Alberta Blue Cross - Staff Assembly 2019

Alberta Blue Cross holds a bi-annual general staff meeting, updating employees with corporate updates and celebrating their successes. They also invite guest speakers to inspire, enlighten, educate and entertain, relating to topics of health and wellness. Organizing the event is lead by the Corporate Communications team. The Alberta Blue Cross executive suite oversees the project as they each have their own respective corporate high-level message to communicate to the rest of the organization. This year, I was tasked to develop the visuals for the 2019 edition of Alberta Blue Cross' Staff Assembly, with the topic of addressing mental health and depression. Within our committee in Corporate Communications, we came up with the idea of reframing the conversation depression and mental health.

The concept was simple: frames and speech balloons, dark (blue) and bright (yellow/orange) and combining the two, as a discussion of coping with depression.

The required collateral to be developed from me were tickets; decor for the event, which was being held at The Citdadel Theatre; internal signage of the event at Alberta Blue Cross; and supporting imagery for internal digital communications supporting the event.

One of the requirements was to alleviate some of the administrative work in putting together ticket packages to all 1,200 staff members. We achieved this by incorporating the ticket and the name tag into one piece, of which it is perforated down the center, so the name tag half (of which the recipient will write their own name and department) will be used with the lanyard holder while the other half will be used to for the prize draw boxes. This immensely reduced the time required to assemble the packages as well as removing the responsibility of proofing each of the staff member's name off of the administrative assistants. 

Developing the decor has two functions: adding some branding to the event as well as directional signage. The floor decals and X-frame banners were used help staff members navigate them to the Shoctor Theatre at The Citadel. Window decals and instructional signs were set up throughout the theatre lobby. We had a number of visits to the Citadel to plan out on where signage would be placed and getting permission to place the floor decals within the building. Time was allotted for set up in advance as well as avoiding heavy foot traffic in the Citadel itself during the morning rush hour.

My learnings from this project is building imagery for communications: from introduction, a few months prior, to building and maintaining interest of the event. How I approach that was use one of the speech bubbles and alternate them for each batch of communication pieces, which included emails, small posters, building lobby screens, and intranet web banners.