Anatomy of a Show: Brandlandia

When you hear your company is going to have an Allhands, what’s the first thing you think of? For many, an image of executives droning on about information that could’ve been a Slack message comes to mind. You might even hear the word “Allhands” and immediately roll your eyes; it’s a boring waste of time, bordering on comical because of how out of touch it is.

Do any of those emotions ring a bell? If you’ve ever been victim to an out-of-touch Allhands, you’ve come to the right place.

Because at Brandlive, we live for creating high impact meetings and events, including your team’s Allhands – and the products we create are centered around making these experiences something worth tuning in for.

Practicing What We Preach

We don’t just create amazing software that turns sleepy slides into exciting shows. We use our products on the reg, including for our whole company Allhands. This bi-monthly production is created to be an experience the team looks forward to tuning in to. We present info in compelling ways, set amongst the meeting’s theme with creative segments, music videos, guest speakers, and more.

Curious as to how you can level-up your own Allhands? Read on for a detailed breakdown of one of our recent Allhands, and to find inspiration to start implementing more creative ideas into your next big internal meeting.

Planning Your Next Allhands

Finding Your Theme

Surely you know what topics you want to hit on during your Allhands (and if not, you should give yourself a long, hard look in the mirror and wonder if you actually need it in the first place.) Maybe you want to announce team promotions, give a quarterly sales update, talk about a new product that’s being launched, or introduce new hires to the team. 

No matter what content you’re bringing to the table that’s unique to your org, take a look at it and identify a theme that can tie everything together. A theme unifies the content while giving your meeting its own identity – something that distinguishes it from the last event. Themes make each meeting more memorable and give your audience something to look forward to. When you’re in the planning phase, realize that you might not find your theme until the end of your planning process, when you know your content best. 

For this Allhands in particular, we called it “Brandlandia,” a parody of the show Portlandia. Brandlive HQ is based in Portland, a place where being fully yourself is embraced with open arms. We love the city that we’re based in, and the ribbing from the show Portlandia has a special place in our hearts. Aside from that, our Allhands this time was focused on new initiatives we’ve implemented as a company, centered around ways to connect more as an org. With that info, we decided to lean into our Portland ways and center our show around the various ways we’re loving on our team.

Opening Music Video

One of Brandlive’s signature best practices around any meeting, show or event is to start with a music video. A music video gives attendees a few minutes of buffer time to roll into the meeting in case they’re running late or their prior meeting went long, ensuring they won’t miss any of the important stuff. You can also use this to establish your theme for the meeting, as this type of entrance will set the tone: is this meeting upbeat, emotional, playful, serious, or something else? 

For Brandlandia, we created our own spin on the iconic Portlandia intro. Created from stock video, Brandlive Studios put together a longer intro to usher attendees into the event, set the scene, and hype people up. We also used this time to introduce the teammates who were leading segments during the event, just like a TV show would list the stars right at the beginning.

Production

The majority of Brandlandia was shot live in our 4th-floor studio, using a two-camera set-up, professional lights, and a video wall in the background featuring various shots of Portland. Other live elements utilized Greenroom to connect with folks outside of the office during our new-hire segments. We also included a pre-recorded segment, shot just days before on the 5th floor of our office and edited by our production department in a few hours. Mixing live and pre-recorded segments is one simple way you can up-level the production value of your Allhands without having the stress of having to do the whole thing live.

Anatomy of Our Allhands

Opening From the CEO

After our music video intro, Brandlive’s CEO, Sam, got the show started, giving some background into Portland’s geography, talking about the many bridges in Portland, their unique uses, and the way they connect the entire city. This intro continued to drive home our theme of cultivating connection throughout our entire org and embracing everyone’s authentic selves. 

Put a Telly On It

Staying with our Portlandia theme, two beloved Brandlive teammates came together to perform a skit around the show’s infamous Put a Bird On It skit. Making it our own, we swapped out “a bird” for “Telly,” our lovable robot mascot, and stuck him to everything in our 5th-floor cafe. 

This segment reinforced the theme and kept things silly and light: a reminder that your Allhands doesn’t need to be all data and slides, but that it can be just as fun as the latest streaming session. This is also a perfect example of how to include different folks on your team and lean into their strengths (and quirks), making your Allhands a true company-wide event to better connect your entire org – who flooded our chat with comments, gifs and emojis throughout the now legendary skit.

Spotlight on Brand Culture: Creating Connection

Announcing our new company culture initiatives was Steph, our Director of Experience Ops (and someone you might have noticed in the previous bit). The segment included a video of LeBron James mentioning his love for Taco Tuesdays, which led into our TACO core values and when we’ll be having team Taco Days over the next few months. 

Outside of that, we’ve begun to implement other initiatives to promote team building, with fun activities on certain days of the week:

• Woohoo Wednesday: Every Wednesday afternoon, teammates in the office are encouraged to head down the street to Kate’s, a new plant-based and gluten-free ice cream shop in the neighborhood, for a free scoop.
• Thursday Happy Hours: Once a month, different teams and departments within the org will lead a themed happy hour in the office. One example is during AAPI Heritage month, where we showcased various local food vendors and activities that some of our APPI teammates shared. 
• Friday Breakfast Club: We offer free breakfast at different places around town on Friday mornings for anyone on the team that wants to stop in before heading into the office.

These initiatives are great ways to support the businesses in our neighborhood, and to encourage our hybrid teammates to make it into the office and meet others in the org they may not normally have the ability to mingle with.

On Theme Segues into Additional Segments

Portlandia is full of classic skits, so there was no shortage of them to use in breaking up our Allhands to stay on theme and keep the audience engaged. Here, we used the skit of Fred Armisen’s character riding his bike through Portland and passionately vocalizing the nuances of the cycling community. 

This short video was the perfect segue – and chance to give our next presenter time to get situated on-stage – into introducing Amy, VP of People & Culture, to explain our new Green Pass initiative: ride your bike, drive your electric car, or take public transit into the office and receive a monthly stipend to cover part of the cost of these modes of transportation. This is all to also align with Portland’s environmental initiative of having net-zero carbon emissions by 2050, so this new program is our opportunity to help out – even in a small way.

Aligning Our Values: Equitable Pay Across the Board

We then brought our new Chief People Officer, Chris, onto the stage to chat about the steps we’re taking to evolve our performance management and compensation processes. This included taking a holistic look into compensation, ensuring that there is equity within similar roles and functions across teams, as well as moving to a refreshed review process. Including segments like these mixed in with the more lighthearted ones allows us to disperse this important info in a way that’ll make it more likely the audience will be tuned in to hear it.

Truth or Dare: Meet The New Hires

With all of the big topics out of the way, we start to wind down the Allhands by meeting our newest crop of Brandlovelies! Our new hire intro has evolved over the years (for a while we were playing Two Truths and a Lie), but with recent success and excitement building around Truth or Dare, we decided to implement it for our six newest employees this time around. Between singing, dancing, and collaborating with the other new hires, we all got some good laughs getting to know the newbies.

Q&A Time

Throughout the Allhands, attendees were encouraged to submit questions through the Brandlive platform. Towards the end, Sam answered these questions (a lighter load this time around) in a real-time effort to not leave any lingering thoughts on the table. This option is just one more way you can keep your audience engaged and included during the Allhands, so everyone can have a voice.

Closing Out the Show

Sam ends the Allhands with another story about Portland, wrapping up on-theme of how Portland got its name based on a chance coin flip. This led to how, while there’s a lot of luck in the business world, there are just some things you can’t leave up to chance; like our culture, our values, the decisions we make as a team, and the decisions we make as individual employees. These choices give us the best chance of success, to build our culture, and to create connections that bridge us together.

The show ushered people out to a cover of “Float On” by Portland’s own Modest Mouse; one last touch to end our Portlandia theme of connecting with the eccentric culture we fully embrace.