How Celebrations Boost Company Culture with Kohler & Wawa

Speaker 1:
Good morning everybody. Happy Wednesday. Happy post Attunesday, Chuck, as he walks out the door, his favorite day, Attunesday. Happy Wednesday everybody. Thanks so much for joining us. Really appreciate it. We’re going to kick off this session with two amazing presentations about The Art of Celebration, and then we’re going to go into a question and answer period. So if you have any questions, make sure you write ’em down. There may be some giveaways for questions as they come around. Just as a little bit of a hint, celebrating events, colleagues, it’s hard, right? Especially when we’re not maybe in the same building, the same region, or even in the same country. So how do we build culture? How do we make sure everyone feels included when it comes to an event? It’s possible through Firstup. Today during the Art of Celebration, we have two fantastic customers that are using the Firstup platform to do just that. First, we’re going to have Colleen from Wawa talk about the Art of Celebration, and then we will have Sammie and Matt from Kohler round out that presentation. Both are using the Art of Celebration in many different ways, and hopefully you’re ready to party with us and they inspire you to throw parties of your own and your platforms. Take it away. Colleen,

Speaker 2:
Can you turn the sound up?

Speaker 3:
Good morning everybody. I am Colleen Labik, head of Internal Communications and Engagement for Wawa. For those of you who have not been inside a Wawa, hopefully that gave you a little taste of what it’s like in our stores. Show of hands, is anybody familiar with the brand Wawa? Woo. Okay, I’m talking to some of my own. Has anybody ever been in Wawa? Yes. Okay, cool. So some of you didn’t even need that, but it was kind of fun, and I know it’s early this morning, so I thought it would wake us up a little bit. That picture over there with all of the stuff that I’m schlepping is actually the very first day that I accepted a job offer at Wawa. I was off to a celebration at a local store for a sweepstakes winner, a customer who had won a free supply of teas for a year.

Speaker 3:
And fast forward 15 years later, that has me, not much has changed, especially not the pink boa, although I traded in for a blazer today. And that really just kind of encapsulates the journey that I’ve had with Wawa, which has been filled with celebrations and connecting with our customers. Wawa itself has a rich and lengthy history dating back over 200 years. We started as an iron foundry and then a dairy, which still is in Wawa, Pennsylvania today. And then we opened our very first retail store in 1964, and we sold things like meatloaf and diapers and not things that we sell today, but we have evolved to meet customers’ needs. And so it’s no surprise that we sell a lot of coffee. Our very first cup of coffee was brought into the store because we had our general manager wanting to connect with customers who were in the store every day.

Speaker 3:
And so he actually brought his coffee maker from home, plugged it in, and served the customers that were hanging out in the store of the coffee. And from there, we just continued to be able to provide things to our customers that they were looking for. Today we operate over a thousand stores. We have 45,000 associates, and while we are primarily in the northeast, are expanding a little bit into the Midwest, I’ve met a few people that are from Indiana, and recently as this week we just announced a few locations there, so I know people are really excited for us to come to ’em. We are also a privately held company, so 40% of our associates are also owners. That’s a really important point that I think you’ll hear several times through this presentation. It allows our associate base to just have a little bit more of an interest.

Speaker 3:
If you’re an owner, there’s a lot of things you want to know, and so connecting with them is more important than ever. So yes, we sell hoagie, we sell coffee, we have gasoline. We also have this family like atmosphere. So our customers are in our source sometimes two, three, even four times a day. And they create this bond with our associates where they start to know each other’s names, they know their favorite sports team and are talking about the game last night. They start to know each other’s birthdays and things like that. And so this connection’s really important and it allows us to have these really exciting moments and those are what we want to amplify.

Speaker 3:
We have a lot of fun and exciting brand moments. Here’s a few, just to give you an idea of stories that we like to share within the organization. So we’ve had customers get married at our stores because they fell in love over the coffee island, and that’s where they want to tie the knot. We’ve had customers who move away and get a tattoo so they can have a piece of Wawa with them at all the times. We’ve had birthday parties in our stores. We’ve had a customer request a golden coffee cup to put his urns in for when he passes, and we have had troops request coffee when they’re stationed away. And one of my personal favorites, I was there for that center picture in the middle, the guy with his hands up like this. That was when we opened our very first store in Florida.

Speaker 3:
This customer had camped out with a little tent overnight on the sidewalk, so excited to be one of the first customers, and that was just him taking in a moment before he was entering the Wawa for the first time. So it’s a really exciting brand, and those are messages that we want to share with our associates so that they feel invigorated and want to come to work every day, but they’re busy. And this is where I’m guessing a lot of us have the same thing in common. It’s difficult to connect with frontline workers when they’re busy doing their day jobs. I mean, you can see by the numbers here, I won’t read them all for you, but they’re doing a lot and that’s really what we’re about. So we don’t want them to necessarily stop doing the great work that they’re doing, but we also want to make sure that we’re able to connect with them so that they realize it’s more than a job and it could be a Wawa career for them.

Speaker 3:
So our app is called the Hunker. One of the very first things that I worked at when I came to Wawa was our newsletter. And it was a great first for me because it allowed me to collaborate throughout the entire organization. I got to meet a lot of people and put the content together to get it out, and it was the most unfulfilling job that I had because by the time we would put together all that content and it would go out, it felt like it was almost expired and we just weren’t keeping up to date. And so it had always been kind of a personal thing for me to want to be able to figure out how to connect with our associates in a better way more frequently. And fast forward to our journey where we now have the hunker, we kept the same name.

Speaker 3:
We thought it was really important because we were still trying to do the same thing, allow that connection to information just on a more frequent basis. And the hunker, for those of you who aren’t familiar, Wawa has this whole geese thing and we have a lot of geese isms, if you will. So you’ll hear some of that terminology throughout. So that is what our app looks like now, but just because we launched an app doesn’t mean everybody came to it, right? There was a lot of opportunity. We did launch it in correlation with our year end meetings. We were able to get some leadership, they took it back to their teams, and then some downloaded it, some didn’t. Some interacted, some didn’t. And I will say a real turning point for us, as I’m sure it was good or bad for many of you, was Covid.

Speaker 3:
We had no other way to connect to our associates who were home and scared about the safety measures we were taking in our stores. And so we really leaned on our leadership team to say, we do have a way to get to them. They don’t have emails or anything like that. There’s only one computer in the store. So if they weren’t coming in, it was how do we get to them? And we said, well, you could post a video on the honker and our C E O went, nobody looks at that, and my heart broke. And we said, some do. And maybe the trickle down effect will be that if they realize this is the only place that they can get these updates is that maybe more will start to follow. And so that’s real turning point for us. We went from 23,000 to 28,000 users in a month, so that’s a 20% increase in a month, which is pretty significant.

Speaker 3:
And then we said, well, now we got ’em here. And as the Covid message started to trickle down and there wasn’t as many updates, we said, how do we keep ’em here? And then we went to town halls. So our leadership team, a few leaders would get together, provide updates, and an open forum with calls that associates would join. They could ask q and a live. And that was really started to stir something to say, ah, we’ve got people interested. We’ve got them listening. How do we keep them engaged? And so our C E O said, I’m going to continue to do this. And we said, well, there’s no real covid updates left. I don’t know what you’re going to do. And he said, what I heard from some of the associates is they just don’t hear what’s happening. And he said, I go into a boardroom every Monday and the doors are closed and I want to come out of there and I want somebody to put a camera in my face and I want to provide an update as to what’s going on.

Speaker 3:
And so it was really exciting for him because he went from, we’re putting up plexiglass in between you and the customers to here’s a new product launching and here’s an associate at a store that did an amazing thing, and I want to share this on this platform. And so through that, we saw a lot of comments. Yes, we leave our comment field open for those of you that I highly recommend it, but you might get a different answer from the team in front who monitors some of those comments. But we’ve found a lot of transparency associates who are looking for things that we can provide resources on as a result. And sometimes we’re able to nip some things in the bud by having it open. But it also has allowed us a lot of engagement.

Speaker 3:
And as I said, it also allowed a way for us to really connect with our associates. So take these amazing stories of the things that they’re doing and put them on this platform. And we see a lot of engagement. We have something called Day Brighteners. There’s a little video on the side there, and that is taking one of our associates in each region for doing something amazing and really allowing them kind of a way to share that across the board. So we’ve had associates who have done truly amazing things, one who provided lifesaving CPR to a customer, and it just felt like that was a wow moment that we for sure wanted to share. And it did get some traction on the hunker, but then we said, I wonder if there’s a way we can get people involved in the hunker, but also elevate just how much we’re doing and how amazing our associates are.

Speaker 3:
And so Q Goose Jams, goose Jams are regional meetings and we go over our core values, our purpose, but they’re really an experience. They’re connecting our associates together with one another, sitting down breaking bread, kind of in like a family dinner style. And they just really have this moment where they understand the brand a little bit. They are our frontline associates that are invited to this. They are not paid. We usually end up with anywhere from a thousand to 2000 per region. Some drive two minutes. We’ve had associates drive up to three hours and we do provide some bus transportation and things like that. But we do giveaways. We provide them with information that maybe is kind of a seek and find on the internet. And so this allows them a way to provide more information around benefits and other things that matter to them. And then also our entire leadership team attends. So they stand on stage and they shout out those amazing stories that have been on the hunker and in some other platforms, and they take those associates and they bring them on stage and they thank them for how much they have done.

Speaker 3:
Even though I kind of give you an idea, I think it’s always better to have a visual. So I’m going to show you what a goose jam’s like

Speaker 4:
Go.

Speaker 3:
So that gives you a little idea of what a goose jam is like. Those tattoos, those airbrush tattoos, they’re harder to get off than you think. So we take a lot of opportunities to really promote pieces of Goose Jam. Within the app, we do a little video you just saw, we have a couple of different versions and we call that the FOMO factor. So we post that in the app and associates go, that looks really cool. I want to be there. And so then they start to talk about it. They get intrigued, they comment, they tag other associates on it in hopes that they’ll attend with them. We also do registration through the app, so it’ll provide them a way to sign up for the event. We used to do just kind of a piece of paper that was mailed to their stores. So this has provided our team with a lot of organization as well, but it just gives them another reason to log into the app and be able to register that way.

Speaker 3:
And then day of the actual event, we do scavenger hunts. And that’s a great opportunity for associates to not just download the app, but also use the app, post photos, comments, and be able to ask questions. We have a hunger table right there next to our benefits table and things that are there, the marketing samples and all that, so they can stop and connect and ask questions that they might not have otherwise. And then we encourage event photo sharing. They love to take pictures. They love for people to like them. And so if they don’t know how to do it, we encourage them to. And we even got to the point where we started to reward them. You will say one of my takeaways today is I’m never too big for a bribe. As you can tell, you all have something kind of in front of you, I believe bribery.

Speaker 3:
And so by asking them to, giving them some of reward for photo sharing, well, it seems pretty simple. What it does is it gives them ease. They did it once. It was pretty easy. They got the instant gratification of people liking and commenting on it, and so they’re going to do it again. And then we launch a post event survey. We give ’em another reward for that. Of course, it’s called Goosebumps because it’s a geese thing. And that’s our recognition system. And so we get a lot of feedback there, which is really great because we are a listening organization. So we take that feedback and we’ve kind of iterated a little bit differently each time that we do a goose jam because of that feedback. Then we pretend everybody who didn’t come has ignored us at this point, has not cared about the app because they’re like, we still have a 24 hour, seven day a week business to run and somebody’s got to do it.

Speaker 3:
And so they’re back at the stores. And what we did is we launched this thank you award, whether you were attending the meeting, we’re thanking you, whether you were back at the store holding down the fort, we’re going to give you some recognition points. And that announcement comes through the app. So as a broadcast notification, they click that and if they’ve ignored us up until then we’ve got ’em. So what impact does a Goose Jam have overall for us? Some pretty impressive numbers. So the impact we’ve seen is a 22% increase in monthly active users post Goose Jam, a 25% increase in associate submitted posts and 106% increase in associates commenting, which I’ve always questioned the things that are over a hundred, but my Han Care friends have let me know that that’s actually true. And so the overall takeaway I would say is engagement is huge. If you can figure out a way to get associates comfortable inside the app at an in-person way of answering their questions and perhaps bribing them, there’s a lot of benefit there.

Speaker 3:
Okay, so here are my takeaways from today’s presentation. I would say if you have trouble connecting with the frontline, make it about them. If it’s stories about them, if the events are about them, if you are truly celebrating them, they’re going to get interested. It doesn’t mean it has to be the information on every post. You can sprinkle things in between. But if they know that it’s really for them and about them it, they’re going to be interested. And then I would say if you want to see in-app activity, give them a reason to post. Sometimes they’re looking for a starter, a message starter or a reason that they need to. And I think when all else fails, that would go to little bribery goes a long way. If you have an opportunity to do a giveaway or a raffle, it could really increase in app activity as we’ve seen. And so I hope that some of what I’ve shared with this today, you can take back with you and you can start implementing. I’m happy to answer as many questions as you guys have, but before that happens, I’m going to pass it over to my friends at Kohler who are going to do a little presentation themselves. Thank you so much.

Speaker 5:
It’s hard to follow. Hard to follow Goose jams. There’s not going to be as many goose related puns in this one, I apologize. But yeah, thank you everybody for coming. We’re excited to be here. Again, I’m Matt Klitzke and Sammie Roberts. We’re the internal comms team at Kohler company talking about our art of celebration, which revolves around our 150 year anniversary. So first of all, a little bit about us. You likely know us as the toilet and the sink people, right? We’re so much more than that though. We’re really about gracious living at every turn. And what does that mean? Well, there’s a lot more to us again than our toilets and sinks. We just want to tell you a little bit about us. So as I mentioned, this is our hundred 50th anniversary. We’re founded in 1873 in Kohler, Wisconsin, which is about an hour north of Milwaukee.

Speaker 5:
Yes, the town is the same name as the company, little company town, one of the originals. And we span the globe, 40,000 associates across six continents and 50 manufacturing facilities all across the world. And again, it’s about gracious living, really providing products and services, not just for your home, but truly for a lifestyle. And we’re a big believer in making the world a better place. Through our sustainable practices, design and innovation. We really strive to leave the world a better place than we found it. A little bit more about us. Again, we’re way more than you see on urinals and on sinks and on faucets, we encompass more than 55 brands across three different business groups. Kitchen and bath, obviously, that’s our big one. A global leader in design and innovation, kitchen and bath products plus luxury cabinetry, an sax tile, different lighting, vanities, energy, that’s one you might not know.

Speaker 5:
We are a resilience leader. Stability and confidence to everybody, whether it’s businesses, communities, through home energy, backup generators, powering large industrial systems, backing up hospitals, powertrain technologies. We make small engines for lawnmowers, tractors, snowblowers, things like that. Really focusing on clean energy lately. H V o, hydro treated vegetable oil. That’s a big thing now that we’re pushing in our energy division and we do that really well. And the final one is hospitality and real estate. I dunno how many of you’re golf fans, but Whistling Straits is the chorus up in Coen. We recently hosted the 43rd Ryder Cup in 2021, which was an incredible event. We have our five star resorts in Kohler, Wisconsin, the American Club, and then in St. Andrew’s, Scotland as well in the old course we own that. So again, a lot more than just toilets and sinks, and that’s a little bit about who we are as a company.

Speaker 6:
So now when you go to the bathroom during breaks, you’ll be like,

Speaker 5:
I have to say, I’m a little disappointed in some of the bathrooms around here. I’ve noticed I don’t see coal around everything, but it’s all right. We’ll let it go. Just talking about us with Firstup, we began in 2018, so five years. We like to think of ourselves as veterans, if you will. It’s been quite a five years. We’ve got more than 19,000 registered users now across the world, and that encompasses both our networked and non networked associates, a hundred content creators publishing to more than 80 different topics. And in 2022 alone, we’ve published just under 4,400 pieces of content on Kohler now in 2022 and 23. And that’s going to be a whole lot more coming up for the year because again, what we’re really here to talk about is our hundred 50th celebration and the celebration surrounding that.

Speaker 6:
Thanks. So yeah, as Matt said, we’re thrilled to be here today. To give you a behind the scenes look at Kohler’s 150th anniversary campaign beginning of the year in January was the beginning of our year long celebration leading up to our hundred 50th anniversary that is coming in December. So our C E O David Kohler helped launch the event internally to associates with a video message. In addition to many other promotional tactics we had following the internal push, we had a public launch all under the central theme of come all creators. So to give you a look at what this campaign is all about, here’s our hundred 50th anniversary video,

Speaker 7:
54,787 days. All come down to this, how what we create makes you feel. If it doesn’t elevate your experience or enhance your wellbeing, if it doesn’t build your confidence or inspire you with its gracious impact, it’s not worthy of our name for 150 years. Our belief has always been, if it can be imagined, it can be created. And for the next 150, we’ll keep boldly imagining so we can create a world that’s more nurturing, more sustainable, more powerful, more beautiful, a world we are more proud of. We are artists, designers, architects, and epic curators, inventors and curators. We are a community of creators who champion creators. Together. We have the power to shape the world. We want one space, one experience, one active impact at a time. The next 54,787. Tomorrows start today. I still get goosebumps

Speaker 8:
When I see that one.

Speaker 6:
So as you saw in the video, our anniversary theme of Come All Creators is all about celebrating bold ideas. A core piece of this campaign was a video series about individuals who’ve made notable contributions to Kohler and our culture of bold innovation. Our in-house team produced around 35 videos featuring our associates, company leaders of the past and present who all embody this mentality and drive. The videos have been used across a variety of channels, internal and external. We have a dedicated K 150 external website, social media, along with plenty of coverage on our homepage of our internet, which we own as well as Kohler. Now, as you can imagine, the content’s very well received by associates drawing engagement well above our typical average. So to give you an idea of what this looks like, here is one of our top creator videos featuring our late chairman, Herb Kohler

Speaker 9:
Foremost was a bit of a rebel rebelling against the path that had been sort of laid out for me

Speaker 10:
Where there was once a landfill Herb Kohler envisioned championship golf breaking from the boardroom, he forged a new family legacy, transforming a flat vacated strip along Lake Michigan into the rolling dunes of Ireland. It takes guts, drive, and intense persistence to make it more than a dream no one expected. The third generation c e o of a plumbing company to thrust Kohler into the world of golf, much less build destinations worthy of its grandest events. It takes a creator to challenge expectations and manifest dreams. There’s a creator in you come all creators as we transform the next 150 years.

Speaker 6:
So our hundred 50th celebration really touches all corners of the organization, from our associates, design partners to our customers, looking more specifically into design partnerships for our 150th anniversary, our kitchen and bath business unveiled many new collaborations this year, really strengthening that legacy of design leadership. One of the most recent and my personal favorite is a partnership with Shay McGee and her studio firm, studio McGee on a new collection of faucets, accessories, vanities, tile mirrors with our business and sacks that does tiles. So content around partnerships like this has performed really well for us on Kohler now.

Speaker 5:
Yeah, and my personal favorite one of these partnerships is with Polar Explorer Robert Swan, you saw a little bit in that video before, but he has an undaunted expedition as he reached the South Pole on foot, and it was powered completely by Kohler Energy. Our product team, our engineers created custom generators and equipment to power his journey. And as he actually has said in several of our videos, Kohler essentially kept me alive during the trip. So no pressure at all, right? But in the, what’s cool about this is the hundred 50th kind of history is if you see that picture up there, that’s Swan and he’s got his Kohler generator there. And the one that he’s got his arm on is, I don’t know if you’re familiar at all with anything, but back in the twenties, his Admiral Bird traversed to the South Pole as well, had a Kohler generator with him to power his trip. He left it there when the expedition went back, he came back a year later after it’s been out in the Antarctic elements for over a year and it fired right up again. So if that doesn’t speak to the resilience of our product, I don’t know what does. But anyway, an absolutely amazing story, amazing visuals, and really tying everything about the company on the hundred 50th tied back in it did extremely well performed better than about anything that we’ve posted.

Speaker 6:
So we shared with you guys a few business examples around our hundred 50th, but what did this really look like for Kohler Associates? Our associates around the world have really rallied around this major milestone. We promoted a dedicated Kohler’s 150th channel for all things, 150th related events, awards, facility, signage. This is the place for sharing it all throughout the year. It’s been amazing to see our facilities around the globe celebrating the 150th all in their own unique way. And thanks to having the Firstup platform, everyone across the organization was able to see it and engage with it and comment on it, get ideas for their own events. So a core team really developed strong brand guidelines, a robust roadmap for the logos, taglines, all things 150th. But we really saw the excitement and buy-in from teams across the organization, hr, marketing, business resource groups, all on the same page around the world who contributed to all of the 150th content on Kohler now.

Speaker 5:
And the other thing with that is talking about we’re a two person internal comms team, and there’s no way that we could have possibly attended everything around the world. So that’s having that, utilizing that existing network of content creators and business partners and really pushing user generated content.

Speaker 5:
So one of the things that we just wanted to show too, some of our tactics and goals that we had for this throughout the year for Kohler now, and really it went beyond adoption numbers. Obviously that’s always the goal, is trying to get people on, get people excited to be on the platform. But really this was about engagement. It’s about engagement, awareness and sparking creativity. And again, we tried to keep everything under that creator theme as much as possible, really to celebrate and motivate the creator in everybody within Kohler company. And we wanted to make sure, again, Kohler now served as the primary channel really to amplify all this K 150 content across the global corporate owned channels. And some of the tactics that we used, a few things has created a heritage storytelling series. If you look up there, that’s our happy birthday bath that they launched back in the seventies.

Speaker 5:
So we’d tie back into some of the old advertisements, some of the cool old products, cool company facts and features that we put out, and people eat that stuff up when they see it out there. They love to see that history of the company and tying it back to everything, broadcasting corporate content again, like that series you saw before, the Creator video series, really serving as that primary avenue for the associates to see everything that’s out there and all these assets similar. The company had a 150th ambassador program that we started. Basically it’s certain associates throughout the entire company who are kind of tasked throughout the year to share their 150th content and stories from their facilities, from their personal life, from their job, whatever it may be, but just to really get on social media and share the stories all over the place.

Speaker 5:
So again, that was a good way internally for us to take that content to help push it out and share everybody’s stories. And finally, we created an engagement campaign to get associates involved, which I’ll talk about in a little bit. But one thing I just want to say as far as kind of a tip to remember, and Sam mentioned it earlier, is we’ve created that one specific topic and channel for the hundred 50th that everybody can go to get the content and really serve as that central hub. And it’s people who are auto-enrolled in it. So if you are on the system, anybody who signs up anybody new, they’re automatically put onto the channel. So there’s no way that they’re going to miss that great content every time. And then on the backend, similarly, we created an initiative. So for us, it’s a lot easier for us to go back.

Speaker 5:
We’ve got so much 150th content everywhere, so it’s so much easier to go back and when we need to search metrics or pull up some numbers, makes it a lot easier for you to find that. So just keep that in mind with something when you’re doing large scale things like this, it makes things a lot easier. And then again, getting back to this engagement campaign, wanted to talk about a little bit, it was the associate creator’s campaign. So essentially what we did is we asked associates to tell us what makes them a Kohler creator. And that can be anything that could be, do you make products? Are you the person on the line who puts the faucet together in cast iron? Do you create processes? Are you in finance? And do you create some great new process within the department, our hospitality folks, our people in our restaurants and our hotels and golf?

Speaker 5:
Do you create experiences for people? We just want to hear all the stories of what makes people color creators. And we put it out there as a contest to submit your stories however you wanted to. And of course if you’d be eligible to win Kohler 150th branded gear. And we also had some Wisconsin Badger tickets locally to throw out to some of our folks there to boost some engagement, which we certainly did. And besides the administrative audience that we have with Kohler, which is really engaged, we really, really wanted to tap our non-network workers for this because as a lot of, I’m sure that’s the hardest audience to reach for us. And I’m sure for a lot of you it’s hard to reach. So what we did is we had a home mailer sent to about 7,600 of our US non-network associates. That little K 150 is a little decal sticker that could peel off and hoping to see those on water bottles and all over the company here and there, and we’ve got tons of ’em.

Speaker 5:
So to really push that K 150 awareness out there, and just as a side note, this was the first mailer that we did post covid and it’s been two, three years since we’ve actually done a whole mailer. So it’ll be really interesting to see is this just recently finished to really see how it’s performed after that. And then we’ve got a QR code there. So just to make it easy as possible, they got to do is scan it, that takes ’em right to the 150th page so they can be a part of it. Or for a lot of ’em who are not registered, they can get on and they can register right there just to make it as easy as we can for ’em. And I think it’s working. I mean we’ve seen our average adoption of non-network probably anywhere from five to 10%.

Speaker 5:
So it’s a gradual, but for us that’s it’s success to see that double digit growth and adoption and engagement rate within the platform. The submissions for people who submitted, it’s good to see we probably had maybe a three to 5% average above our benchmark. But what’s funny is the campaign promos when we would post, don’t forget the contests or call to actions people, those were huge. I don’t know why, but for whatever reason, those are about 10 to 20% over our traditional benchmarks. And again, another tip that we’ve found just to tell you, and again I’m sure you do it, but it’s always good to be reminded, is gatekeeper your content. Because this is all about user generated content. We don’t put any of this out there. This is all coming from our associates, but making sure that it fits within the framework of what you’re doing.

Speaker 5:
We got, I don’t know how many submissions where it’s like, it’s like a picture of a machine and a guy next to it and it’s like, what is this? Before it goes out, it’s like, help me help you tell the story. What is this? So it’s always good to keep that in mind when you get all this user generated content. And through campaigns like this, it’s just really to gate keep it. And this is just a little bit of a look of an example of some of the stories people had sent in. Again, it ran the gamut from people talking about their departments, what they do individually in their jobs. And then you can see on the bottom globally from around the world how people are celebrating it and really pushing the idea of we’re all creators, this is what we do in our facility and this is what we want to show off to the company.

Speaker 5:
Again, having this platform to do that, no one would be able to see this otherwise. This is a way that everybody around the world can see China, what they’re doing for their events, how they’re celebrating this, taking ideas saying, oh, that’s awesome. We should do something like that. And we’ve seen that. We’ve seen people who have saying, oh my gosh, look at that cool event Italy did. We should do that here. So it’s really letting people tell that story in their own way, telling their stories in their own way. And people like to see what their peers do, right? It’s like anything you’re more interested in, you don’t necessarily want to hear what the CEO or the vice president thinks about the celebration. That’s great, but it’s what is Joe who works on the cast iron line doing to celebrate? How are we going to get inspired by that? So again, we got so many cool images and stories from this, it’s just been incredible and they keep rolling in again throughout this rest of this year. We’ve got a whole lot more coming up for the rest of the year with events, dedication, different things, because the anniversary itself is in December, so it’s this big long rollout. But again, UGC is the key for us for large scale events like this really, really makes a difference.

Speaker 6:
The artist celebration for cold origin didn’t culminate on one single day any one particular event or really one specific place. Honestly, you could really say the venue for our 150th was Kohler now and for the past 270 days, our guests have had the front row seat to a truly once in a lifetime occasion through the Firstup platform, they were able to do this easily. So regardless of the size of your company, where your employees are, the number of people on your internal comms team, this is it. Is it just two? You can definitely create something memorable around a momentous occasion. It’s definitely in reach. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. Ready to

Speaker 11:
Thank you both so much. We’re going to go ahead and have Colleen join Matt and Sammie up on stage. Happy to take questions at this time. If you do have a question, the only thing I ask is that you say your name and which company you’re with, please before we have you ask the question. And I would also like to personally thank you all for bringing some swag. Colleen brought the socks and then Sammie and Matt brought some bags for those who asked questions. And thank you for referencing me earlier, Colleen too. I was the person from Indiana who went crazy when I said yes, Wawa is finally coming to Indiana. So maybe I’ll be in front of the store with my hands up as well. I’ll send you a picture who’s going to be first with a question. There we go. Chris is in the back.

Speaker 12:
Hey guys. Tyler from TE Connectivity video is obviously a big part of both of your campaigns and what you’re doing to engage with employees and celebrate them. Can you talk about your partnership with your brand team, external comms team, other stakeholders in your organization to create those videos? I’m assuming you’re using external video partners to create most of those videos, maybe not all of them. So you can just talk through that and what that looks like at your organizations and then follow up for you. Wawa, can you just talk about the Goosebump campaign or the reward program? And you guys again work with a third party tool to track those points? Yeah,

Speaker 3:
I’ll go first. It’s kind of a mashup for what we do for video. So we do have an internal media services department. We have an internal studio that was again, kind of a result of a post covid world. We realized that we went from a lot of non-video still photo type of posts. And so we do some in-house. We do still work with vendor partners, especially those that are in the field and in the locations that we have stores. Lots of times those videos come back and we end up editing them different ways. Then we also do some quick ones ourself, like with cell phones, we have have a little bit of a mashup of all of those things. The goosebumps is something really fun. Our associates love it. So we have a recognition program and everything feeds into what we call the Goose Pride store, and we partner with a third party halo for that.

Speaker 3:
It’s where associates can go to order their uniforms, they can go there and purchase things. So if they have family members or friends that want things, they can buy things. And Goosebumps is our rewards program. It’s a points-based system. So they get a digital token, they get the opportunity to play that in a digital game, and then they receive points for that and you can get things through their concert tickets or gift card to restaurants and stuff like that. But what we have found that they redeem it the most for is Wawa swag. They’re looking for hoodies, hats. We’ve even had the Halo brand tell us that they’ve never worked with somebody who has been excited to just get the gear with Wawa on it. In fact, they severely underestimated it. And originally they did not put enough in stock and we heard it loud and clear through our app. So we’ve made changes since.

Speaker 6:
Nice. And for Kohler, I can speak on this a little bit. Matt and I, our internal comms team is housed within our corporate function, but that’s within this large advertising agency in-house called The Beacon. So for us, everything’s done in-house and a lot of the examples like the Herb Kohler one, those are all done with paid media on social. So we were able to luckily tap into those. We have a world renowned archives team, so really everyone coming together to leverage everyone’s skills, how can we best show all of this content internally, have people share when they can with some of those videos. So ours was mostly done, but we also, Matt does a ton of your videos with leaders, and so it’s kind of a blend because we’ve seen leader videos just done with an iPhone in the plant. Hey guys, I’m giving an update on the floor that has performed tremendously. So that’s what we really try to push their leader led video content. I dunno if you want to

Speaker 5:
Expand on that a little bit. Yeah, like Sammie said, we’re kind of spoiled in the sense that we are in this massive advertising and creative agency with this 40,000 square foot studio and editors and producers and everything else. So we’ve got a whole lot of world-class content at our fingertips, which again, it’s kind of spoiled. But like Sammie said, at the same time we are a big proponent of get out there and just do ’em. You don’t need to be fancy. Not everything has to be highly produced. Again, I go out with iPhone, we’ll do associate features, we’ll do all kinds of different stories with video usually made doing it. And again, really pushing those leader videos. And we’ve had a lot more engagement with our leaders I feel like in the last year or so. I think with this 150th campaign they’ve been able to get involved, feel like they’re more comfortable getting involved and really speaking to the associates, getting on camera and being a little more transparent and honestly just loosening up a little bit and just having fun and getting out there and putting that message out. And again, it really resonates. That’s what people really, really like to

Speaker 6:
See. And kind of like how you said Colleen, the big events drawing them in, we’ve had we definitely a surge of people submitting whether it was the campaign or just like, Hey, this is what my plan’s doing. People’ve never submitted before. Manufacturing line leaders, things that maybe they don’t have time or whatever, but once they did, oh it was so easy. Then we’re hoping to keep that rolling. So we’ll be able, plenty of stuff to do next year to keep the excitement rolling.

Speaker 3:
Great.

Speaker 11:
Any other questions? I’m going to take one from this side and Chris, we’ll get another one queued up right there.

Speaker 13:
Hey everybody. I’m Will from Nasdaq. We’re a publicly traded company and I realize that your two organizations are private and we are growing through international acquisitions, so we are not just a US company anymore when we were founded. And I’m curious if perhaps this is just for the Kohler team, but how do you keep the balance between domestic content and pulling in content from your global locations to provide that balance? And then I guess for both organizations, could you address how you also drive content and engagement from your leadership outside of the CEO or beyond the CEO, I should say? Thank you.

Speaker 5:
Yeah, I mean I can just start with that. For Kohler, I mean beyond the CEO, we kind have our Beats system for at least both of us kind of cover different parts of the business and it’s just really being in touch. And we have a few embedded communicators within each business as well, just within the business. So again, it comes back to utilizing the other people, getting their leaders involved. I think sometimes the leaders are more comfortable with the people on their own team that they recognize and that they can be a little more comfortable with getting in front of. So I found that’s been a big thing is just kind of leaning on their teams to help and just keep pushing. Honestly, it is just like, look at Brian from Energy. He’s done all these videos, you haven’t done any yet. Wouldn’t you want to do the same thing? Friendly competition? And sometimes it works, but you’d be surprised how often they’ll be like, alright, I’ve milked it, then I’ll get out and do it, or whatever.

Speaker 6:
Yeah, I’d say too, two huge things with New Studio we’ve been really pushing. We don’t offer our own posts that we write, but we really push, come on, you can be the author on this post. We don’t like to do just Kohler now as the author, because like Matt said, people like to see that authentic voice, whoever it may be. And then we also own the global intranet, so that’s huge. We use one of the amplifier micro apps on our global intranet. So people mostly, I’d say the bulk of our users are very heavy desktop admin just because they can see that news. They may not even know they’re clicking into Kohler now, but the global teams, they see that they want to be in the carousel. So we kind of balance try to represent everybody. We also have a weekly newsletter that highlights and all the stories of the week for the news, and that goes out to all associates with emails.

Speaker 5:
Yeah, and just to your other question as far as balancing global and domestic content that’s out there, I mean, we meet editorially as our group and some of the other top people, the topic managers once a week and go through our editorial calendar. And a lot of it honestly for us is kind of self-monitoring. It is just checking, looking at the balance. It’s like, oh, we’ve got Italy just posted four things. It’s like, all right, well then let’s hold off on these other ones maybe till later in the week or next week. And just to, it’s kind of a balancing act, like you said, to find it, but I feel like it’s a pretty good job. We do a pretty good job of it. And again, it comes in spurts. China’s a great example. They’re so engaged and so involved, and they always want to share their content and they do so many good things. But we will look from overnight, we will wake up and I’ll see there’s like nine posts from China and it’s like, whew, okay. But the difference too is as you know with Kohler now and everything, it’s what they want to see. No one’s going to see everything. So it’s like not everybody’s going to see all that content from year, all that content from, it’s more managing it on our global owned, our corporate owned channels that we manage

Speaker 3:
Certainly don’t have the domestic global thing, but I will comment on it because I do think that we have something similar in common is as we’re looking into new markets, something we’re really trying to do is put ourselves in that position of if I’m a new associate and I don’t know what a goosebumps or a goose jam is, what does the experience look like for me for the first time that I come in and start sorting through some of the content? And so that’s the lens that we really have to put on and think through so that they don’t feel like they’re not a part of it when they start to interact with some of it. The other question I’m trying to remember, leaders besides CEOs, how do you get other leaders to post? So our CEO is heavily in the app. If you scrolled it, it’s a lot him.

Speaker 3:
We say we could never do the show Undercover Boss because he’s very well known throughout the organization and we’re just happy to have him interested in it and posting and all that kind of stuff. I will say our other leaders, there’s not as much activity. It’s certainly a focus for the future for us, but the things that they have been involved in and content that they’re drawn to usually have some personal connections. So if they’re part of an E R G or if there’s an event that they’re hosting, making sure to capitalize off of that to get them in.

Speaker 5:
And just one other quick thing. I was thinking with Global, you said you’re starting to add global, so it’s kind of new is that utilize that newness, I think is that find an advocate or two wherever it is in China or whatever, and just get them on board and get them excited and just let it cascade from there. That’s what I’ve found with us is you get those partners who are involved, they want to be involved, and it’s contagious. Once they start doing it, it’ll start to flow and it’ll make your jobs a whole lot easier too.

Speaker 14:
Hi, I’m Emma. I’m from Service Corporation International. So my question is primarily for the Kohler team. I liked how y’all did the specific branding for the 50th a hundred 50th anniversary, and in some of the photos I noticed that at different locations where they’re having physical celebrations, it looked like they had branded material branded decorations. So I was wondering if y’all were sending stuff out or were they creating stuff locally? How did that process work?

Speaker 6:
Yeah, great question. Well, fortunately, no we didn’t. That was all held by our HR teams. We did have our internal associate Toolkit, SharePoint. We are on Microsoft, so SharePoint site, really self-serve. They made it really accessible to get all the logos, to get all the things branded sites to easy get all of the pull-up banners, all of that. Our corporate team created that and then just let sites kind of take it from there. But I felt like there’s such a freedom within a framework which really let people do a lot of unique things. People change their external signage, lots of cool things. It’s just fun to almost see what was happening around the globe. But we didn’t have to manage that. That would’ve been a lot.

Speaker 5:
Yeah, that was the HR team really taking a hold of that one. But again, just it was so cool to see everything that everybody did. Like you said, everybody put their own twist on it for whatever it may be, but all based again, off kind of that template. I mean, it’s the huge style book for it and the deck with everything and fonts and everything else. But at that same time, people were able to take it and make it what they wanted.

Speaker 6:
And we were kind of in the midst of the end of our new studio rollout. And so if you’re on new studio, it was really helpful. We had a dedicated area where we put all the logos and things like that in, so it made it easy trying to make some templates to make it as easy as possible for our content creators on the backend.

Speaker 15:
Hi, Andy. From Marvin Windows and Doors. I’m your state neighbor. Yeah, in Minnesota. Hi. I’m actually, you had mentioned you had an ambassador program and I was just kind of curious how you went about building that program and how you engaged that team and what that group looks like in terms of user generated content.

Speaker 5:
So again, that was kind of an HR creation to start with, and the main goal when it started was social media. That’s what they really tried to push a lot of LinkedIn, things like that. And then for us secondary piggybacking on that, we would get in on their meetings and their newsletters. They’d sent with always that, Hey, put it on Kohler now too. Make sure you get it internally. Don’t just put it out there. Let our internal teams know too. And to be honest with you, people didn’t do it as much as we nearly wanted them to, at least internally. So that’s been kind of a challenge, but they’ve done a pretty good job putting it out social media. But again, it’s getting people to do it, getting people to engage it. Sometimes it’s hard, sometimes it works with different groups and other times for whatever reason it doesn’t.

Speaker 5:
And that one’s just been been okay. But like I said, fortunately, I think for us, I don’t want to say we didn’t need it, that’s not really what I mean, but I think we’ve had so many people that have just ended up being ambassadors and advocates without being asked. There’s so many people from around the world in different places who have just kind of taken that tact. They’re always sending us stories or helping post stuff or getting stories. So that’s really where that went. It’s a good to do though. I mean, if you’re ever looking at something like that, I think that is a good ideas to get that dedicated group willing to do that. So little hit or miss. But again, as it turns out, we just ended up kind of organically having people jump on and doing it without being asked kind of thing.

Speaker 11:
Next question is coming from that side and then middle section. I am coming for you right now. Hi there. I’m Abby Davis with Edward Jones, and we actually just celebrated our centennial last year, so I really appreciated. I would’ve loved to have seen that presentation two years ago, honestly, it would’ve been really helpful. We are also sort of grappling with how to keep the energy and excitement up throughout, and I think you all gave really good examples of things to do to celebrate and keep the momentum going. I’m just curious, what are some things that you’re considering for the future and how do you get some of the regions and areas who maybe didn’t participate as much? How do you get them excited? I assume you have sections of the country who are more, like you said, China is doing a lot. Are there groups that aren’t doing as much? How do you engage them?

Speaker 3:
You want me to go first? Sure. Okay. I think what we’ve found that’s really important is also defining success really early because the events team and internal communications teams sometimes looks at it a little bit different from those who are the speakers at the event or the attendees of the event. So really making sure that we take all feedback into account moving forward. And then the goal is to really just not let it die. So how do we keep doing it? How do we grow it on a larger scale as we continue to grow? And that’s just continuous conversations and making sure that we’re listening to our associates and providing them what they’re really looking for.

Speaker 6:
Yeah, I think for us, I’m just thinking of the girl thing for how to keep the engagement. It’s always hard when you have such a momentous year to be like, okay, well what’s coming up for next year? But we have a lot of a table coffee book, a lot of books and things that aren’t going to be sellable, that we’re going to take those stories and use ’em all into next year. So we’re lucky that way that we’ll have continued storytelling. I think having that wealth of examples, maybe inspiring some groups. Hey, it’s hard. I think as a two person team, I’m sure you guys have limited resources. In small teams, you can only do so much. And we have now over 80 different topics. So also managing all of those people. But we do quarterly bases with those people. So we like to try to hop on all those leads. So the topic lead for that channel hops on and gets inspired that way. So maybe post event, hopefully we can get some more of those stories and show ’em best practices for sharing for next year.

Speaker 16:
Hi, my name’s Lindsay. I’m from Lehigh University in the Lehigh Valley, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. My question is for you all and then anybody else in the room who is doing event-based stuff. So it sounds like with Kohler, your one 50th was a year long celebration and then the goose jams is time bound, I guess. So I’m thinking as a university, we have giving days on campus, so having, do you launch event-based topics? Is that something we just piloted last month? So we’re very new where you launched something for a set time and then sunset it pretty quickly. Is that a thing and have you all done that and then not done it because it didn’t really work? Or is it an ongoing thing of just user generated content no matter what the time of year? So how do you all do events in Firstup and do you use topics in that way is my question.

Speaker 3:
We balance ours a little bit. So a good example of that would be Goose Jams are really targeted by region. So that region seeing everything when it happens, maybe we will filter some of the photos again to give that FOMO factor kind of throughout, but it’s really them that are seeing it and then afterwards kind of sunset until the next one. But then when we have something like we’re celebrating our 60th anniversary in April, and that will be across everyone, so everybody will see that that’s a little bit more of something timeless that would last a lot longer. It really depends on what the level of the celebration is. We don’t usually sunset much. We love to be able to go back and scroll and see at some point. Maybe we’ll get better about that in the future, but for now, that’s what we’re doing. We’d really just try to make sure that regionally we’re targeting and only taking out what there is to really share across in order to give people inspiration for their,

Speaker 6:
Yeah, and I will say at Kohler, one of our big principles is we try not to auto subscribe people into channels. We’ll do global news the hundred 50th because those are massive. We want people to pay attention. But a huge value for us when we got brought on to this is our first endeavor ever into any global communication portal. So prior to five years ago, no manufacturing associate had, they don’t have the internet, they didn’t have anything. So we really felt for associates, the most gracious experience would be to let them opt into channels. They decide what they want to follow, if they want to follow their fellow plant in Texas or whatever, that’s up to them. So we don’t necessarily do pop-up event channels, we just try to always recommend go where your top key audience are. And most of ours are either each plant has a channel or we’ve got a legacy corporate headquarters newsletter. That one’s really popular. So we events more that way. And then hitting across all of our channels between intranet and we’re huge teams users. So really interested in how the integration’s going to evolve too with teams.

Speaker 5:
And like Colleen said, as far as sun setting goes, we barely, rarely take stuff down. Just kind of in that same sense, if you need something, you can look back, you can find it every now and then we will. If it’s something real niche or specific, we might set an archive date or whatnot. But generally we just leave it open out there.

Speaker 6:
And studio, if you’re on the new version, we really love the linking to external links as well. So that’s been one of the top asks from our topic managers, how can we link to external as well as your articles. So that could be a good purpose too for migrating to new studio.

Speaker 11:
We have time for one last question. So after that, I do know that our wonderful presenters are fantastic resources, so make sure to connect with them either at lunch or right after the session. Of course is we’re going to have the breakout session 30 minutes afterwards. But right now we’ll go to that final question.

Speaker 14:
Hi, my name is Bailey. I’m with primoris. My question is more about content related. You spoke about an editorial calendar. Can you speak on that a little bit and how you manage your social agendas and your events versus what HR and safety are pushing your way?

Speaker 6:
Yeah, say you all know that every department comes to you and it says, I have five things. I got to get out to associates this day and everything is their top priority. And we’re like, I don’t really care about that.

Speaker 6:
So I think that’s why it’s always refreshing to be at these things. You’re like, these are my people. They understand. But yeah, the editorial board, it’s representative. We’ve got quite a few embedded communicators throughout the last couple of years, so they all attend. One person represents it, one person represents each of our business units. So we really look and we really try not to over pack associates, we maintain gatekeeping on all emails that go to mass distribution lists just so all of a sudden it’s like, wait, why have I gotten a promotion for chocolates and all this stuff all at once? So we have really strict rules around how we’re reaching our associates that way. But yeah, it is a weekly meeting. If you guys do similar formats, things change the day of it’s fluid, but it’s a model that’s worked for, I mean, quite a long time

Speaker 5:
For us. And it’s modeled. It’s listed by all our main business channels are that Global news channel hundred 50th, and it’s putting ’em into the categories, what day they’re going to go, are we going to feature ’em? Are we going to put ’em on our carousel? Different things like that. And then I think similar to, I think you’re asking, we work with our main corporate group in their calendar for the larger corporate initiatives that are going on. So we know what’s happening. This is going out this date, this is going out this date. If it’s something that we want to promote. And again, there’s never a shortage of content. People are constantly coming to us with asks and Can you do this? Can you help me with this? I want this. But yeah, I mean, I would recommend having just that editorial calendar just to organize it, keep it however it works for you. But like I said, that’s really worked well for our team to keep everything organized and it’s open to everybody. It’s not just us managing it. If our content creators want to go in and, oh, I got to change this, or Can I move this, or I want to do this channel, they have the ability to go in and do it as well. We kind of manage it, but any of the team can get in there and kind of work it as well.

Speaker 3:
We do not have the editorial calendar solution, so for anybody that does, please find me afterwards. I’m ready to buy a subscription to whatever works best. But I think one of the things we’ve been trying to do and the team’s been doing a really good job of is providing transparency to what else is happening in the business. We realize that everybody thinks their content’s the most important stuff. So if we can give them a little bit of here’s what’s happening the same time as you’re doing this and realize how their message might be minimalizing as a result of that, it gives us a little bit more buy-in for them to come to us sooner than just dropping the content and going in the future. But it’s a lot of lake learning for sure. And seriously, editorial calendars recommendations, come and find me.

Speaker 5:
We just use Excel. It’s nothing fancy.

Speaker 3:
That’s why hear from everybody. Yeah.

Speaker 11:
Great. Well, thank you all so much for joining us today. Thank you. Really, really appreciate it. Thank you for your expertise with events. Thank you to everyone who flocked to this session. Really appreciate

Speaker 5:
It. Thanks everyone.

Speaker 11:
If you sat in a spot and the Wawa swag is taken, make sure you grab a pair of socks before you head out too. Thank you so much. Looking forward to the other sessions today.