Context
Mazars is a global auditing firm with more than 40,000 employees in 91 countries. Most employees are auditors and accountants working long hours on a number of high profile cases. As such, the outcome had to be:
- Able to engage hundreds of employees at once
- Adjust around time-poor employees and their schedule
- Not be completely reliant on a screen
- Encourage empathy when writing to an audience with very different circumstances
- Involve a variation of the ‘Ministry of Loneliness’ event, as this was why Mazars had approached us in the first place
Our methodology
Our first task was to find a charity to partner with. We wanted to target somewhere with wide reach, who also needed somewhere to grow. We spent two weeks interviewing charities to understand what their needs were, and created a package of proposals for Mazars staff to decide which group they would like to write letters to.
It was important for us to include a range of charities, for grassroots local groups to those with a national reach. In the end Sue Ryder was chosen because the hospice environment and how patients and hospice staff would need a particular boost at this particular time.
There were three main groups of users to consider when designing this project:
Mazars employees – who were time poor and needing a quick activity which would also make them feel like a part of a local community.
What did we do?
We wanted to really focus on sharing moments of positivity, being mindful that the employees were writing to strangers and might not always have been aware of their individual circumstances. The aim was to dissuade We led some mindfulness exercises to ground the employees in the moment and created smaller breakout rooms to share experiences. To add a personal touch, we numbered each letter and introduced a tracking system, so that employees could see where their letter had ended up. This protected patient confidentiality while also making each person feel as though they had made a unique contribution.
Hospice residents – who had been in isolation since March 2020 and could not be around their friends and family.
What did we do?
We had to be very careful about the materials and objects we were sending to the hospices, guaranteeing that they would be free from traces of the virus. This ended up being a very difficult back and forth between Sue Ryder staff, hospice management and our design team. In the end, we created a template for the Sue Ryder staff to scan and make posters of the letters, which were then sent to each facility and printed as posters to hang up in communal spaces.
Sue Ryder Staff – who had to coordinate the sanitising, sending and distribution of the postcards entirely remotely.
What did we do?
We consulted with postage companies to create a bespoke posting service, and supplied a stamp to each employee so that they could send their letter back directly to the Sue Ryder staff without any delay. Each postcard had a QR code which allowed staff to track where the letters had been. We provided poster templates.
