An international provider of financial services and investment resources for individuals and institutions sought our expertise for an internal innovation challenge. Understanding that some of the most creative ideas and solutions often remain hidden in the minds of its 39,000 employees, the company partnered with us to build a system to tap into those ideas. We worked with the C-Level team to create an online system that would educate and motivate employees to become innovative thinkers and allow them to submit their ideas. Winning entries received over 1 million dollars in awards.
We held stakeholder interviews to indentify and prioritize the goals and metrics for the new site. The main goal of the site was to generate 1,000 ideas from employees in the first year. Affinity diagramming sessions were held with general employees to brainstorm content ideas and content organization. Our visual designers worked with the client's internal brand managers to develop and build a site that still fell within the brand guidelines, but departed enough from the rules so that the site would be visually appealing and provide infotainment to users through the use of character animation, voice over and video.
The focus of the site was to allow for our animated frog to inform visitors about innovation resources and drive them to submit innovative ideas via the website so they could be delivered to the C-level team. The site launched with minimal outside marketing collateral due to budget constraints. However, employee visitation to the site was astonishing. Within the first month the site received over 1,000 innovative ideas – a conversion goal that was set to 12 months. The number of ideas being generated so exceeded expectations, that the Innovation Challenge management team was overwhelmed, and the site had to be taken down early.
Aside from providing a vast amount of resources on the topic of innovation, they leveraged an animated mascot in the marquee area of the website to speak to users and drive them to the big orange ‘submit an idea’ button on the homepage. (please note that closed captioning was provided for hearing impaired site visitors).
The goal was to receive 90 ideas in the first month, over 3,000 ideas were submitted in the first 2 months.