By Brett Zielke

This year, ATB Financial won a Gold Quill award for their “Move Your S#!T to the Cloud” internal communications campaign. According to Mireille Farkouh, senior manager of communications at ATB, the campaign was borne out of a need to push people over the final hurdle of what had been a long-term company plan.“In 2017 we moved the entire organization from Microsoft to Google, and this was part of the final phase. Following the initial conversion, we still had some Microsoft programs available. The project team found we had a large group of people still using them and tending to use them more if they had their files saved to share drives on their desktops. Our goal was to get their files moved over to Google drive. By this point, we had lost some momentum, because even though it was still important, it wasn’t top of mind any more. It was also time-consuming and wasn’t very glamorous, so we had to take it to the next level.”

Mireille Farkouh, senior manager of communications at ATB, receiving a Gold Quill Award.

With 48% of employees needing to move their files over to the cloud, it was clear that an original approach was needed to show the importance of getting everyone to use the same system and programs. After about a month of planning, “Move Your S#!T to the Cloud” was launched in January, with a few clear objectives: to get 90% of employees moved over to the cloud, and a 30% overall reduction in Microsoft use. “The first week was slow, we only saw about 2% of employees switch over. But by the end of February, we had an additional 27% move over, and by the end of the campaign we exceeded our targets.”

One of the reasons the campaign was so successful was due to the level of engagement from different departments within the company thanks to a dashboard that the project team developed to track the percentage of each department that made the switch. “The dashboard helped to create some friendly competition between the teams,” Mireille said, adding the overall acceptance of the campaign’s somewhat edgy and fun title speaks volumes about the environment that has been fostered at ATB.“The idea behind it was to create a sense of urgency. Although it got mixed reviews, the vast majority found it fun and aligned with who we are as a company.”

Impressively, this was the second year in a row that ATB had been awarded a Gold Quill award for one of their campaigns, having won last year for their app. Mireille says that while she wasn’t involved in that campaign, it is easy to see why ATB has managed to have this sustained success. “We have a really great internal communications team here and what they do is really valued at ATB. We’re encouraged to push boundaries a bit. We spend a lot of time engaging and bringing our employees on board with what we’re doing and making them part of the process instead of just pushing things on them. This collaborative, open-minded culture allowed us to take something fairly monotonous and boring and make it a bit more edgy and exciting.”

Congrats to everyone over at ATB. We look forward to seeing what you come up with next year! 

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