LeasePlan is an international company with over 6000 employees from the Netherlands. They operate in two large and growing markets: Car-as-a-Service for new cars, through their LeasePlan business, and the high-quality 3-4 year old used car market, through their CarNext business. As a global company with thousands of employees, internal communications and maintaining work morale can seem like a daunting task, especially amid a global pandemic and with employees working remotely.
LeasePlan approached PRLab in November 2020, for quick fire, rapid assistance with one of their new internal employee initiatives - the Run to the Moon Challenge.
The Run to the Moon challenge consisted of LeasePlan employees collectively running, walking, and cycling the entire distance from the Earth to the Moon for a cause- to help global mental health charities. For this, they wanted to create engaging and exciting copy, with fresh ideas, inspiring videos, and sharp graphic design to help their employees along the way.
They knew that PRLab, strategically positioned in Amsterdam and worldwide as the go-to PR and marketing agency for startups, could provide the necessary assets for their international internal communications when they needed it.
The strategy was simple, but with a mult-faceted approach. PRLab gathered its team of experienced copywriters, graphic designers, and video animators and onboarded themselves to the objectives for LeasePlan in one week, and then, helped map out a long-term strategy for the appealing communications to help LeasePlanners Run to the Moon.
An important component of engaging content is the graphic design of the imagery that supports it. Taking cues from LeasePlan’s brand guidelines, PRLab created the style and feel for the Run to the Moon Challenge, incorporating all of the planets in the solar system and a celestial vibe to represent the distance between the Earth and the Moon. In case you didn’t already know, that distance conveniently fits all of the planets of the solar system in between.
Not only did PRLab’s graphic design team create the look and feel for the challenge, they also designed the visuals for the many videos LeasePlan needed for the monthly challenges activating employees to run to the Moon.
LeasePlan needed PRLab to generate ideas for monthly challenges and prizes that would help inspire their employees to get out the door and hit the ground running. PRLab came up with 8 months worth of challenge ideas, fun prizes for the participants, and bi-weekly copy for their internal communication distribution.
LeasePlan had four different mediums for internal communication and our copywriters crafted engaging - and often playful - content to keep LeasePlanners motivated for the challenge. This entailed the creation of a LeasePlan style guide, and templates for each medium so that the burden of content creation was both eased, and enabled LeasePlan to make use of it as well.
They also wanted videos made of their employees competing throughout the challenge, and PRLab crafted the script and copy to help make those videos come alive.
A prominent role for the ideas and content for the monthly challenges were calls to action, prompting employees to share their experiences while competing in the challenges as they made their way to the Moon. In the end, the content was a success - LeasePlanners the world over shared their videos and experiences on their way to the Moon.
PRLab took the LeasePlanner clips, and fashioned them into animated graphic videos each month, keeping employees engaged and the challenge exciting.
Video animation is a time consuming process, but the team at PRLab was able to create these videos at breakneck speed - without loss of quality - to ensure LeasePlan could share them with employees when they needed them.
PRLab created fun and engaging videos for the LeasePlan Run to the Moon Challenge:
“Covid-19 has had a massive impact on the way we communicate to our 8,000 employees in over 30 markets. To keep LeasePlanners across the world motivated and connected, we launched a number of employee engagement initiatives, one of which was the ‘LeasePlan runs to the Moon’ campaign, where we encourage our employees to collectively run, walk or cycle the distance from Earth to the Moon. This is where the PRLab team came to the rescue and helped us reach the Moon by supporting us every step of the way – from program launch and encouraging employee participation to celebrating our collective achievement. PR lab helped us come up with creative content ideas and bring them to life. As a result, LeasePlanners reached the Moon way ahead of the target that we had in mind when we started, and this is definitely living proof that our communications approach helped us get there. It has also been a great fun working together with the PR Lab team on this exciting project.”
Tanya Pakhuta, Global Internal Communications Manager