We are calling this the Swoogo Showcase, and we have invited some of our agency partners to talk about some unconventional ways that they've used Swoogo.

First up is Katie McEntyre, from Opus. She is the senior event registration and reporting technologist, and she's going to talk about an internal way that she's used Swoogo for Opus.

Hello. There are so many of you.

So, just to start off, I spent a a decade doing that position at Opus. I'm now the associate director of strategy, so you're gonna have to sit through my boring strategic up front.

At Opus, we use Swoogo for a variety of client projects, but one of our most favored applications is using it for cultural engagements. So, I loved what Stephanie touched on just now about having that remote workforce and still trying to create kind of a cohesive culture where everybody has the opportunity to feel seen and heard and a part of something a little bit bigger than themselves.

So recently, we took a look at how we engage the remote workforce.

So highly engaged companies do better by almost every metric. They hire more easily, they retain, they have stronger client relationships, and fifty percent of organizations say that this problem is very important.

So the considerations that we look at when we're trying to craft a cultural activation inside of Opus, is purpose. Do the employees feel as though engaging in the activity actually betters the world and not just the company that they work for?

We look at connections, so we don't like to do things that have a figure head, where there's somebody speaking and talking and then everybody else is just sort of passively sitting and watching. We look at ritual. Is it something we all work in events? We're an events agency at Opus. So we're all very busy and we all have very different schedules. We're all across different time zones. Is it on a cadence where people can participate or is it disruptive?

Is the activity repeatable? Is it something that we can kind of make an ongoing part of the culture? And then autonomy. So everybody has different ways they like to engage; are we taking all of those into consideration?

Recently, we decided to undertake this for ourselves, and we set the purpose as improving adult literacy and celebrating the roles of literature in our own lives.

So, we had reading and book-themed discussions in Slack channels, we had hosted book clubs, we had virtual events with educational experts. We were leveraging an activity that many employees already enjoy and consistently engage in, so they can do it on their own time. We did allow audiobooks as well, because studies prove that audiobooks aid in literacy.

The activity is repeatable. It's nondisruptive. And autonomy, the employees could choose the level at which they'd like to engage. They could choose what, when, how they'd like to read.

This was inspired by the the statistic that fifty four percent of Americans between the ages of sixteen and seventy-four read below the equivalent of a sixth-grade level. So there's some alarming statistics you can see here, we won't go through all of those.

But just at at a glance, 2.2 trillion dollars in projected annual income are lost due to low literacy in the United States alone.

So, he came up with this idea. Fifty-four percent of Americans between the ages of sixteen and seventy-four read below the equivalent of a sixth-grade level.

The solution to this problem is formal adult literacy programs with a developed curriculum and personalized instruction.

So we came up with what we called 54 for 54. Working together, all of the employees of Opus Agency were challenged to read a cumulative fifty-four thousand minutes between April 3rd and June 30th. And if the goal was met, Opus would donate a combined fifty-four hundred dollars to Hill Literacy programs in the UK and US.

So this led us to our technical challenges.

In order to do this, we had to have a circular registration path. So, as everybody knows, most of the time, registration is very linear, Go through, fill out the form, hit the end, you're done. In this case, we needed to have one platform where people could sign up to participate, but also sign back in to log their minutes read, so we could track them. We needed to be able to display results so that people would be encouraged to keep going, so they could track their personal time and they could track the company's overall progress towards their goal.

We also wanted to be able to track extracurriculars since this was an internal initiative, it was a team of one. And having to go back in every day, multiple times, to see if somebody signed up for a book club was not an ideal situation.

So, to allow participants to both sign up for the event and log minutes, we used group registration.

So they went through the first time, were set as the group manager, went back a second time and it would create a new attendee type called minutes read, that was asked a completely separate set of questions. And they could go through this as many times as they wanted to. Using a combination of first in group and attendee types, we were able to differentiate the paths and get the full end-to-end experience that we were looking for.

So you see, when you start off, you create an account, Fill out the about you, whether or not you want to join a book club, simple thanks page when you log back in.

You would have an overall view of your current reading. You could click to log the date that you read, the minutes that you read on that particular day you were logging, and optionally, what you were reading. We used this for some neat pie charts later. Then you'd return to that log-your-reading page where we would only display the dates read and the minutes read. And then at the end, we had that same who's attending widget display with the times that were logged, and a neat little JavaScript to kind of sum up all of those times so that you could track your personal amount of reading.

We used a very similar process to display results. So using the who is attending widget, which is one of our favorites, we just added minutes read to a hidden widget on the front page, and we had that little thermometer there at the bottom.

And so, as this filled up, as people logged time, those times would display in a hidden div on the front page, and then we had some code that would loop through and it would go, alright, do some math. And then use CSS as a gradient to fill up that thermometer to whatever percent we're currently at.

So that's what they actually saw.

So, as you can see, we actually did reach our goal, and the thermometer is all full.

Then, for tracking extracurriculars, again, we were able to use those built-in Swoogo alerts to let us know when somebody had signed up for a book club and needed to be added to the appropriate Slack channel. We used it to get all sorts of information that we could then display for interesting statistics: what days we read the most, what type of books we read the most.

And we've used this kind of technique, this circular registration, and who's attending for a number of different applications.

So, a couple of our favorites, we've used used it for scavenger hunts. So you sign up the first time. When you go through the second time, we use the people modifying their registration to show your tasks, and then we use that who's attending on the homepage to show submissions.

We've used it for step challenges.

And we've also used something similar for a season of gratitude where we built sort of a one-pager website, and had people answer the question of what's one good thing in your life right now, and then spit it out using that who's attending. So it was just this virtual cascading wall of gratitude.

So, that's one of our favorites, combining the power group registration, new versus modifying, and who's coming widgets. Thank you.

Thanks, Katie. I think that was a great example of an internal use of Swoogo.

You know, Swoogo is used a lot for your end clients if you're an agency partner, or if you are a customer yourself. But sometimes, the call is coming from inside the house, and I think it was great for a good cause as well.