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Christmas is the perfect opportunity to inspire positivity and boost employee engagement using your employee app. Here are our top tips on how to use your app to create some fun for your employees and spread the festive joy!
Create an App Advent Calendar (Appvent Calendar!)
An app advent calendar is a great way of reminding your employees of all of the great things that have happened within the business over the past year, including calling out some of their own achievements! Simply start by creating a new List in your app, then create each day of Advent as separate pages within your list. Then only post content into each day’s page (and send out a push notification) when each day arrives. This way, employees only ‘open each door’ on the appropriate day!
On each day of Advent, you can post about something positive that happened in the last year, such as ways that an employee has gone above beyond for a colleague or customer.. When employees open the Advent Calendar section of the app, they can look for that day’s door (like a traditional Advent calendar), or you can send out a push notification each day to let them know that the post for that day has been published!
If you like the Calendar featured images for each day in the example above, and you’d like to use them for your own Appvent Calendar, send an email to our Support Team and they will upload all 24 images into your media library!
Have a Christmas Competition in Your App
Our Acknowledgements feature allows for employees to enter simple competitions, but seeing as it’s Christmas, why not make a little bit more of it? Here’s a great idea for a Christmas App Competition:
Find the Santa! The idea here is that you’ll continue to publish your app content as normal, and you can even combine this with the content in the Advent Calendar, if you’re creating one of those. From now until Christmas, once a week, you hide a Santa in one of your images in the news section of your app. You can use the Santa below if you’d like – it’s really simple just to add the Santa in the corner of one of your images using any basic program – even MS Paint will do the job!
At the start of each week, you remind everyone in the app to look for the Santa, and if they spot it, they simply need to comment on that page and they’ll be entered into that week’s competition draw for whatever prizes you can source. Things like Christmas Hampers and even Amazon vouchers tend to go down well at this time of year!
Have a Virtual Christmas Jumper Day with User Generated Content
Whether or not your employees are all working together again in an office or there is a hybrid mix of office-based and working-from-home staff, you can still use your app to have a Christmas Jumper Day. It’s as simple as creating a new List in your app, enabling user publishing, and encouraging everyone to post their crazy Christmas Jumpers!
User Generated Content is great way to make your app more interactive, and we’ve recently posted a new CMS Learning Track to show some fantastic and useful use-cases for UGC. If you haven’t encouraged much User Generated Content in the past, having a Christmas-themed section of your app for your employees to post to, is a fun and low-risk way of dipping your toes in the water, with a view to making more use of UGC in future.
You can find a full walkthrough for adding a UGC list to your app here, and in the new UGC Learning Track on your CMS Home screen. You can even enable post moderation, so that every picture needs to be approved before appearing in the app if you prefer.
We hope that these three ideas – The App Advent Calendar, Spot the Santa Competition, and Christmas-themed User Generated Content - spark some inspiration to add some festive cheer to your employee app! As an added bonus, check out how Derry Group Ireland used their Thrive employee app to create some festive cheer and show their appreciation for their team at the same time. If you need any help with bringing these ideas to life in your app, please reach out to our Support Team, who will be more than happy to assist!
From everyone at Thrive.App, have a happy Christmas and a great new year ahead!
