Okay, so you’re all set up and you and your Challenge Team have taken action.
Now it’s time to start to engage your people…
Step 8: Share that you’ve joined the challenge
First thing to do is to let the world know that you’ve joined your organisation.
Who you tell and how is up to you – you might want to start with letting your team know, or maybe you want to share it with your whole community on socials or in a newsletter.
This is just a first announcement. A teaser. You’ll soon be inviting people to join, and communicating about dates and locations. Here’s an example of what you might say initially:
“We’re very proud and excited to share that we’ve joined (our company) in the Good Empire Zero Ocean Plastics Challenge, to help save 1 million ocean plastics this summer. We’ll be sharing more about it soon, but over the summer, we’re going to be coming together to help clean up our beaches, waterways, parks, stormwater drains and gutters, and save our oceans and marine life. We hope you’ll all join us in our team goal to save 10,000 ocean-bound plastics.”
Now’s a good time to check out the Zero Ocean Plastics Challenge Hub – you’ll find design assets, social tiles and a few other handy bits and bobs to help you communicate about the challenge. Feel free as well to create your own.
Step 9: Set your first Team Event
It’s up to you, but it’s a good idea to start with just your team first. As in all the employees in your company. They can be anywhere in the world – good thing about the app is that anyone can participate remotely, and still feel like you’re all doing something together.
Before you invite your team to join the challenge, its a good idea to set up up a core event. This might be somewhere close to HQ that you invite your team to join you in. If you can get some of your people together to kick things off, that’s awesome.
If not, then it’s a good idea to at least set a date and a time, so that everyone can be doing it remotely, but at the same time, to get things started with some momentum.
Step 10: Invite your team
When we say team, we mean all the employees in your organisation.
If you haven’t already communicated about it, you might want to add more detail around what the challenge is all about, but here’s the gist of it:
“Hi team – we’re going to be kicking off our Zero Ocean Plastics Challenge with a cleanup at (address) on Friday morning, 9am on (date). Come and join us if you can. Or if you can’t make it, put an hour aside on the Friday morning and get out to a waterway, stormwater drain or gutter near you, and pick up what you can. Don’t forget to download the Good Empire app and create an account, then click on this link to join our (company) challenge (include Challenge Invite Deeplink).”
You might want to set this up as an event and ask people to RSVP. You could also set a week aside and let teams or individuals organise times that suit them. However you do it is fine, but it works best to give it some focus, rather than just leaving it open ended.
How you get advocacy within your organisation is up to you, but good practice is to get your leaders to champion, and then recruit every team lead to gather their teams.
If your CEO or founder or MD advocates loudly, that sets an expectation that “we want to get behind this as an organisation. This is important to us and our culture.”
Step 11: Prime the team in the countdown
Communicate as much as you can in the leadup. Get around to your leaders, make sure they’re in, and rallying their teams. Get your CEO on video, announce it at your town hall – whatever works for you. Make it important!
You can use this “how to” guide for individuals to get ready in the app:
- Download the Good Empire app on your phone and create an account. Here’s the link in the App Store and Google Play Store.
- Click this Invite link to join our company challenge. (include your custom Challenge Invite Deeplink)
- Bring a reusable or compostable bag and gloves (or we’ll provide them for you)
- Join us, wherever you are, at (time, date, location/s) and pick up all the plastics you can find
- Lay out and count your haul
- Click on our challenge in the ACT tab in the app and press the “Take Action” button
- Film your haul, and maybe film yourself talking through what you found, how you feel, what’s recyclable – get creative!
- Add a caption and log your tally
- Submit your post, and share it if you like, to inspire others.
Step 12: Team to take action
Time to take action!
It’s actually a really fun and rewarding thing to do. Dirty, yes. Discouraging, disheartening, but empowering!
This will be your first bit of impact as a team. Aim to hit your first challenge goal together (eg: 10,000 ocean plastics, or 1000, whatever you think is possible). You can always then ask your teams to keep going in their own time to reach the target if you don’t hit it straight away.
Step 13: Celebrate and share your impact
Strike while the team is on a high! Validate and celebrate your action together, and the impact you’ve had.
If you hit your challenge goal – amazing! Screenshot it in the app and share it around with the whole company.
You can share individual posts straight from the app, into Slack or whatever you use for internal comms.
A powerful thing to do is to create a Challenge Highlights Video – we can do it for you, quickly and affordably ($1500), where we take all the posts your team has made and cut them into a short video, set to music. It’s a great piece of content to use to share the challenge and the impact you’ve all had.
Maybe you want to set a new goal now, and use the excitement to set another event to try to get even more people on board – they’ll be able to see something tangible now. In which case – repeat steps 9-12!
Or maybe you’re ready to start to engage your customers and community – this is a powerful way to build community.
Click here to see Part 3 of the guide, where we’ll take you through engaging your community!