Get ready to spread some holiday cheer in your organization with a fun Advent calendar! We'll show you how to bring the magic of the Holidays to your Haiilo platform with an easy-to-follow video that walks you through creating your very own digital Advent calendar. Whether you want to engage colleagues with daily surprises, fun facts, or festive activities, this setup will help keep the Holiday spirit alive all December long!

Aim of the advent calendar

• Boost Employee Engagement: Daily surprises, activities, or messages can increase employee morale and foster a sense of belonging, making your workplace feel more festive during the holiday season.
• Promote Company Values: It's an excellent opportunity to reinforce your organization's values by incorporating messages or activities that align with your company's mission, culture, or social responsibility goals.
• Reward and Motivate: Daily small rewards or incentives, like gift vouchers, recognition, or even time-off perks, can help keep motivation high as the year comes to an end.

Set up in Haiilo

Preparation

First, decide where your calendar will be displayed. To make the calendar easily accessible, it's best to place it on a company page, like a news, HR, or internal comms page, or within a globally accessible community. An alternative option is to create a dedicated community and use this community for further holiday-related topics, like uploading pictures from your yearly holiday party.

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

• Split an image into 24 parts or number 24 individual pictures
• Prep 24 pieces of content as "gifts" 

Be creative with the content: Think of stories, competitions, recipes, etc. Avoid requiring participation on weekends and use those days for simple greetings or a message that doesn't require action.

Need ideas? Involve your team! Use a form or email for submissions, and set guidelines like keeping ideas festive, simple, and quick to execute. Set a mid-November deadline for submissions to ensure you have enough time left to set it all up.

Video tutorial

Examples

Here are some ideas for your doors:

• Secret Santa: Foster team-building with a company-wide Secret Santa. Use a Teaser widget for a festive image, the Rich text editor for rules and how-to instructions, and a User profile widget for contact details.
• Cookie Recipe: Share a holiday recipe with a delicious cookie image. Use a two-column layout to display ingredients and instructions side by side, highlighting key info like oven temperature with tables.
• Competition: Engage users with a fun competition—whether it's a quiz or photo contest—with prizes like vouchers or holiday merch. Use a Teaser widget for the prize image and the poll widget for the question. Make sure to limit the response to 1 per user, enable Show results to user, and close the poll the next day.
• Holiday Story: For doors that fall on the weekend, you might want something less enticing but equally holiday-inspired. Give your colleagues a chance to relax to an audio production of "A Christmas Carol.".

Further tips & tricks

• Don't forget to make some noise: prepare a post that will bring attention to the start of your advent calendar. Depending on the location of your advent calendar, you can use the teaser widget, a link button, or even the global hero teaser to link to the advent calendar and make it easily accessible.
• Festive Intranet Makeover: Time to deck the digital halls! Turn your intranet into a holiday wonderland with a splash of red and green, and give your company logo a merry makeover with some seasonal flair. The result? A holly, jolly workspace that'll have everyone feeling the holiday vibes! Want to know how to create your own holiday theme? Check out this article on creating themes to get started. And don't forget to customize your Hero Teaser with a festive touch to make the homepage shine even brighter!
• Hidden Clues & Puzzle Fun: Want to take it up a notch? Add an interactive twist with a treasure hunt! Hide letters or symbols across your intranet that form a festive phrase. Employees can hunt them down and submit their answers, for example, through a form, for a chance to win some sweet prizes.
• Make it more formal: Fill your advent calendar with meaningful intranet content if you're aiming for more than just a playful effect. For example, you could create a year-in-review with quiz questions related to specific months, topics, or projects. Or use it as a fun challenge, asking employees to locate certain information across the intranet.