 On 2 June 2009 Aviva, the global financial services company, held its “Becoming One Aviva” (BOA) event.
Prior to this date the company had been known by a number of different brands around the world, including Norwich Union, Commercial Union and Hibernian.
The date became known as “BOA Day” - the day all the companies rebranded to Aviva. But how did it engage all its employees around the world? And how did the company utilise its existing comms. channels?
One way was to use its “Aviva World” intranet. This is Microsoft Sharepoint powered and still relatively new, having only been launched the year before. For BOA Day what was really needed was multi-language capability, something that the existing intranet didn’t have.
The solution was to launch a series of online forums in 10 different languages. These proved to be very popular with staff around the world able to ask questions of the Aviva management in their native tongues.
The BOA Day event took place over the course of 24 hours, starting at 9am local time in Melbourne and finishing at the end of the day in Chicago.
Topics up for discussion were recognition, becoming a global company and corporate responsibility. The topics were nominated by HR and marketing representatives from around the world.
The online experience included fun events too - they ran their very own “Aviva Twitter” and people could vote on their favourite “one-sentence story”. Staff were encouraged to send in the stories with a photograph of themselves – more than 160 people did.
 They could even vote on their favourite corporate responsibility initiative that they thought Aviva should support. £1 was donated to Oxfam for every vote.
Aviva Europe was the most active region on the forums, making 424 posts in all languages. These questions were either answered on the day or answers were published on the Aviva Europe "You Ask Us" site shortly after the event.
The main points made in each of the forums were also used at an Aviva leaders' conference the next month.
Aviva World also had a real-time chat facility with 15 “anchors” in the various countries around the world. The anchors were joined by senior leaders around the group who reported the activities in their country, which included CR activities, parties, picnics and much more.
For example, Aviva staff in Hungary helped paint play equipment in a local park; in the Czech Republic they took children to the zoo; in Paris they held a giant picnic for more than 2,000 staff and in Russia they renovated an old park in Moscow. In Romania they launched a new campaign for the United Way charity and in Ireland they packed school bags and food hampers for local causes.
Aviva's various business units around the globe also held "town hall" events where staff could meet and question senior leaders.
The biggest bulk of Aviva’s staff are in UK and Europe, but the late afternoon and early evening (UK time) were devoted to Aviva’s Canadian and US operations.
Local communications people were also encouraged to send in reports of their activities, complete with photographs. These were uploaded as soon as they were received – more than 200 photographs were received from Europe alone.
The hub of all this activity was in what became known as the “War Room” in Aviva’s London headquarters. This was manned for the whole 24 hours with a rolling team of IT experts and communications professionals.
 At its peak Aviva’s servers were dealing with more than 200 web requests a second.
So what can you learn from Aviva’s experience?
- First, plan your activities well in advance – everyone had to know their role in what became a giant enterprise.
- Secondly, rehearse the day’s event a week before the real thing. This makes sure that the systems work and that people are familiar with logging on and using the various forum and image handling software.
- Stress test your intranet to make sure that it can stand the strain.
- Have a minute-by-minute timetable and make sure you stick to it.
- Call people 20 minutes before they are due to start their comms activity to make sure everything is OK.
- Make contingency plans in case someone is sick or there is a technical failure.
- If people do ask a question of their senior management make sure that they receive a swift answer.
- Don’t underestimate the amount of work and effort that goes into a global initiative like this
- Everything that was captured on Aviva’s BOA Day was kept and now forms a substantial section of the company’s intranet as a permanent reminder of an important day in the company’s history.
Steve Nichols worked on Aviva's BOA Day event, editing and publishing stories from around the world from 4:30am until 4:30pm! Steve runs InfoTech Communications (www.infotechcomms.co.uk) and is editor of this web site. InfoTech specialises in online communications and Steve has acted as consultant and trainer for many blue-chip companies including Aviva, AWG, Shell, BT, Standard Life, HBOS, BNFL, Accenture and Australia New Zealand Bank.
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