November 17, 2020
Smartly.io is a social advertising platform that helps brands automate and optimize their social advertising. Started in 2013 by two serial entrepreneur co-founders Tuomo Riekki and Kristo Ovaska in Helsinki, Finland, they are now a global team of over 400 Smartlies in 17 locations, building a platform that automates creative production and ad buying at scale.
Every year, Smartly.io has an annual offsite to bring in the whole company from all over the globe to one location! One year they travelled to Greece, and during another, they brought the whole company to Finland.
This year however, with the onset of COVID and shelter in place, the team needed to find another way to bring everyone together to connect and socialize like they would in-person and Smartly.io’s 7th birthday was the perfect opportunity for a virtual celebration. Smartly.io has over 400 employees with an HQ in Helsinki and offices spanning across different continents and 12 time zones.
Normally, this annual event would be a way for team members to connect with each other, have a sense of belonging, encourage collaboration, and boost team morale and culture within the company.
With everyone being zoom-fatigued and tired of staring at a screen all day, they needed to find something engaging and fun to keep everyone’s attention, and also create an experience where all the global team members could join in and feel a part of the event.
Using Rally, Smartly.io was able to create an ongoing 24-hour schedule of fun activities and events to occur in different rooms in the main venue.
A venue was set-up and customized to Smartly.io’s branding and multiple rooms were created to reflect the various activities that would be happening in each. With the ability for users to move freely between rooms, they could hop between each to check out the different activities that took place.
With Rally, users could quickly break out into smaller groups (and switch conversations to private!) for trivia and go on stage and present to the rest of the room for Powerpoint Karaoke.
There was no shortage of creative activities to engage the whole company! With a full day of events, regardless of time zone, there was always something fun to do and a chance to meet others in the company.
Keeping the rooms open all day and giving users the freedom to move around between different activities saved the team the time and hassle of sending out multiple links, launching meeting rooms, and manually moving users across breakout rooms.
"Through using Rally’s platform, all Smartlies from around the world could feel as if they were celebrating together in one space making the birthday party as close to an in-person event without it actually being in-person.” - Mari Terrio, Collaboration and Community Manager at Smartly.io
Even though everyone was stuck at home and not able to travel to meet each other in person, teaming up with Rally allowed Smartly.io to continue hosting an unforgettable birthday celebration that brought the whole company together.
With so many in-person events such as company retreats, parties and celebrations moving online, Rally proved to be the best solution to bring groups of people together to feel connected and socialize in the most natural way.
Have a look at Smartly.io’s blog post on their event here!