Hacky New Year Comms Strategy

2021 marked AppDynamics’ 4th annual hackathon, Hacky New Year. For the first time, our team had to design a large-scale, all-virtual Hackathon event while many employees were feeling plagued by uncertainty, exhausted from a new work-life dynamic, and emotionally fatigued from a snowball of turbulent events. Our solution was to create a virtual experience built on these core themes: more seats at the table, resilience, and empowerment. In order to create an energizing and immersive experience for 338 employees, I needed to develop a communications approach that embedded those themes into every corner of HNY2021.

Strategy

Objective: Elevate virtual attendees’ experience before, during, and after the event with an atmospheric communications approach that is energizing, thoughtful, and on-brand.

Contribution: I developed a comprehensive roadmap for our multi-channel communications approach. The comms timeline was structured on an experiential arc that provided a consistent drumbeat of engaging content. As the owner of these deliverables, I drove projects forward by sourcing the necessary talent to support design efforts, creating briefs with clear creative direction and scope, motivating teammates to meet deadlines, and providing quality/brand control before shipping deliverables.

Creative Direction

Objective: Create a collection of assets and social events with a cohesive look and feel that imbue the themes of more seats at the table, resilience, and empowerment. These assets included graphics, animations, videos, emails, social events, and daily updates to promote the event, inform attendees of important information/updates, and reverberate a mood.

Contribution: I worked closely with fellow designers and video-editors to create engaging design/video/animation assets, while owning creative direction and messaging.

Impact Assessment

Objective: To wrap up the HNY event, I developed a succinct case study that investigates HNY history, goals, research, and impact assessment to help the Innovation team improve future hackathons.

Contribution: Working closely with designers and research designers, I provided creative direction and feedback while also being responsible for content and copywriting.