Virtual Holiday Card Extravaganza
Challenge
It was my first holiday season at a tech company, and the question was posed: What should we do to send a holiday greeting to our customers?
I started looking at a handful of other tech companies and saw a gamut of examples. Sometimes a simple email is sent, other times a Christmas card is produced, and some companies went all out with a fun video.
We also were talking about doing some type of survey to understand our audience better (we had many questions about nonprofit personas in those days), and encouraging participation through a giveaway.
So the main goals were:
Conduct a survey that would give us insight into what our audience was like.
Create incentives that would compel participation.
Engender some warm brand feelings in the midst of the holiday season.
Process
The process went threw a few stages to accommodate each piece of this campaign.
Survey
We decided to hijack a holiday theme and call it “12 Days of Kindful,” positioning the giveaway as the primary purpose of the event. We knew our audience was unlikely to fill out one long survey, so we positioned it as 12 shorter surveys, with a prize attached to each survey. This way we could solicit more responses, knowing that people are going to be less jaded if they can win something each day after only a few minutes of their time.
My team coordinated gifts for the 12 days, and we built out an email template to accommodate the next day’s giveaway, survey link, and the previous day’s winner. We then wrote out all the survey questions, focused on things like preferences in media (to understand what formats we should pursue, as well as what tone our brand should take), preferences in email, fiscal calendar and buying schedules, challenges for the positions, and other topics that would reveal characteristics of our audience.
“Surprise and delight” music videos
The next piece was to surprise and delight the survey participant at the end of their survey. The idea was that, since there is only one winner each day, we wanted to give all respondents a nice holiday surprise to thank them and engender good will with our audience.
We decided to lean into our brand’s fun, quirky tone of voice and record holiday songs with lyrics around nonprofit operations, like thanking donors, raising money, etc. The video would be shown at the end of the survey, giving a little touch of fun as a showing of gratitude to the respondent.
I set up a green screen in one of our offices and asked (read: forced) around the office for people to sign up and participate. It was pretty easy to get 4 or 5 people to sign up, but the 6 or 7 after that was a struggle. It took a lot of coaxing, but we got there.
I used lav mics plugged into iPhones as the audio recorder, and then swiped public domain audio tracks and holiday videos or backgrounds for the production. I had to produce some of the audio tracks with more instruments, since some were MIDI backing only. I then mixed the audio in Logic Pro and edited the green screen effects and the resulting output in Final Cut.
The music special grand finale
To tie it all together as our Kindful Holiday Card, I came up with a concept to host these videos almost like an ABC Holiday Special. I wrote the script, produced wardrobe and procured a set, coordinated the shoot, and starred as the host. After a day of filming, I tied the host portions in with the songs to produce a 15-minute short film. We exported this to YouTube and sent in our end-of-the-year holiday email.
Product
Although I don’t have access to the report or emails, I do have the final Holiday Music Special in its entirety.
Results
I’m pretty fond of the final product. It has a fun feel to it, and is pretty well produced for my first foray into film. Our customers thought the videos were pretty funny, but it was a major hit internally. The Kindful team continued to show the video at their holiday party for the following two years.
The final survey got great results (ranging from 300-500 respondents per day of surveying) and I compiled it into an extensive report for our entire company (report not shown). I received lots of great feedback from co-workers about the great insight the report brought, painting a much more complete picture of our target market.