Engaging Employees During a Global Pandemic

To bring love and support to the Dutch Bros frontline employees as the COVID-19 pandemic upended life as we knew it. In a time of global instability, it was imperative that their culture demonstrated value and appreciation for employees who were risking their health to bring coffee and joy to their communities.

We used the absence of in-person events during the pandemic as an opportunity to engage with Dutch Bros employees in a more dynamic and flexible way than ever before. The result was Radiate Kindness – a yearlong, multi-channel campaign to support the Dutch Bros retail employees.

We created five distinct content channels to connect with the Dutch Bros team: Discoveries, Challenge, Good News, Stories, and Music.

Discoveries – We partnered with key thought leaders to provide inspiration tailored to younger audiences on topics such as creativity (IN-Q), bucket list building (Ben Nemptin), and writing your own story (Alex Banayan). joyful shared inspiration from these leaders in videos of in-depth interviews with a Dutch Bros team member, and then created related Challenges that encouraged audience participation.

Challenges – We provided prompts for the audience to engage with the Discoveries for a chance to win prizes. Among the challenge prizes were custom shoes, skydiving, and one employee won the opportunity to interview their idol, Simon Sinek.  

Good News – joyful partnered with GOODGOODGOOD to develop a custom Good News Paper for Dutch Bros that featured national and global stories of positive news, as well as stories from within the Dutch Bros universe that needed to be shared with the larger company. 

Stories – We collected stories from employees of their favorite experiences at Dutch Bros. Each story was animated and then shared throughout the company. This initiative was so powerful that it grew from an internal campaign to an external marketing initiative in 2022. 

Music – Dutch Bros team members curated playlists that were introduced with videos produced by joyful in which team members had the opportunity to explain the inspiration behind their playlist and deliver their own message to their teammates.