The Troll, Beyondtime and the Magic Clock campaign by Nova Post

Nova Post Olena Plakhova, Chief Reputation and Marketing Officer  Anastasiia Yalova, Head of Employer Brand Development Katerina Slavynska, Employer Brand Manager Irina Ivlieva, Corporate Psychologist Others Natalya Shcherbyna, Curator of the Corporate Program to Support the Mental Health of Employees Halyna Budilova, Author Kateryna Kovtunenko, Illustrator

The fairy tale "Troll, Beyondtime and the Magic Clock" A long-term internal communications project aimed at building loyalty to the company. From 2022, the project focuses on psychological and emotional help for children of company employees during the war. What and why: Nova Post* pays great attention to its employees. Currently, the company employs 45,000 people. HR tasks include communications that help employees' children learn more about their parents' important work and form a positive attitude towards the company from a young age. To do this, since 2020, we have been creating fairy tales for the children of employees about St. Nicholas' helpers - their mothers and fathers, who help deliver children's gifts during the New Year period. In 2023, we released the fairy tale "Troll, Beyondtime and the Magic Clock". Project goals: - To help tell the children of employees how important their parents' work is - Through the interaction of the story's heroes with fairy-tale characters, talk with children about important sensible things - war, inclusiveness, etc. - To help relieve emotional tension and feelings of fear in employees' children - To form a positive attitude towards the Nova Post brand from childhood *Nova Post is a well-known and popular Ukrainian company that has been helping Ukrainians to quickly send and receive parcels and goods for 23 years. As for the beginning of 2024, Nova Post has representative offices in 12 European countries Current situation and research: According to the company's tradition, we give gifts to all our employees' children on the eve of St. Nicholas Day. In 2020, during the pandemic, we created our first special gift - the fairy tale "Troll, the Giant, and the Miracle Car". The main characters of the fairy tale are mom and dad, who help Saint Nicholas pack and deliver children's gifts. In the process, they face various obstacles and use their superpowers to overcome the challenges and deliver all the gifts. In 2021, the fairy tale "Troll, the Starlet, and the Cosmic Pebble" was published. The year 2022 became the year of a full-scale war between Russia and Ukraine, so we created the fairy tale "Troll, the Cargo Plane, and the Magic Rainbow", which correctly described the essence of the war for children's psychology and supported children in new conditions, demonstrating the importance of the work of their parents - employees of Nova Post. In 2023, we created a continuation of the story "Troll, Beyondtime and the Magic Clock", which, in addition to the previous topics, raised the issue of inclusion. Why is this project special Using a fairy tale to convey information about the company, the work of its employees, and the impact on society allows you to talk to children about important things in a language they understand - through fairy-tale characters and events. The involvement of psychologists in the project team allowed us to create a story that has a therapeutic effect. Companies often build communications with students to familiarize them with their brand while they are still studying. We decided to make everyone fall in love with Nova Post from a young age. How did we do it What we did to implement the plan: 1. To join the project team, we invited 15 child psychologists, along with children's writer and illustrators, who work with children of different ages. They not only read the text of the fairy tale but also considered in detail all the illustrations of the story. They made their corrections and helped to reveal the theme of the fairy tale correctly so that the story had a therapeutic effect and did not traumatize the children's psyche. 2. To work on the character Myron, who returned after the war and has prostheses, we invited representatives of such NGOs as “Veteran Hub” and “Barrier-Free” to consult our project team. 3. At the final stage, before printing, the fairy tale was read by five children of Nova Post employees of different ages. This focus group helped determine the relevance and interest of the story. Each of the five children read the fairy tale to the end and evaluated the work positively. 4. To increase interest in the fairy tale, we created its visualization with the use of artificial intelligence, which was seen by the children of employees on New Year's Eve. 5. We integrated the main characters of the fairy tale into the entertainment program of the holiday tour "Delivery of the fairy tale to your city" created by Nova Post. 6. In order for the heroes of the fairy tale to become a part of children's everyday life, we developed a merch line based on the story. We used both internal and external communication channels, telling about the fairy tale: - Telegram channel for employees - Internal online digest - Printed newspaper for employees - Social networks of employees - YouTube channel of the company - Festive New Year locations: "Winter Country" in Kyiv and "Fairy tale delivery to your city" in 17 cities of Ukraine What have we achieved: 1.The fourth fairy tale was read by 25,000 children of the company's employees and more than 2,000 children who visited our holiday locations. 2. In total, we gave away 137,000 books about Saint Nicholas' helpers, thanks to which we got little ambassadors. 3. In addition, each issue of the fairy tale is accompanied by a large number of positive mentions of Nova Post as a place of work. So, after the release of the fourth fairy tale, we received more than 1,200 posts about the fairy tale and Nova Post in general on the pages of employees on all social networks. The total reach of the posts was almost 2,100,000 reactions. 4. Thanks to the initiative, according to the results of an internal study, the emotional state of children from the frontline regions improved by 15%. Children called visiting the holiday the best event in recent years; some visited the country's capital for the first time in their lives. The integration of characters from the fairy tale into the holiday program of the tour "Delivery of a fairy tale to your city" positively affected children's psycho-emotional state, allowing them to interact with their favorite characters not only on the pages of the book.