This month, Rachel Clarke looks at how the way large-scale events train volunteers can provide lessons for brands.

In The House

Innovations and initiatives from Strat House clients and partners.

• Unilever helping women farmers to grow pineapples and their incomes
• Adidas takes on Samsung’s controversial ‘Night Owls’ ad in women’s safety campaign
• Unilever Study Reveals Influence of Influencers in Sustainable Behavior Change
• Dove are standing up for #KidsOnlineSafety
• Gong cha named best food & drink franchise at the 2023 Global Franchise Awards
• Find out why LinkedIn And Dove Are In It Together To Help End Hair Discrimination

Do you know where I can find this?

There’s an image meme going round LinkedIn about the difference between a Brand and Marketing, with former being all about the why and the latter about the how. As with all things, it’s never quite as clear cut, especially when you add the service elements to the mix.  Search for articles about the differences, and you can find hundreds, often slightly different. Sometimes the definition of branding never gets past the visual identity, but for most, it also includes who a brand is, what it stands for and how it behaves – all about the experience it provides its customers at every touchpoint.   Marketing is the expression of the brand across the chosen ecosystem, from digital to ATL, But this misses out one necessary part of your brand – your people, especially those who have direct connections with your customer, whether that is retail personal or customer service.

At the end of July, I start a stint as a volunteer at the Commonwealth Games in Birmingham; they have me working at Edgbaston where the Women’s T20 takes place. I’m one of over 13,000 people from across the UK and the world who are going to play a major role in delivering the Games.

Over the last few months, there has been a heavy programme of training taking place, a mix of role training – knowing what we need to do – and venue training about the location we’ll be.   Volunteers will most likely be the first, last and everything in between touchpoints for every Games Visitor, from royalty to the casual spectator. They will be the face of the Games and its brand – and there are plenty of applicable processes that the team have implemented that other brands can learn from, here are my top five:

1. Recruitment: it all starts with recruitment. Yes, you need people who can deliver on the role, or can be trained to, but you also need people who share your brand values.  Or for many types of recruitment, people are looking for brands that share their values.  The Games ensured they could find the right kind of people through a standardised approach to recruitment, with all interviewers trained the same way and all of them following similar scripts.  Standardised interviewing supports finding people who fit the organisation, not just fit the interviewer.
2. Making the brand relatable: branding and marketing have their own jargon and brand documents are usually full of words and acronyms your front-line team may not be aware of.  If you want your brand to be understood by everyone, you need to translate it into everyday language. There’s no problem keeping the richness for your agency teams, but there needs to be versions that anyone can pick up and understand. We’ve worked with clients to ensure they have these versions available.  For the Games, they have taken these brand elements and turned them into great training documents, with animations, examples and mnemonics to help the wide team understand what they are representing.
3. Making sure everyone understands: The Games are ensuring everyone has the right training, covering a mix of brand and role, all about how they will need to interact with their customers and the expectation. There are training exercises and discussions to push what the Games brand means. This is backed up by a set of online training modules that uses a variety of means to show their expected behaviours. It’s all about clarity – and repetition. For brands, it’s not enough to just send out the information, you have to get everyone to work through it and find ways for them to live it in a controlled environment
4. Making the information findable: It’s important to have the relevant information in a place that everyone who needs to can access it – multiple times we’ve had to wait for the right information from clients because it’s on someone’s personal directory, not in a shared environment. The Games have a document repository with at least a few hundred documents. They make sure everything relevant is loaded there.  They have access control at the top level and then provide different routes into the information – the minimal list of what you need to know; and then letting your find things through a filing system or through search (research has shown that your preference partly depends on your age and metal picture of what computers do). We’ve worked with clients to help them organise their information and documents, it’s all about knowing your users and doing the right research to ensure it can meet behaviours. 
5. Making the information succinct: we have worked with many brands where the information they have around how the brand behaves and is executed is across a sprawling set of documents. It’s the inevitable entropy of brand documents. You can see the start of this with the Games documents, but their lifespan is too short for a large impact. One of our specialist areas is taking this information and pulling it all back together into a tighter, leaner document library – reducing repetition and removing inconsistencies. Having regular reviews across everything ensures you reduce the sprawl, remove out of data information and keep everything relevant.

So, do you know where all your brand information can be found?  Is everything there that is needed and is it up to date?  If you handed it to your newest team member is it understandable?  We can help make sure the answers to all of these questions is yes.