Why an internal online competition can help your business

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Generally aimed at targeted customers, competitions are mainly used to promote your products to online communities and grow your external audience, notably through social networks. Giving away prizes and gifts to your users can help in your efforts to build stronger bonds with your online community. However, this format of engagement and promotion can also be used for your internal communications campaigns.

The creation of internal competitions can provide an original and innovative approach to strengthening the work dynamic and team spirit within your company. Beyond the traditional marketing strategy of running external online competitions on social networks – often on Instagram or Facebook, but also on platforms like LinkedIn and WhatsApp – competitions can also be used for various objectives internally.

By integrating storytelling as part of your competitions, you can reinforce your company’s values and culture, while also uniting employees around important issues. Organising an internal competition can help improve employee motivation and participation, while creating a fun and stimulating atmosphere for participants.

What are the business objectives of running an internal competition?

The objectives of running an external marketing competition are perhaps more obvious. By offering a prize, targeted customers are incentivised to interact with your brand, interact with your storytelling, and be motivated towards a desired call to action. In a sense, running external competitions is like hunting in the wild. It’s a big competitive world, and there are plenty of your own competitors chasing the same quarry.

Running an internal competition gives you a captive audience and a smaller enclosure in which to operate, so if you apply the same objectives to internal competitions it’s a bit like wasting bullets to shoot fish in a barrel. You might be asking yourself, “What’s the point? Why would I give away competition prizes when they’re already on my team and doing what I want them to do?”

The planning and running of internal online competitions for business is more nuanced, but still incredibly valuable when it comes to HR matters and promoting long-term business growth.

Boosting engagement, fostering innovation, and identifying talent

Firstly, an internal online competition can go a long way to boost the motivation and engagement levels of employees, particularly if it’s a competition that encourages them to show off their skills, such as with a Photo Contest or a Video Contest, or even some form of Quiz or other question and answer game where they can demonstrate their knowledge or ability to adapt to think quickly. Instant win competitions could also be used as a way to reward employees, although it’s worth bearing in mind that an instant win style game needs to be balanced against the fact that it will only reward a single or a few of your employees overall. The instant win format might be better served to this end as part of a broader campaign of gamified inhouse experiences and looked at as seasoning as opposed to a main course.

Internal online competitions that follow a question and answer format, or even follow a longer, multi-level narrative, could also be used to identify talent, and potentially even future leadership or upper management material. Promoting from within, identifying aptitude in the rank and file and taking someone from the ground floor to one of the big seats helps your business in a number of ways. For one thing, it’s how a business can grow effectively. There are numerous real-world examples of new CEOs coming in off of their success in other industries, and failing to understand the values of the business they’ve begun stewarding, or the nature of the new niche they find themselves wielding so much power in. While sometimes a fresh perspective is useful to combat industry disruptors, bringing some leadership up through a business helps it to maintain its identity.

Some internal online competitions could even be created to help foster a culture of innovation and continuous improvement. For example, even a simple competition, like presenting an industry specific problem, putting employees into multi-departmental teams, and seeing how they collaborate to come up with the best team entry at best results in innovation, and at worst builds internal bonds.

Our ideas for organising a corporate competition

Organising an in-house competition can be a stimulating and engaging operation for employees, and to ensure the success of your campaign, it is important to offer the right competitions, or right combination of competitions to best serve your organisational objectives. You can use our catalogue on the Drimify platform, which offers a variety of game mechanics to suit all types of participants and all your competition ideas.

Here are some of our most broadly repeatable and adaptable formats for inhouse online competitions to help your business.

1. The question and answer format competition

The Quiz is a highly versatile game mechanic, and universally understood and intuitive. Customising a Quiz for an internal competition allows you to construct questions using text, audio, or video, and give the answer formats as multiple choice, open, or even ordered according to a value system. You could offer a company quiz to test your employees’ knowledge of your product or company culture, offering a prize or prizes to the top performers, or even make the Quiz more complex to pose hypotheticals to identify particular skill sets within your business.

Another competition idea adopting the question and answer format mechanics, if you were looking to audit your personnel in terms of personality types, such as a DISC test assessment or equivalent, would be to create a Personality Test. By creating your own, you can make it more specific to your industry and your company’s values, and get a real sense of what your roster looks like to inform hiring practices and training initiatives.

Utilising the Personality Test engine allows you to not only make it bespoke, but you can include video and audio in your question formats to appeal to different learner types, and make the whole experience more engaging than the typical boiler plate experiences of this nature. As a thank you for taking part, you could offer participants an instant win game like a Spin the Wheel or a Scratch Card, and put up a set number of prizes.

2. Instant win game

As discussed earlier, the instant win competition certainly has its place for internal competitions, but given that they’re games of chance, with prizes built into the mechanics of the game engine, it’s best used internally as an incentive to participate in another initiative, or as an extra experience to distribute a spot prize as part of a digital calendar of competitions. This is because if you tried to use it purely to reward your employees, you’re ultimately only rewarding one employee, or a handful of your employees – it’s not meritocratic.

3. Points-based games

Casual games such as a customised Pacman with your branding on, or a Blocks Puzzle, or a Memory Game, or one of the sports game engines all have points attached based on how competitors perform. This means you can reward the participants who perform the best, and you can include a leaderboard to demonstrate their performance.

You could allocate prizes based on where people stack up in the leaderboard, or just have a special instant win game for those players who finish in the top 10, or top 20, for example.

While such contests are meritocratic in terms of rewarding skill, it’s worth noting that someone’s Pacman ability is probably not tied to their work performance, so when using them, you need to think carefully about your internal goals. These sorts of games are great to include in broader experiences, such as being a part of a series of contests built on our multi-level Dynamic Path™ format for an internal event for employees to learn about new initiatives.

A multi-level experience of competitions and games

Using our Dynamic Path™ app, you can create a bespoke storytelling experience with various competitions and games included. For the Christmas period for example, you can offer an Advent Calendar to reward and entertain employees.

Equally, you could use this to create an educational experience around an important company milestone like a new product, or new business model, and include instant win games and custom-branded points games to break up the heavier sections and reward your audience for engaging in event through gamified experiences and the opportunities to win prizes.

Some practical tips to keep in mind

• International approach: Drimify offers support in over 30 different languages, so you can tailor your communications operation to the needs of each country if your company is international. However, it is important to take into account the different time zones, and to adapt the participation dates so that everyone can participate equally. So, whatever your ideas and the type of competition, we can help you.
• Propose a fun course built over time: initially, to engage your users as much as possible, choose a game mechanic based on a motivating challenge. Then, to create even more commitment and to be a long-term player, build games over several weeks and on a recurring basis (monthly, quarterly, etc.). This way, you will get more retention from participants throughout the duration of your operation.
• Clear rules: don’t forget to provide clear rules that govern participation in the game, data management, and the awarding of prizes to winners. It must be accessible on the internet from any device connected to the web.

Creating corporate competitions are an effective way to create a positive, dynamic and productive corporate culture, bring real added value to employees, and create a lasting commitment at all levels of your organisation through gamification and competitions.

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