Christmas, the Geekolaus and a surprise
Christmas 2019 is history and we would like to take the time just before the turn of the year to thank all our customers for a wonderful Christmas season and a great 2019! As many of you will have noticed, there were lots of promotions and offers this December, for example in the form of our Advent calendar, Christmas santa and, of course, this year's Geekolaus.
The latter always has a very special significance for us, as it is one of our biggest and, above all, most interactive community events, which of course means that we want to make it as unique as possible every year. For this reason, this year we decided to focus on the strengths of Geekolaus again. What makes Geekolaus special for us and the community? How can we make Geekolaus something special?
It quickly became clear to us that this event is not just about going home with as much loot as possible at the end. Sure, presents are always good, but we also had the other promotions at the start and we wanted more for the Geekolaus - we wanted something personal. We think one of the great things about the Geekolaus is that it allows us to get closer to you, our customers. At the same time, it gives you an opportunity and a stage to turn the whole game around and surprise us. All participants can give free rein to their creativity and tell us how they enjoyed the year.
An event for our fans
For these reasons, we ultimately decided that this year's Geekolaus should be a little smaller and primarily aimed at getDigital fans. But what could it look like? We discussed this point at length.
How about a Christmas greeting! That's a good idea, preferably as nerdy as possible and maybe even personalized. Who has ideas? Glued to the "disc" of a floppy disk, that would be something. I've had this idea before, but it was still good.
But is that it, or do we need something else? What could everyone do with? What would be a good gift for the "fan geek"? Is merchandise an option? We dwelled on this question for a long time. We thought it was a good idea, but this year a certain competitor had attracted rather negative attention for having too much merchandise in its Advent calendar. Did we want to make the same mistake?
As you know, we ultimately decided against it. On the one hand, we like satire, and on the other, it's a campaign for our fans. We had decided that ourselves and were confident that you would be happy about it. Or at least laugh ;)
So the gift was sorted - excellent - ahh! One more idea: what if customers could choose who they receive a Christmas greeting from when they place their order?
Great idea, we'll do that, who will be in the selection?
The agony(s) of choice
The idea was actually a good one and very much in the spirit of this geekolaus, but it also involved a lot more effort than we had originally thought. Try to get individual Christmas greetings from ten colleagues in the Christmas rush by a certain deadline. Let me put it this way, it's rather difficult - very difficult. There were also some logistical problems with ordering the cards, as they were all different. In the end, we ordered a kind of "blank" on which we then printed the individual card texts. It was quite a time-consuming undertaking, but I think it was worth it in the end. As we had planned, there was a personalized greeting for each participant, which is also unique.
Wow! We did it!
It should be said at this point that we were already well behind schedule. Now we just had to bag everything quickly and then we were through. "Quickly" then took several more hours. Despite pre-sorting, you shouldn't underestimate how time-consuming it can be to make sure that the name on the shipping label is also the name on the greeting card. However, with two days behind schedule, we still managed to get your Geekolaus gifts to the post office and we hope that they all reached you in time!
As we know that some of you would have liked to have had more than one card, you can find all the cards as pictures here. They were personalized and signed, but only for Geekolaus ;)
Your contributions to Geekolaus
The gift you receive from us for Geekolaus is of course only a small part of the whole campaign. What gives us even more pleasure are the many gifts we receive from you every time! Personally, I was very impressed by how much effort this year's participants put in and I had a lot of fun unwrapping the many packages in the stream and presenting them to you.
Those of you who have been following the stream already know that there were a lot of very cool and, above all, different entries this year. Hats off again for that in any case! I was really touched by how much time and effort many of you invested. From simple Christmas greetings, poems and handicrafts to self-written songs, everything was included this year. You can find a few of the submissions as pictures here:
All your entries are currently decorating our stream room. But many of them will also find a new home in other places in the office or with our Christmas elves. :)
Thank you very much, we were very happy and it was a nice end to the sometimes stressful Christmas season ;)
We wish you all, depending on when you read this, a happy new year or a happy new year. You are the best, thank you for your loyalty and support, we are looking forward to a great new year with you!
Nerdy greetings, Seppi