Inside the Event: Issue #10
✨ Timely ideas, vendor recs, and little moments of magic in employee experience ✨
🌸 Spring Has Sprung!
And just like that Q1 is over. Get all your vendors paid?! 😅 San Francisco has been unseasonably warm and beautiful. We’ve been able to eat on the roof at work, I’ve been gardening (basically just loading up bags with leaves and weeds), and enjoying lots of walks and outdoor workouts.
Let’s jump into what’s ahead this spring!
🌷 There Is a Lot Going On in April!
🌎 Earth Month offers lots of ideas for happy hours and activations around the office.
♻️ Recycling & Composting Refresh – Use Earth Month as an opportunity to re-educate employees on composting and recycling practices at work.
🥕 Farmer’s Market-Style Happy Hour – One of my all-time favorite events was when Twelve Top Catering hosted a spring-forward farmer’s market happy hour. They brought tons of fresh veggies for employees to take home. The best part? No waste— the goal was for everything to go! 🌽🍅🥒
🐝 Honey Tasting with Carmel Honey Company – In the past we brought in Jake from Carmel Honey Company for an in-person and virtual class. 🍯 I learned SO much about bees, honey production, and the company’s incredible backstory (he started it as a middle school project!). Highly recommend him for an Earth Month event.
🌱 Confetti has a ton of virtual events including Compost Basics, Plant Care and Zero Waste 101, Earth Day Trivia, Terrarium Workshop, and more!
💛 Bring Your Kids to Work Day
BYKTWD is always the last Thursday in April and every year it gives me so much empathy for parents! I’m filled with joy but also drained by the end of these energy-filled days.
🎨 Craft: This year we are working with Forager Crafts to do both an in-person and virtual craft, decorating coin pouches (and shipping out kits to remote parents!). We’re also bringing in balloon animals to our offices, which was a huge hit last year.
🌭 Food: Kid-friendly breakfast and lunch, which is typically the adults’ favorite day of food as well. We bring in a coffee cart with hot chocolate and have a hot chocolate bar.
💰 Work Connection: We are bringing in a designer to host a session. Our Social Impact team is joining the fun and the kiddos are able to drop their coins into a few containers deciding what they want to donate (like a shirt or backpack). And our coin pouches connect to financial progress for the audience!
😄 Vendor Highlight: Two Dudes Photo
I don’t think I’ve highlighted them yet but wow they take the BEST photos! They even made me look great after 3 hours of sleep on IPO day. My new LinkedIn photo is from our latest experience with them! They do an antibooth and a partybooth and just not your typical photo booths. We brought them in for our ERG Summit and had the first 2 hours be for a classic photo booth and then the last 2 hours for headshots for our ERG leads. Folks ended up using the classic photo booth time for headshots, which reminded me that employees love a headshot moment! 📸
🎉 In Other News…
I’ve been on a memoir kick and finished Strangers by Belle Burden and Jessica Simpson’s Open Book and now onto Dave Grohl’s The Storyteller.
We’re getting into the Glean agent world and it’s fun! It’s a little scary to have all of the AI tools connected to Slack and every single thing you do but it’s all pretty efficient and there are lots of oohhs and ahhhs and aha moments.
We have some fun surprise and delight swag moments coming up. My latest realization is not everyone needs everything. Get 200 items of this and 200 of that. Do a raffle. Things can sell out. There are moments to give the entire company something and there are moments for hype and excitement. I’m most excited about doing swag drops (since swag is employees’ currency) and similar to how Canary Marketing does a swag drop or like a sneaker drop—exclusive, limited, exciting.
✨ My Personal Surprise and Delight
I’m in the Waymo freeway test group and I love Waymo so when I needed to get home from dinner the other night I thought sure let’s just go for it. Waymo at 65 MPH at night is a little different than stop and go 25 MPH in the city 😂 so this is more of a surprise... a little terrified... then delighted!
The surprise I’m really waiting for is the duckling sightings at Stow Lake!! My favorite day of the year. Hopefully photos to share soon.
✨ That’s it for this month’s Inside the Event! Stay tuned for more ideas, vendors, and inspiration in next month’s edition. Until then—surprise, delight, and take care. 💫