Stonewater colleague day.
Every year, Stonewater holds its Great Big Get Together (GBGT), which is a virtual and in-person event for colleagues.
Role: Strategic & Creative Direction across all mediums
Background
GBGT rewards, educates and inspires colleagues to achieve our Vision: For everyone to have an opportunity to have a place they can call home. The themes of the video content were Celebration, and the video content we created sat alongside key presentations on the day. The content was designed to tell the story of what Stonewater has been doing across the UK over the last year.
GBGT 2023 was a celebration of our work across vulnerable communities in the UK, as well as the official announcement of the new website. The day consisted of several sessions to address these core themes. The video content created needed to fit the brief given for each presentation as well as blend together in look, feel and overall narrative. For some time now, Stonewater has embraced a hybrid-working model for their widely spread colleagues across the UK.
As the fourth virtual event since the Covid-19 pandemic, the Great Big Get Together was built around the power of targeting ‘togetherness’ – better connections between colleagues, and with customers, too – but it also had to inspire, and to be innovative and engaging. It was vital that colleagues walked away from the event with a renewed sense of purpose, hope and optimism with regards to the work they do for Stonewater customers every day.
Outcomes.
The video content for each presentation was positively received by colleagues, leaving a longlasting impression, as per the objective. GBGT 2023 had a highly positive impact on our colleagues, with 90% of our circa 900-strong team registering for the event and 100% attendance on the day.
The sessions garnered a lot of engagement from colleagues, with 398 users posting 2,994 messages during the event.
After GBGT 2023, Stonewater we sent an unincentivized survey to attendees to get their feedback; 96% of respondents felt better informed about Stonewater’s direction of travel, 91% were very happy with the quality of the content and storytelling, and the event was rated 4.7/5. 250 colleagues since the event have come back to view the video content on our Hub, showing its impact.
I am Stonewater
‘I Am Stonewater’ was an emotive, hard-hitting, 3-minute hero video that highlighted Stonewater’s success in building a diverse and inclusive workforce.
Fun, memorable and intensely honest, ‘I Am Stonewater’ energised the ‘Great Big Get Together’ day for more than 800 employees, truly confirming the employer’s commitment to delivering on a realistic inclusivity strategy. The introductory hero content aimed to authentically showcase the organisation’s commitment to “bring your whole self to work.”
Upon analysing the client’s brief, we discovered that Stonewater was already making significant strides in its inclusivity and diversity efforts. Notably, in the Best Companies survey, Stonewater received the highest score for the EDI (Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion) question: “I don’t feel discriminated against at work.” Over 80% of colleagues felt that their individual qualities were recognised and valued.
Recognising this existing commitment, we designed a film to inspire employees to take individual actions that could make a difference for themselves, the business, and the organisation’s customers. The film aimed for holistic authenticity, demonstrating how each person could actively contribute to inclusion. We chose a fly-on-the-wall style for the footage, capturing candid moments.
Our intention was to showcase a wide range of honest and open responses, reflecting the diverse mix of people working at Stonewater—individuals who were unapologetically themselves. The resulting film powerfully conveyed the breadth of the workforce and underscored Stonewater’s unwavering commitment to diversity and inclusion.
Impact
92% of all Stonewater colleagues attended the Great Big Get Together. And 92% of those employees agreed, they felt better informed about their employer’s direction of travel, 2,405 individual comments went into the event’s chat facility across the day – excellent engagement at all levels – and the feedback from colleagues focused on the authenticity of ‘I Am Stonewater’.
Website Launch
Stonewater have undertaken a huge digital transformation, bringing all the HA’s systems together to modernise and streamline communications and services to customers. Alongside MyHome (where customers manage support, repairs, updates etc) the website was reimagined in its entirety, focusing on a better user journey, streamlining of content, accessibility, and device optimisation.
How we assisted:
Stonewater asked us to craft the overarching campaign which needed to focus on demonstrating that customers were at the heart of this digital transformation. It also aimed to excite and energise the Stonewater team by tying back to the company values and highlighting that Stonewater embraced change and innovation while putting the needs of their customers first.
This was all about making things better as well as easier, and that meant simplicity was key.
The communications campaign around our new website had the running theme of “The Power of Easy” to demonstrate how we’re making everything simpler and more inclusive across our digital platforms. We created an engaging animation to introduce the journey of creating the new website, through the clever use of fun avatars of the website project team.
By combining real world footage with animated avatars and fun animated elements, we were able to talk about a somewhat dry subject in a fun, accessible and engaging way – showcasing the work that had been done.
The second half of the video featured an event-by-event timeline of the three-year journey of building our new website and the major milestones we achieved along the way. To make it relatable (as well as funny), we interspersed the website events with real world events that were happening at the same time and edited the final piece to an upbeat, soundtrack.
