The Intranet Easter Egg Hunt

I recently completed a revamp of one of our businesses sections on our Intranet. We culled a lot of outdated and superfluous content and drastically reduced the complexity of the navigation. After about 3 months worth of work we released the new section. Our standard communication methods were used to spread the word. These include a carefully drafted news item that displays on the Intranets front page, a banner add that also displays on the front page and an email message to everyone in the business unit from their General Manager which congratulated the project team and urged staff to visit the new section.

The revamped site was released on 6 March 2009 and usage statistics indicate that over the first 20 days visits the new homepage increased by 203% over the same period the previous month.

The project team wanted to follow up the initial launch with a competition specifically designed to not only maintain a high visitor rate but also to encourage users to navigate through the entire site, the Intranet Easter Egg Hunt.

How it worked
An image of an Easter Egg (60 x 60 pixels) was placed on 6 pages throughout the new site. There are 30 pages in total and the pages containing egg images were selected because they were considered key pieces of content.

An example of how the egg images were placed.

I created a html entry form that allowed users to submit their entries via the intranet. The online form allowed us to capture user ID and location of all those submitting an entry. This also allowed us to limit entries to one per user.

The prize on offer was a Cadbury Chocolate Egg & Bunny Hamper at a cost of < $100 AUD and the winner was to be drawn from all correct entries received by the competition close date.
The competition was launched via an Intranet news item on the 26th March 2009 and was set to run till Saturday April 4th, a total of 10 days.

The Results
User statistics over the 10 day competition period showed 362 visits to the sites homepage. This is an interesting statistic when compared to the actual number of entries we received. Were the additional users still interested in viewing the recent changes to the section? Have they found something of use or interest? Hopefully yes but time will tell.

Another very interesting statistic discovered was that the average number of visits to the pages that contained Easter Egg images over the competition period was 430. This is around 18% higher that the visits to the home page. I can only surmise that some crafty employees upon finding the location of an egg were emailing the links directly to colleagues. These people could then go directly to the egg location and bypass the homepage.

All in all the launch of the sub site redesign combined with the running of the Easter Egg Hunt competition was shown statistically to be a success. The Business Units Intranet presence was pushed to the top of the monthly ‘Most Popular Homepage’ list and the total number of unique visitors to the Homepage for the month soared to 858 as compared to 235 for the previous month.

The challenge now is for those responsible for maintaining the sub site to try and maintain its high ranking and as most of you Intranet Managers will know is not an easy task.

I have to conclude with the obvious pun that our Intranet Easter Egg Hunt was an Eggcellent idea.