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Many of today’s industrial and service companies can trace their roots to the great industrial and economic ferment of the first decade of the twentieth century. It was a time of tinkerers and entrepreneurs, many of whom experimented with then new-fangled science and manufacturing processes: electricity, steelmaking, assembly lines. It also was a time when the moneyed interests of Wall Street and Boston and Chicago began to form the corporate organization that still exists in one form or another today.
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So where does that leave corporate communicators charged with coordinating a 50th, 75th, or 100th anniversary celebration? Up defecation creek with no visible means of locomotion if the thing involves a last-minute struggle to cobble together an anniversary piece for the employee magazine.
The key to any historical celebration is planning. Corporate communicators need to know what they’re going to do, how they’re going to do it, who’s going to do it and when it’s going to get done. They should understand that an anniversary celebration is a golden opportunity to convey the organization’s values and traditions to a number of audiences, including employees, retirees, customers, shareholders and seniors. An anniversary celebration is a chance to use the company’s past as a teaching tool for the future.
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It’s also an excellent opportunity to wed the corporate past to a marketing theme. The spin-offs of an anniversary celebration are literally endless – books, brochures, videos, displays, news releases, speakers’ bureaus, educational programs and the like – and they are all readily adapted to the organization’s current marketing program. And it doesn’t hurt to adopt a few offbeat ideas for the anniversary celebration.
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Corporate communicators are missing a bet if they don’t take notice of what their colleagues in the healthcare industry are doing in this area. In the 1990s, we worked with a Minnesota hospital that was approaching its centennial. At the time, the hospital was an acute care hospital with 426 beds, a workforce of 2,500 employees, and an 800-member medical staff representing 57 medical specialties.
The hospital established its centennial steering committee more than two years prior to its actual centennial. The committee consisted of the hospital CEO, representatives of the medical staff, volunteers, its former CEO and members of the hospital communications department. The steering committee decided on the scope of the celebration it wanted to undertake and solicited bids from local and regional agencies interested in coordinating the program.
We were selected for the project and completed a 300-page history book, a booklet for hospital employees, an eight-panel brochure and two audio-visual programs (one designed for general audiences and a second designed for Methodist Church audiences in Minnesota).
I can’t emphasize strongly enough the value of starting early. To be successful, an anniversary celebration should have all of the collateral materials in hand at the beginning of the anniversary year. The research and writing involved in a major celebration is not going to be done overnight. Add to that all of the minor details that inevitably crop up, and a two-year lead time is not unreasonable.
We recently worked with a gas utility in Indiana on its fiftieth anniversary celebration. The planning there was absolutely first-rate. They allowed the first year for the research and writing of an anniversary book, a second year for the design of the volume and the third year for the printing and production of any collateral materials, allowing for budget fluctuations. If two years lead time is good, three years is even better.
That’s not to say that every company wants to undertake a major project. But even an anniversary booklet commissioned for the actual celebration can take upwards of six months. We recently produced a 32-page 100th anniversary booklet for a municipal utility client in Idaho. We were first contacted in early 2000, and the booklet was distributed in early 2001. The utility’s anniversary had been in the planning stage longer than that, and the publication of the booklet was enhanced dramatically by period historical photographs we located in the archives of the local county historical society.
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Planning gives the communications department the option of tying the anniversary celebration to the current marketing program. The visual images we unearth for a book lend themselves well to the production of a video history. We tape-record all of the oral history interviews used in the research phase of the project, and those tapes can enhance a history video or radio spots advertising the anniversary. One client – a family-owned southern Indiana furniture manufacturer – videotaped family members, retirees and longtime employees, who then narrated much of the history in the company’s 50th anniversary video. One of our utility clients took a number of the historical facts and visual images used in its book and turned them into a handsome calendar distributed to the utility’s employees.
Although we generally steer clients away from centennial bric-a-brac – coffee mugs, key chains and the like – offbeat collateral materials sometimes work. Several years back, we were working with a small bank in
Michigan’s Upper Peninsula that was celebrating its centennial. The centennial committee wanted to include recipes from the region’s many ethnic groups in its history booklet. We were initially skeptical, but we incorporated recipe cards as a design element in the booklet. The client loved it, and I’m sure they’re still getting calls for the history book with the recipes.
Anniversary celebrations serve a multitude of purposes. They can be designed to highlight the company’s history or can be used for a single purpose, such as the anniversary of a power plant, a manufacturing facility, or a general office building. In any case, if they are to be done successfully, they’ll involve months and years of clear-headed planning.
So, plan, plan, plan…and happy anniversary.
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As today’s companies continue to examine corporate culture and organizational development, corporate history becomes an increasingly important tool. Institutional memory is a key to providing clues to the direction a company intends to take in the 21st century.
Corporate history is a valuable promotional investment, too. Brochures, books, annual reports, videos and print/broadcasting campaigns can be adapted to carry a historical message. The nostalgia value of corporate history books and videos is a particularly effective method of targeting senior citizens, an audience that many companies traditionally neglect when it comes to marketing and promotion.
Baby boom employees and customers, especially those over the age of 40, are historically inquisitive. Corporate history can teach younger employees valuable lessons gleaned from the company’s past.
| Adapted from Utility
Communicator’s Exchange, Staskal Utility Communications, 1992 |
Bill Beck operates Lakeside Writers’ Group in Indianapolis, Indiana.
He offers a full line of corporate history services to clients in a variety of industries.
He has written 40 corporate and institutional histories for companies that include Kimball International, Northern States Power, International Association of Assembly Managers, Idaho Falls Power, Reilly Industries, and Methodist Hospital of St. Louis Park, Minnesota.info@yourbusinesshistory.com
Updated January 30, 2005
©2000-2005 Lakeside Writers' Group, Inc.
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