Camp Praytell 2020: How to Design a Meaningful Virtual Company Event

Our annual retreat Camp Praytell has become somewhat of a spring break for the Praytell crew. Starting six years ago at a retreat into the Catskills to get offline and hang out, growing from 20 people to 50 to 150 with our Camps following suit—from a tiny house to a lodge to last year’s full resort with a bouncy castle party...always with the intention of celebrating our team of people. (And hardcore hanging out together in the woods for a few days.)

Cut to 2020. We had to pivot. And we went online to build out a two-hour experience that wouldn’t suck AND hopefully allow folks across our agency in 150 different places to feel celebrated, seen, and most importantly, that we are all there for each other. Here are things we learned.

#1 -- Plan, Rehearse, Improv

Virtual events can be a prime example of thinking maybe we don’t need to plan as much, since it’s just a digital link. WRONG. Digital events are even more crucial to plan out since keeping a pace and a vibe the whole time is way more important than a live event (which has the added buffer of venue / food / other distractions). There are no distractions built into a virtual event so we have to make sure each moment is fully planned out, rehearsed, AND matches the goals.

Key Takeaways

• Have fun with the theme. Yes, you need one. This is your flag and your spine line. Ours was CAMP ALT DELETE (aka laugh, cry and f**k it). Build a mood board to help lock in an overall cinematic tone. Creating a world helps an online event avoid feeling super sterile.
• Plan out the flow, make sure it’s paced without gaps. Take advantage of multimedia add-ons like videos or polls and time them to surprise/delight/refresh. Make sure to rehearse the run of show with colleagues to test out the tech, timing, and vibes!
• Build it for the end result. Events should always have a goal, something you want the audience to take away, and that is the core element to keep in mind while building your virtual event. Our goal was celebration and unity, which was engraved into every moment.

Best part about having a great plan is we get to throw it out if something way more interesting happens, which is that special event magic we can’t plan for. But the improv magic can’t happen without a plan to spur it on. So plan. AND RECORD IT. (Sounds simple, but so easy to forget if you don’t include it in your plan!)

#2 -- Engagement = Surprises

Surprising people in an online event seems like a joke right? Well, there are still lots of opportunities to bring a sense of thrill and spontaneity to online events. And most of these opps come from knowing your audience. Who are they and what do they need? We also realized that through these different levels of engagement, we could build in more surprises that live before / after the event and in our multimedia elements so that folks could be invested.

Key Takeaways

• Have a surprise for all personalities. That means maybe a musical performance by everyone’s favorite underground band (Black Pumas!). But maybe half your folks dig that and the other half are more interested in a timely healthcare speaker like the one we hosted to speak on the new vaccine (comms person from Pfizer). All of these are quick (15 minutes), surprising, and directly engage the audience.
• Engage early to build excitement. We asked our team to submit four random clips from their phone that felt like they represented 2020 and we turned all those clips into a Best/Worst 2020 video. Make things specific, bring folks into the mix so they have buy-in, and do a little something for each kind of teammate.
• Allow for lots of types of involvement. That means, give folks the option to do more or less. We not only had Google chats (we did our event in Google Meet) going during camp, we incorporated Google Polls with Q&A sourced from an all-office google form for personalized games. We also had a Happy Hour Google Meet before Camp Praytell started where a teammate taught us how to make cocktails. After the main programming, we invited everyone to the “afterparty” at Kumospace, a free online virtual bar for mingling, and some teammates even started up their own Google Meet hang post-camp to debrief! Another option we provided—they can skip all of it.
  
  Engagement is a tricky element because you don’t want to create more work. But making everything optional and nothing mandatory creates a free-feeling, easy vibe that makes for genuine engagement and through that some, hopefully, genuine surprises.

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#3 -- Meaningful Gifts Only

We still love gifts. Even though our world is hopefully becoming less materialistic, a well-curated gift will never be turned away. AND come to find out, a gift can actually extend the life of the virtual party!

Key Takeaways

• From the beginning when we were taking everyone’s addresses to ship the gift to the gift’s arrival, the elements of joy and excitement extend beyond the actual event.
• Nothing frivolous, make sure to think through each element involved and ask if it is really needed. Ideally, each part of the gift tells its own little story.
• Follow the event theme and make sure the gift is culturally relevant. Our goal was to send a gift that was comforting and functional and thanks to our solid camp theme and goal setting, we picked out a box of curated items that checked those boxes.
  
• We worked with Family Industries for our curated gift box this year. They are beyond stellar with a super high quality product and can work within a budget.

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AND BEFORE YOU GO…

One more final thought, we can call it a tip, but it is more of an encouragement—keep the virtual events informal.

For an internal culture event, no one needs a rigidly controlled environment with mute buttons and limited chat rooms. Keep it a shaggy dog vibe. And remember that the first impression is everything, make sure to set the tone of easy-breezy from the beginning.

A fun tone is hard to manufacture but easy to hold onto. Minimize stress through planning, surprises of joy, and engagement. Do all this and maybe even you (the planner!) can have a good time too.

Questions? Drop us a line at Hello@praytellagency.com

Christine Hauer is Praytell’s events lead. As one of the founding members of the Praytell team, Christine’s done it all including client facing roles in account management to running the office operations as Culture Champion. She brings 10,000+ hours of event execution, vibe setting, and experience creation and a love of people and planning to bring multi-media events to life IRL and on screens across the country.

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