WorldatWork is a global organization that has spent the last 70 years trailblazing the concept of Total Rewards, which helps organizations and human resource professionals to hone their skills and access strategic compensation packages, workplace benefits, training opportunities, and more. Since their conception 70 years ago, they have managed to launch various certifications, provide leading industry research, and pioneer the field with their Total Rewards Model.
Today, WorldatWork continues to elevate their legacy by shining a light on their community with Walls.io – which helps the organization to collect the unique voices of their members and event attendees.
We spoke with Monica Gaddis, Director of Meetings and Events at WorldatWork, who spearheads this initiative. Currently, Monica and her team manage 5 different social walls and 14 Echo campaigns, with the intention of building even more walls for other use cases in the future.
As Monica puts it, “We’re using it as much as possible and we’re planning on using it again next year. It worked really well for us.”
Here’s a quick rundown of how WorldatWork is using Walls.io’s social walls and Echo at events:
- Echo gathers posts from visitors prior to their events, helping the team in promotion
- Social walls were displayed on screens at events held in the US, Canada, and India as well as integrated in their attendee mobile app
- The social wall was embedded on the company website
And how WorldatWork uses Walls.io for community building:
- The team sends out newsletters and emails to members of the association with the Echo sharing link to encourage people to share their membership on socials
- These Echo posts are collected on a social wall that displays all the member posts
- Another social wall was created to celebrate the organization’s 70th anniversary through a collection of memories and historical photos
The Interview
What was the initial challenge you were experiencing that prompted you to look for a social wall?
We saw a lot of other associations using attendee social posts to increase awareness about the event. I went to the PCMA Convening Leaders last year and they used a similar tool and after I registered I just realized how easy it was to share and I really wanted to try that for our events.
As far as the challenge goes, I think that people love sharing stuff on social media, but sometimes they don’t know what to post or they don’t see the impact. One thing that’s great is that Walls.io collects LinkedIn posts, whereas previous tools that we used did not – and so this was a problem because most of our people are posting on LinkedIn.
You’ve hosted various events with different social walls. What is your experience with that so far and how do your visitors generally respond to the wall?
Our use cases are different depending on the wall, so for some of our events we have displayed it on site and some we have not. For our larger events, we display the wall on the screens in the room in between sessions. We loved seeing the reels from Instagram on the wall – those looked awesome on the huge screen.
Our biggest event of the year called Total Rewards was in May and the wall was super successful. We had so many posts coming in and it was really vibrant. We had a couple of screens set up and the wall was even embedded on our event website in advance so that people could see all of those posts that people are making from Echo. As for the additional onsite experience, we also embedded it in our mobile app so people can scroll through it in the app easily.
Since you have these different use cases and a hybrid setup, what’s your marketing strategy for using the social walls?
I definitely recommend using the wall in different ways to attract people. The screens give people something to look at at the event, but having it embedded on the website is also helpful. For that same event in May, I had pinned a poll at the top of the wall when it was embedded on the website that asked the question “What are you most excited about?” We got good responses and it already built some momentum, so I think there’s a lot of ways you could use the wall in advance to especially plan out a longer lead time.
Another use case we did is an activation campaign on site for our 70th anniversary. We did a separate wall for that where we only collected Direct Posts, to get pictures from people that had been to past events, courses, educational programs, affiliate events, etc.
My team also scanned in some really old photos that we had and then we uploaded those with captions. So we displayed that in advance. And then we also had a screen in the activation we had on site that kind of had those historic photos, which was super fun. The idea was to collect historical images and display the social wall on site as a way to say “Here’s the last 70 years.”
How was the process of setting up/maintaining the different walls and web embeds?
It’s usually our events team that does it all. So me mostly and my colleague on our team who handles our event tech. She embeds it into our event websites and our mobile app which is really easy to do. And then I am usually the one setting up all the walls and Echo campaigns, which is also super easy.
It’s also the same process for our other offices. We have an office in India and they do an event for our India members which they set up similarly, and then at our recent event in Canada, we followed the same strategy.
How is it to use Echo and the social walls together? How have they helped you build awareness?
I love the combination. I think having it in combination is great because the Echo posts help you populate the social wall before. People always want to know who else is going to the event, and with Echo, our attendees, exhibitors, and sponsors can easily put something cool on their social feeds and then we can raise awareness about the event and create a little bit of FOMO for people.
Aside from the events use case, what else are you using Walls.io for?
We have a couple additional things we’re using Walls.io for that are not events. We’re in the middle of a membership Echo campaign where we send out a members newsletter and a couple of dedicated emails that encourage people to post that they’re a member of World at Work. The goal is that through the Echo sharing feature, we’ll be able to fill out a social wall of all of these people who are members and perhaps embed that onto our website at some point. That’s been pretty successful so far.
We’re also running an experiment with our Event Experience Advisory Council, which is our volunteer council who helps advise our event planning and strategy. We did a post for them to share announcing that they’re on the council and I think about half of them shared it. We have a few other advisory councils that we wanted to test it on as well.
I can see a lot of other things we can use it for in the future. We could try to put together a wall through Echo, for example, that collects posts if you’ve completed your certification or a course. People always like announcing stuff like that on social, but they’re probably not going to go and make a graphic on Canva on their own.
Empower your community to spread the word with Walls.io Echo
What made you choose Walls.io as a solutions provider?
We came back to Walls.io again this year because we wanted to aggregrate LinkedIn hashtag posts on the social wall. LinkedIn is key for us because that’s where our community is typically posting about work and going to work events. As far as Echo goes – to be honest we were actually using Snöball for another event earlier in the year when Echo didn’t exist yet. And we did have success with it but there were some minor drawbacks as well. This year, our account manager at Walls.io reached out and offered us a trial of Echo as a beta tester and we dove right in. We’re using it as much as possible and we’re planning on using it again next year. It worked really well for us. We like being able to self-manage the campaigns and graphics and it works well for us to be able to email out the sharing links ourselves.
Wrapping it up
By embracing a tool like Walls.io, WorldatWork is able to foster a stronger sense of community among its members, employees, and event attendees. The combination of the social wall and the promotional marketing done through Echo, has helped them to amplify awareness both onsite and online, and achieve greater engagement at in-person events.