CultureCon Adds Context and Empathy with AirDeck
CultureCon’s mission is to inspire positive change around organizational culture. They do this through community events, custom courses, consulting services, and virtual learning, but are best known for their annual conference, CultureCon 2023, hosted in Madison, WI. Their flagship event boasts speakers and attendees from companies including Spotify, Axios, LinkedIn, SAP, Credit Karma, Wikimedia Foundation, and many others. The goal of the conference is to equip the audience with the tools and inspiration needed to become agents of culture change at their respective workplaces.
Nick Lombardino, CultureCon’s co-founder, stated, “The value is in getting people together in the same room to talk about engaging topics surrounding workplace culture and sharing lessons learned. Everyone leaves feeling a deeper sense of connection and a spirit of accountability to act.”
CultureCon’s first in-person event was in 2018 and the positive momentum continues today as the conference gains national notoriety among speakers and attendees. An event of this caliber requires sponsors to provide support and commitment towards building more uplifting, fulfilling, and healthier workplaces. In order to attract a long list of high quality sponsors, CultureCon uses AirDeck for their sponsorship package decks and to onboard conference speakers.
How it started
Prior to CultureCon, Nick worked as the Director of Employee Experience at FarWell. He was introduced to AirDeck there and used it as a tool to build out the employee onboarding experience. Nick saw the value in adding voice to the asynchronous onboarding process to make it more personal and digestible for employees. The modularity of the AirDeck platform allowed the team at FarWell to customize decks and quickly edit or reuse the content and audio files in other decks. Nick found the tool integral to aid in FarWell’s growth.
When CultureCon was created, AirDeck was a tool that Nick planned to harness to attract and secure sponsors for their annual conference. Sponsorships are vital for the growth and success of CultureCon. Nick needed a way to communicate sponsorship levels, benefits, and value through more than just a static deck. A sponsorship deck without audio or video lacks context, a human touch, and emotional tone that can inspire someone to act.
How it Worked
AirDeck’s document communication platform enabled CultureCon to use audio or video to personalize and add clarity to their sponsorship decks. It also allowed the team to create an instant connection with potential sponsors.
“The value of AirDeck is adding context to a message, so you have peace of mind that your message is communicated in the way you wish. The written word doesn’t have voice inflection, tone, and empathy. That goes a long way. We need to communicate to our potential sponsors the value they get if they partner with us and it’s all contextualized through AirDeck,” said Nick.
AirDeck gives you the tools to rinse and repeat the smart way so creating personalized content is quick and painless. CultureCon found this to be true when they needed to redesign their sponsorship deck. The ability to record directly to each slide was a game changer.
“We recently redesigned our sponsorship slide deck. It was nice to keep audio from previous decks, cycle in a new slide, and not have to re-record the whole thing again,” explained Nick.
AirDeck worked so well for communicating with sponsors that CultureCon decided to leverage the tool to onboard conference speakers. The asynchronous process allows CultureCon to walk speakers through the conference processes and tools. This gives speakers the power to view the onboarding on their timetable — and as many times as they want.
The Results
AirDeck is the cornerstone for CultureCon’s sponsorship decks. For an organization that inspires positive change in organizational culture, it’s crucial for customer touchpoints to be rooted in empathy. AirDeck is the mechanism that helps CultureCon represent their organization’s vision and mission in a way that reflects this.
“On a deeper level, there is a feeling of empathy because you can hear the voice and the tonal inflection. I think it humanizes the message more. That is super important. AirDeck is the best partner in that regard,” shared Nick.
CultureCon also used AirDeck to make way for massive time savings. Because their sponsorship decks leave nothing up to interpretation, sponsors often commit without a meeting.
“It has worked where we don’t even have to talk to the sponsor before they commit to a sponsorship level. It saves time and energy talking synchronously,” said Nick.
The Future with AirDeck
As CultureCon continues to create impactful conferences, they’ll turn to AirDeck to help them easily create decks that ooze context and empathy. In fact, CultureCon plans to expand its AirDeck use cases in the future.
“We work with a group of external consultants that provide us feedback and insights. We do a monthly update for them with current state and goals. Historically, we record an audio message and send it through text. However, it lacks visual representation. So, we may switch those monthly updates to AirDecks,” stated Nick.
From sponsorship outreach to onboarding and monthly updates, AirDeck has and will continue to make a difference for CultureCon well into the future.
