Team Building, Multi-Tasking, and a Semi-viral video

I've worked at a lot of nonprofits that don't take the time to invest in team building or professional development. Often, larger nonprofits assume folks are going to last slightly on either side of 18 months, so they don't bother to create a sense of community, shared purpose, or mission.

Thankfully, my current organization takes the time to develop staff as teams and collectively. Somehow I ended up on this year's Staff Fun Day committee. We were tossing around ideas about how to bring our staff together, in teams and as a whole, to celebrate our collective goals, successes, and skills. This was right around the time the SPCA viral video was gaining popularity, and I thought, how hard could that be? We selected a song we thought was representative of what we do, divided the staff into teams, and I taped my DSLR onto the back of a wheeling office chair and filmed our staff's interpretation of the lyrics. 

The resulting video is fun, hilarious, and a great snapshot of what we do every day: working in teams and as a group to go the extra mile (or 500) for our clients. Not only that, it was great social media fodder, and one of the most successful engagement tools we've come up with. I'm all for multi-tasking but this video really did the trick. We've used it as a marketing and development tool and are likely to do so all summer. Here's the final product. 

Right now we're sitting around 3,000 views, which given the amount of competing content, is pretty good. Is it viral? Not yet, but I'm holding out hope. Either way, it was fun and helps people see the lighter side of what we do!