The brief, and the constraint
the organisation's 20th anniversary needed to be more than an event day. It needed a digital
experience that carried the story, invited participation, and reached everyone — including
the large share of employees who are not sitting at a desk when things happen.
The constraint was the interesting part: no budget for standalone software. Which turned out
to be the right constraint, because the organisation already owned Microsoft 365.
What was built
An internal engagement platform on SharePoint:
- Event homepage and the anniversary journey — twenty years, told as a narrative
- Milestones, leadership messages and employee stories
- Programme schedule, activity pages and committee information
- Photo gallery and event resources
- Participation through Microsoft Forms, with leaderboard and activity mechanics
- WhatsApp community integration and QR-led journeys connecting the physical event to the
digital one
I owned the concept, the information architecture, the visual experience, the content
structure and the engagement mechanisms.
The automation underneath
Communication ran on Power Automate: structured employee recipient lists held in SharePoint,
personalised HTML email templates, and automated bulk sends to 600+ employees — replacing
what would otherwise have been a manual, error-prone, repeatedly-executed mail merge across
several campaign waves.
Why I include this
It is the clearest demonstration of a principle I apply to most transformation work: the
question is rarely "what should we buy?" It is "what does the organisation already own, and
what could it do if someone designed a proper experience on top of it?"
Delivered on existing enterprise licences, at no incremental software cost, reaching the
whole company. The same instinct applies to far larger problems than an anniversary.