Like many other companies, in March 2020, Sun Life’s employees transitioned from working in our offices to working from home. This was also a time of uncertainty for our clients in many ways, both business and personal. We created this video to assure our clients and business partners that this transition would not affect our excellent service and that we didn’t miss a beat. We also wanted to let our clients know the different ways we were pivoting to support them during the pandemic. And finally, we wanted to create an emotional connection between our employees and the viewer—our clients—to demonstrate the caring and commitment of our people in their own words.
Typically, we would work with our in-house multimedia services team to coordinate interviews with all participants across our various offices in the United States, with professional lighting, filming and everything else that goes into the production of such a campaign. However, this time we had to rely on our employees speaking to the audience from home, using their built-in laptop cameras. This approach brought home the reality of working from home, as the viewer could see employee’s homes in the background.
Our event services team provided clear instructions and best practices to our “talent” prior to filming and were available via Zoom to help guide the shoots remotely.
We included pets and children as well, as most people were navigating this with new “co-workers” as well. We recruited employees from different departments, finding a nice mix to represent the wide diversity of our employees. The script was simple, and we edited together the best reads from the employees to create a seamless and heartfelt video that conveyed our brand promise of caring, relevant, and optimistic.
The video was first debuted internally in April by Sun Life U.S. president Dan Fishbein via the Workplace by Facebook platform and quickly brought to the attention of Sun Life’s global employee population by Sun Life CEO Dean Connor in one of his weekly video updates. The video was also placed on our special COVID-19 Response page on our website, played at the beginning of several client webinars, and shared via social media.
This video has been played over 1,300 times on our COVID-19 response page of our website and was played at the beginning of nearly every one of the 31 external webinars we held during 2020, with roughly 44,306 attendees.
For videos shared to social media by Sun Life U.S. in 2020, the video achieved the following impressive results:
As part of our #TeamSunLifeUS Social Selling and Social Media Ambassador program, where it was shared to social media by our employees, it reached a potential audience of nearly 17,000. Of the more than 700 unique pieces of content shared by through the program for 2020, the video was also:
For content shared on LinkedIn by Sun Life U.S. president Dan Fishbein, who also appears in the video, it had:
The was made available internally to employees via Workplace by Facebook and has been viewed:
Most importantly, the video succeeded in conveying the message that we continue to be here for our clients, no matter where "here' is, and that we are always #SunLifeStrong!
