Employee Engagement success tips

Here comes the juicy bit. What do our most successful programmes have in common? Relevance, friendly competition and community spirit.

1. Relevance

Plan and customise the finer details of your campaign to make it as relevant as possible to your organisation. This will help people connect, engage, and then pledge. Three for the price of one!

In their 2017 campaign, innocent drinks asked us to create a banana-based bespoke impact stat for them. They ended up smashing it 🍌saving 250,000 bananas worth of carbon (20,000 kg CO2).

Set a relevant target: so here's the truth; we see poor engagement when pledgers see targets as arbitrary and struggle to make a meaningful connection with the bigger picture. Set campaign targets that strongly align with your organisation's strategies. Then communicate the link consistently and persistently.

Read our guide to setting relevant targets >

Customise your Priority Do Actions: we’ve got over 60 actions, we call them Do Actions. From using a reusable coffee cup to avoiding unsustainable palm oil, there's something for everyone. Prioritise five that support your goals and values.

Read our guide to choosing Priority Do Actions >

2. Competition

Use incentives: we don’t want to over-egg the prizes (people should be motivated to take action for the impact alone), offering some small prizes and rewards is a great way to reward people that make extra effort and to build a buzz around the programme. Focusing on team prizes is good as it encourages people to get their colleagues on board, building a culture of collaboration.

Use leaderboards to fuel competition: every successful Do Nation programme has friendly competition driving it. Our leaderboards feature fuels the competitive spirit and spurs even the most reluctant pledgers to take action when they see their team at the bottom of the board.

Read our guide to creating leaderboards

Commentate on the race: share the leaderboard in weekly updates and ask front runners to share pledge anecdotes and stories in team meetings.

Recognise input: people love recognition for effort, so encourage personal, public thank yous from senior people throughout the programme.

3. Community

Think creatively about internal comms: how can you best spark and maintain conversations about sustainable living throughout the course of your programme?

At power company SSE, they created an open yammer page for people to swap eco tips on how to achieve pledges 💬 It became SSE's most visited yammer page. Impressive.

Create a space for people: slack, teams, yammer, etc allow people to share tips and ask questions. Keep it open and accessible so everyone in your organisation can benefit.

Create a community legacy: your programme could have the lasting legacy of creating a peer-led community of climate- and carbon-saving behaviour changers. And you'll know who to go to next time you need enthusiasts!

Use team campaign pages as a hub: send people to their team page frequently. They'll see all new pledges coming in and can see the impact they are having together. Customise the copy and image at the top of the pages to make them relevant and motivating.

Read our guide to engaging the right people to support your campaign, and help keep the community spirit alive.