From donating to charities to throwing a big staff event, here are 3 ways your intranet can help your organization make the “nice” list this holiday season while supporting your holiday initiatives.
It’s a wonderful time of the year to look back, give back and celebrate as a company. There are many ways you can support these efforts using your intranet. Here’s a “nice” list of things to do, and how your intranet can support holiday initiatives.
1. Charitable Donations and Volunteerism
Lots of businesses make physical or monetary donations at the end of the year for a variety of excellent reasons. Engage your staff to take part by conducting a Quick Poll on your home page allowing them to vote for the charities you’ve selected. At IC, we love to support our local community. Each year during the holidays, we team up with the Family Services of the North Shore, to provide gifts for those who need a little help over the holidays, and help decorate the gym where they give out the gifts.
We publish ages and gift requests using Company News and build an Online Form to track commitments by staff for items they’ll contribute. For a number of years now, we’ve done this and volunteered to help decorate the hamper collection location for the Christmas Bureau of the North Shore. With volunteer events, you can actually create an Online Training Calendar application and rename it. The ability to create an event, provide in-depth details and track registration allows you to use this year-round for any community events you participate in.
2. Prize Draws or Contests
Gifts are often received for client appreciation from vendors, such as baskets or hampers, and some have policies where these cannot be accepted. The intranet is great source to raffle these off. As part of your holiday initiatives, you could have staff enter into a random draw using a custom built application. Did you know the Application Feed can show random items?
In addition, if you’d like to tie it back to charity, you could create a task list, using Task Manager, of funny things for staff to do to stay in the draw. In previous years, we had a wine and food basket and pulled names each day to remove from the draw. Staff could donate $5 towards our hamper, or complete a task to stay in (eg. Bring in a baked treat for the office, an ornament for our tree, or buy a special coffee for someone).
3. Staff Holiday Events
Throwing a big staff event is goes hand-in-hand with any holiday initiatives. Whether you’re doing a large dinner and event, or a simple lunch in the office, you can communicate details online and help with the logistics using Event Sites. Need to know about dietary restrictions or have staff make food choices? You can use a simple Online Form for this. One fun idea, and a nice way to create nostalgia, pull all the photos published on your intranet throughout the year and create a slideshow. If you haven’t been sharing photos to your Online Photo Album, maybe this a New Years resolution for 2019! You can start with your holiday event.
Embrace the Yuletide Cheer
These are but a few holiday initiatives organizations can do to connect with their staff and community throughout the holidays. This season brings so much excitement, energy and joy, why not take advantage. I’d love to hear your thoughts or creative practices your company has adopted, share how your intranet has support your holiday initiatives below. If you’d like help to implement any of these, send an email and we’d be thrilled to help! Or request a live demo of our intranet software with one of our product specialists. Happy holidays!
