Creative way to congratulate your colleagues on Fatherland Defender's Day

BDC Consulting, together with many other companies, transitioned to remote work in March 2020 due to the coronavirus pandemic. In addition, the team became distributed: the main part of the employees is located in Belarus, but there are a few guys from Russia, Ukraine, and even Indonesia. The company never returned from "remote" work mode, so the female employees of the agency had no choice but to organize online congrats for male colleagues.

This case study will tell you about the digital tools we used, the way we came up with ideas, and the real reason behind the girls having to do to the pubcrawling.

Raw data

The challenge: to congratulate men creatively, cheerfully and necessarily in a digital format

Target audience: 16 fighters of different ages, geography, interests, marital status

Geography: Belarus, Russia, Ukraine, Indonesia

Budget

Breakfast for the initial generation of ideas:

4 lattes - 16 rubles ($6)

3 poached eggs - 45 rubles ($17)

1 pumpkin cheesecake - 8 rubles ($3)

1 pancake with berries - 15 rubles ($6)

1 undrinkable matcha latte - 6 rubles ($2.3)

A visit to bars

Bar 1 - 108 rubles ($41)

Bar 2 - 120 rubles ($46)

Bar 3 - 100 rubles ($38)

Bar 4 - 50 rubles ($20)

Total spent on preparation: $179.3

The team behind it all:

13 Superwomen - BDC female employees

Stage 1. Brainstorming in a remote format

Three weeks prior to X day in the "girls" chat we sketched the first ideas that were fresh in our minds. We figured out our budget and work costs.

Then we decided that we would delight our men in smaller bites for the entire working day.

Stage 2. Creative mornings and formulating ideas

To improve our collective thinking, on one of our workdays we got together for a brunch (some of us joined in at ZOOM) to discuss ideas and formulate them into a logical progression.

There we continued to get creative and sketched out the following ideas:

• Drop funny videos from the archives with men into the chat room about once an hour
• Hold several competitions: intellectual, "female" (guessing out the names of girlish things in pictures and pronounce correctly the names of famous brands), and another one in the format of comment-out (comment on the posts of our former employee or complete the task)
• Ask well-known celebs to congratulate our guys in Stories (from Olga Buzova and Yuri Dud' to some Belarusian celebrities)
• Congratulate our folks on the local radio
• Record a special congratulatory video, where the girls says nice and warm words to the guys

The gifts

Right away we dismissed the idea of some small gifts/kits for men and even considered telling them we spent the whole budget on breakfast and going to bars 😂.

We ended up thinking that regular certificates weren't as appealing anymore and decided to give Amazon Gift Cards.

However, before getting a real gift, they wanted to have a joke and give conventionally free gifts: guides on what would resonate with each of the men. For example, for someone who recently shaved his head - a guide on how to care for his new haircut, a single man - a guide on getting Tinder Gold, a Scandinavian lover - a guide on traveling in Sweden, a beer lover - references to the Top 5 beer apps, and so on.

Next, we broke down all the ideas into short actions and formulated the roadmap in Google Sheets: action, responsible person(s), deadline.

Stage 3. The bar and making the final concept of the party

Going to the bar on Friday (February 19) was one more of our ingenious ideas: we decided to get together with the girls and make a common video with cocktails, where we tell the boys that we wanted to work out how to congratulate them and what to get them as a present, but we eventually decided to just go out to the bars, and spend the gift budget on cocktails, respectively.

However, after the first cocktail we came up with another brilliant idea: late Monday night (February 22) and at night to drop video content from our "party" in the public chat room: cocktails, dancing, songs, and cliff-hanging congratulations. Making a delayed video sending right until the early morning, so that the guys would not suspect anything and sacredly believe that the girls are not even planning to congratulate them. This prank was a total success 😉

A few cocktails later, we were able to sketch an overall concept for the celebration as well: creating a channel in Slack at 10am, supposedly having a new project, attaching a brief, giving half an hour to review and scheduling a general call with the first contest in a WHAT? WHERE? WHEN? scenario 

And next - act all in line with the script.

Stage 4. Preparation and the day before February 23rd

As true deadline lovers, we did most of the tasks the day before the holiday: shot a common video, reached out celebrities so that they could congratulate the guys, prepared tweets for Ilon Musk and NASA, determined the time to send messages from the "evening hangout" to the chat room and timed the day ahead.

We wrote 13 messages and three tweets to famous personalities and companies to congratulate our guys on the holiday.

The results include:

• 3 reads.
• 2 responses with regrets they would not be able to help: Anna Bond (belarusian blogger) and S7 Airlines.

Conversion to reads: 18.75%

Conversion from request to response: 12.5%, though negative 😅

In addition, learned the terms of how you can congratulate men on Belarusian radio and planned the text.

Evening

From 10 p.m. the general chat began to receive videos from the bars at intervals of then 10 minutes, then more than half an hour. The videos were scheduled until 3 a.m.

Stage 5. X Day. Congratulations

The day was completely planned out: every hour or so a task, a video, or a congratulation arrived in the common Slack channel.

The tasks included, for example, guessing what was shown in the picture and what the women were using it for.

Men, please leave in the comments what you think it is and what you think it's used for.

Creative congratulations to the guys from BDC Consulting, celebrities and bloggers, as well as tweets to Elon Musk, NASA and Aviasales, which have gone unanswered. We tried, though 😉

And we sent screenshots of our endeavors to the guys as well.

Next, we had to write wishes and send them to the congratulations section of Belarusian radio stations: unistar.by, rusradio.by, and roks.com. Each greeting coded the name of an ex-colleague, which was the password for the next contest - our adaptation of the famous show Comment Out. There was only time to congratulate one radio station, but the guys managed to guess it on the first try, though at some point they were defeated by doubts. It is under the posts of this female employee that the men had to leave comments, or complete the task.

There were examples of comments (each guy had his own comment, they chose by his serial number from 1 to 16):

Many flowers have incredible beauty and fragrance. But next to you, they turn into a pale shadow.

You must have escaped from Mount Olympus. You are Aphrodite, aren't you?

Beauty contest winners will be jealous when they see you.

Beautiful is where you are. You beautify reality. Keep up the good work!

I'd sell the world for your eyes, I'd go to the ends of the earth for you, I'd do anything with you!

And these are sample assignments, in case anyone was reluctant to leaving a comment:

Take off your clothes while the match is lit.

Take a picture of a closed refrigerator from the inside.

Make a face mask out of hand-me-downs and sit with it until the end of the bell.

Drink a shot of cooking oil.

Change your avatar on Telegram and your description to "girls, sign up for sugaring" for the whole day

Then we gave out "joke" free gifts, sent out a congratulatory video, and sent out Amazon Gift Cards to the mailboxes.

At the very end of the day, the men would additionally get this case 😉