Admittedly, it isn’t easy to incorporate an Advent calendar into Haiilo. With our partner Hirschtec, we’ve come up with an idea of how you could implement a calendar.

The preparation

To present an Advent calendar in an attractive way in Haiilo, you need to make a few preparations:

• Divide a picture into 24 smaller pictures or allocate numbers to 24 individual pictures
• 24 items of content

You can let your creativity run free when it comes to the content: Wonderful stories, competitions, Christmas recipes through to a joint Secret Santa campaign – the possibilities are endless. You can find a few examples further down in the article.

Take the weekends into account in the calendar. Not every employee will log in on the weekend to open the calendar doors. On these days, you could either wish your colleagues a good weekend – perhaps with a Christmas greeting – or something that isn’t oriented towards participation.

Build the Advent calendar

First of all, choose the location where the calendar should be integrated. If the calendar needs to be accessible to all employees, a company Page, such as the HR Page, is ideal for this. An engagement Community would naturally also be an option.

You need two apps for the calendar: The Content app and the Blog app. As it’s more sensible to create the content first, we advise you to start with the Blog app.

We have also created an extra navigation group for the two associated apps to keep things nice and clear on your company Page:

The Blog App

You can find out exactly how to set up the Blog app in this article.

The benefit of Blog articles is simple: They can be scheduled! Create your 24 individual articles now and select on the tab "Publish" the date of the corresponding calendar door. This means that the calendar door for the respective day can only be seen once the day actually arrives.
If colleagues click on a day that’s in the future, they get a message as they aren’t allowed to open the door (yet).

Choose a time for the publication that’s before most of your colleagues start work. This gives everyone direct access in the morning to the newest calendar door when they log into Haiilo.

Two settings need to be taken into account: 

• Deactivate the field "Send all subscribers a notification".
  Now you may be wondering why; after all, this would remind every employee about each day’s door. Yes, but the notification in the bell links directly to the Blog article. They wouldn’t be "opening a door". The lovingly created Homepage of your calendar would no longer be seen.
• You’re acting here as a representative of your company. Select "Publish in the name of the Page".

Create 24 posts using this setting. You can find examples of what content can look like at the end of the article. Once you’re done creating, you should have 24 planned posts in the Blog app, which can be seen by the yellow banner below the heading.

Tip:
Check in the overview not only whether all posts are also planned but also once again whether all of the posts are actually being published in the name of the Page. You can see this at a glance at the right under the posts, in this case "HR".

Our tips for an attractive layout:

• Always use a Teaser image with a short introductory text. This allows your colleagues to see in the overview what was on the previous day.
• The calendar should look impressive! Pictures and clean text formatting are always attractive to the eye and make people want to read.
• Do you have several competitions? Use a recurring image so that your colleagues see straight away what the day’s content is.

The content app

You can find all the information about the Content app in this article. The layout of the app should look something like this:

• One row with the RTE Widget
• 6 rows with 4 Image Widgets each
• optional: final row

You now add an introductory text in the RTE widget. This is also the place for competition rules or for contacts in the event of questions.

You now need to manually insert all of the previously cropped and numbered pictures into the 24 Image Widgets. There’s no way to fill all of the Widgets at the same time. 

Tips: 

• If you create the content for the 24 doors in the Blog app before you insert the 24 pictures, you save yourself the step of editing all of the Widgets again to add the link to the "door".
• Open two tabs when creating the doors to copy the links to the blog posts.

Examples

There are generally no limits to your creativity when it comes to content.

We’ve begun our calendar with a Secret Santa. This activity helps boost engagement among colleagues and also acts as a team-building measure as people may come into contact with colleagues who they don’t know yet.

We’ve used advanced mode in the blog article:

• Added a Teaser Widget and used the two Christmas gnomes as a cover picture.
• The text is formatted with the RTE.
• And an additional contact is added for questions with the user profile widget.

As with almost all activities involving participation, it’s important here to set rules.

• By when do people need to be signed up?
• How do I find out who I’ve been given?
• How does the handover take place?
• How much should the gift cost?
• ...

For the 2nd door, we’ve got a delicious cookie recipe:

We’ve edited the blog article using advanced mode again:

• Added a Teaser Widget and used the delicious cookies as a cover picture.
• Selected two-column layout to show the ingredients next to the preparation. There’s an RTE Widget in each column.
• The text is formatted with the RTE and tables with baking times have been added to provide a better overview.

On day 3, our colleagues will find the first competition:

We’ve edited the blog article using advanced mode again:

• Added a Teaser Widget and shown an example of the prize here: There’s a Christmas dinner to be won.
• The text is then formatted with the RTE.
• The competition question can be shown quickly and easily with the Survey Widget.
  • It’s important here that participation must be visible. Select under "Advanced settings" "Show result"
  • Remember to close the survey once the deadline has passed.

To present colleagues with more than just the competition question, we’ve peppered the text with some general knowledge in keeping with the prize. You’re naturally free to choose how much detail you want to go into for the competition itself and the background to the question.

Other types of competition could include:

• Questions about the company
• (Photo) competitions
• (Anonymous) nominations of colleagues who’ve earned a little reward
• Knowledge questions

The prizes are also only limited by your budget:

• Restaurant or take-out vouchers
• Merch sets from the company (if the employees don’t get them for free)
• A ready-made Advent crown or perhaps even a Christmas tree

The 4th day falls on a weekend. We want to give our colleagues a chance to relax surrounded by their families and have selected an audio production of A Christmas Carol:

We’ve edited the blog article using advanced mode again:

• The Teaser Widget is the key Widget here. We’ve not only inserted a picture but also linked this directly to a YouTube video of a reading of A Christmas Carol.
• Then brief instructions in the text.