in “tribe.” Psychologist and Jedi Ewan will introduce you to some intriguing human behaviours found across different cultures and times.

The venue provided everything we needed to pull it off; big top, marquees, fields and outside catering. Next it was up to Janeena and her team to find musicians to entertain and create a festival feel and vibe.

Frances Pace put together a fantastic eventbrite invitation – channel shift from our usual Excel spreadsheet and staff emails. With an unusually (for us) short lead-in the invite went out.

With eight days to go, a reminder email to just 39 staff was needed, many of whom we knew were ‘harder to reach’ so combined with calls to line managers. We achieved a 65% invite conversion rate and 84% of tickets booked through the system.

The invite was immediate and urgent plus it didn’t look anything like any event we’d run before; non business branding, a lot of pink and a funky background to get the right look.

How we used the IC channels
westival 5The usual internal comms channels were dominated by ‘Westival Live’ and conversations about dressing up were overheard in corridors.

The team continued to pick up the latecomers and by Friday 24 we had a final attendee list. Partly, I think, down to the fact that we’d hit on the right theme and had such a short lead in time, we achieved much improved engagement with the booking process.

With festivals being mainstream, much more accessible to a wider demographic and possibly on bucket lists for some of our staff – it hit the right note.

It was a team effort – the planning team were: Park Sims: Janeena Sims, Frances Pace, Stefan Atkinson. The West Kent team: Hilary Knight, Molly Pass, Sandra Thompson, Suzanne Smith, Anita Francis.

On the day of the event at The Hop Farm, Paddock Wood, Kent, the sun shone. All day. The site looked like a mini-Glastonbury without the mud. We succeeded in delivering corporate messages in a fun and engaging way.

How are we going to top that next year?

Author: Suzanne Smith, Communications and Marketing Manager, West Kent Housing Association.

Thank you Suzanne, I imagine it was a visual treat for employees and a memorable way to bring your people together.

I’d love to know what your company does. If you have an idea of an article you’d like to write for the All Things IC blog, do please check out my guidelines and get in touch with your thoughts.

You can see some of the reactions from employees via Twitter captured below,

Rachel

Further reading on the All Things IC blog:

How to brew the perfect managers’ conference
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What’s on this week – 18 to 28 May 2015.

First published on All Things IC blog 18 May 2015.

Comments

  1. This looks amazing – what a brilliant idea. It’s great to see your employee’s photos and tweets, how else did you evaluate the event? And what was the feedback like?

    And the age old question….how did you manage to get your senior management team on board with this? I think a lot of internal communicators would love to do more creative things like this, but would struggle to get management to support the idea.

  2. suzanne says:

    Hi James thanks for the comment. We used SurveyMonkey to get feedback – it’s already linked to Eventbrite so was quite a simple process to amend the template and send out. We got overwhelmingly positive feedback; 98% rated it as good or excellent, 97% rated it well organised. We had some issues with catering and people had to queue so lots of feedback about that but otherwise it was all positive. The first organising meeting included a director and she sponsored the idea from the start which was important. But on the whole we are given responsibility to deliver staff events without too much involvement. That’s not been the case in every place I’ve worked so I do feel lucky. One of our organisational values is ‘working hard and having fun’ so it was easy to link it back to that as well.

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