AMP Amplify Festival - Staff Engagement

“I believe that our online addiction is slowly snuffing out our ability to innovate.. more time spent online does not necessarily increase learning. In fact, the concurrent sensory deprivation may inhibit our ability to innovate in the physical world”
— Annalie Killian, ‘The learning paradox of ubiquitous connectivity’, TEDx Melbourne

Annalie, our client and Director of Innovation at AMP, runs the Amplify Festival - a week-long festival of innovation and thought leadership - every 2 years. While the festival has always sought to inject creative thinking into the company and invest in the knowledge capital of AMP’s people, she came to us in 2013 to execute an idea that had these unique challenges:

  • Get staff to learn a new craft. IQ of the population is increasing, while the creative quotient (CQ) is falling. Especially in the financial services, staff no longer use their hands to solve problems. This is a real issue for employee well-being and capacity for innovation. 
  • Create a strategy for engaging the whole of AMP Asia Pacific, even though the Amplify Festival physically takes place in Sydney and Melbourne.
  • Higher attendance and conversion from registration to attendance. Past festivals have seen enthusiastic registrations but drop-offs in attendance.

Success Metrics

  • A cost effective, logistically simple and interesting mechanism for staff engagement aligned with the festival’s theme of ‘Transformation’
  • Use of origami paper craft as the instrument of engagement
  • Visually arresting installation as the backdrop to Amplify (Sydney office)
  • 80% ‘turnout’ i.e. conversion rate from registrations to attendance in Sydney and Melbourne

Design Principles

  1. Think with your hands, make with your head
  2. We are all capable of multiple transformations
  3. Creativity is in the crowd

 

Desk Drop (Amplify Program & Origami Pack) to 7700 AMP employees

Our origami program pack

  • was distributed to 6000 staff by their peers and/or Amplify ambassadors at each site
  • invited staff to engage in learning a new craft with easy instructions and a fun ‘How to Fold an Origami Crane’ animation accessible through an augmented reality app
  • prompted their engagement with festival content by printing speaker bios on the origami paper
  • let employees contribute to crowd-created artwork in their teams and as a company
  • reminded staff about registration and attendance multiple times via crowd-created content
  • inspired innovation by being a catalyst for people to connect with their team and ‘tinker’ but also arrange to attend Amplify sessions together
  • reminded staff that Amplify is a unique investment by AMP into their professional development
  • was integrated with the intranet and automatic calendaring to ensure notification and reminders
  • invited them to see their crane through multiple transformations

Wildwon commissioned paper artist Ai Ikeda to work across both the design of the origami packs, animations and installation that formed the backdrop to the main auditorium at Amplify.

In line with the values of both Wildwon and the Amplify Festival, we worked with AMP’s preferred printer to create a pack that used no glues, no plastics, was made from 100% recycled and Forestry Stewardship Certified (FSC) card and paper, and had three lives throughout the promotional period.

The execution was carried out via a campaign integrated with AMP’s internal communications team and channels. Two tactical engagement events aided this execution:

1. Internal Amplify Briefing - Wildwon attended to connect with potential ambassadors of our promotional strategy. We found these in team assistants, and staff at multiple AMP sites.

2. HackFest - Origami demonstration and ‘fold-a-thon’ to 40 HackFest participants enhancing problem-solving and creativity and giving employees an extra nudge to get involved.

Multiple touch points throughout the 5-phased life of the campaign. Employees:

  1. received the interactive pack and news of its arrival via AMP’s intranet
  2. took a photo of their crane creation, added it to the digital crane wall and entered a competition
  3. saw their photo in a stop-motion animation with hundreds of others from all around the world
  4. saw physical cranes collected at the Sydney and Melbourne offices
  5. attended the festival to see cranes used in a crowd-created backdrop and installation

“Being an ideas person, I am always looking for people with outstanding design-thinking and execution capability to complement my small team and make magic happen. I am thrilled to have found Yvonne and Sally from Wildwon who could connect with me creatively and strategically, and work independently but with a high level of collaboration with my team to deliver a bold and risky experiment in an integrated and seamless manner. Their approach is inspired, their preparation is awesome and their thinking is clear and considered. What I valued most is that they always respected the artistic integrity of the vision and didn’t compromise in the delivery- yet, worked creatively within the constraints of budget, our internal procedures to help us achieve our targets with a high-quality, high-impact and visually stunning campaign. In terms of the ROI for this project, it was an unqualified breakthrough success! Wildwon’s professionalism, openness, resourcefulness and easy-to-work-with style endeared them to the entire Amplify Festival team, and I can’t wait to use them for more projects in future.”
— Annalie Killian, Director of Innovation and Thought Leadership, AMP

Origami Crane Photo Competition & Digital Crane Wall

100+ photos of folded canes submitted to the competition by staff

“People are going CRAZY for cranes, can we extend the competition? ”
— Sarah Warner, Internal Communications Manager
Digital Crane Wall AMP Wildwon.png

How to make an origami crane animation

Hackfest - tactical engagement event 

“I was quite unsure how the crane folding would fit with other Hackfest activities but after you left I noticed that many teams continued to fold cranes while working in teams. What I learnt was this stimulates more ideas as you are working and concentrating.. it even sparked an idea for the Amplify game.. so thank you for the great work”
— - Melissa Foong, IT Operations Manager

AMP employee crowd-created stop motion animation

Highlights

  • 6000 packs produced and distributed to 19 Asia Pacific offices
  • 116 uploads to the digital crane wall
  • 83 AMP submissions to individual crane photo competition
  • 21 AMP submissions to team crane photo competition
  • 1000+ physical cranes folded across Sydney and Melbourne locations
  • 75 employee-made cranes used in the Sydney installation
  • positive feedback from speakers, AMP CEO and session attendees on crane installation
  • 2 animated stop-motion videos produced
  • 10,441 session attendees (http://amplifyeffect.com.au/)

Crowd-created Origami Crane Installation & Backdrop