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Scottish Government: Pivoting an event to cut costs and increase reach
Scottish Government’s annual “In the Service of Scotland” is a major employee learning and engagement event which connects employees with Ministers and senior leaders. Usually a hybrid event delivered in partnership with an external partner and platform, spending restrictions forced the event team to rapidly pivot to organising it in-house with only weeks to go.
Using existing digital workplace tools and Scottish Government’s new SharePoint intranet, the team was able to recreate the event experience, while fully meeting branding requirements. The team also innovated with new content formats to replace sessions which could no longer be held.
By using creative approaches, the team were able to increase both the reach of the event and user engagement, as well as reduce costs by 87% on the previous year. The user experience and accessibility of the event site also improved.
Why this won a Silver award
- There’s a great can-do attitude from the team whom, instead of cancelling the event, focused on what they could achieve.
- There’s some great creative and innovative approaches, such as the new Fundamentals in 15 sessions.
- We like the team’s strong commitment to taking a data-driven evaluation of the previous year’s event to improve the next one.
- This is a great cross-team effort, with the intranet and comms team working together.
- We love the improvements to usability and accessibility gained by using the intranet over the external platform.
- The fact that event engagement and reach have increased despite the pivot is impressive.
- The reduction in costs are significant, and critical in a public sector organisation.
- We love how the event has triggered greater interest in the intranet and that the team are proactively looking for opportunities to repeat the trick.
Full case study
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