What makes Delta Dental a great place to work? Our communications and people teams knew we had something special. They conducted internal and external research to define the company’s unique strengths as an employer and to tell a compelling, accurate story of what it means to have a career at Delta Dental. These learnings informed the company’s Employee Value Proposition (EVP) that would attract, engage and retain talent.
Our Brand + Creative internal agency was brought in to bring the new EVP to life with a branded campaign that would excite current employees and boost recruitment efforts.
As a Brand + Creative team, our challenge was to take the research and framework for our employee value proposition (EVP) and make it accessible and inspirational to current and future employees through the creative. It also needed to be uniquely branded as Delta Dental. The consulting firm provided a rough concept for “Behind the Smile” that our leadership was excited about. Our creative team took it from there – changing to “Behind our smiles” to put the emphasis on the employees and then showcase the components of our EVP that support that person, as well as the mission of our organization that employees work together to achieve.
We knew we wanted to feature our own employees in the creative. A crucial component of our employee value proposition at Delta Dental is our people-first culture – and we wanted to make that a key component of our EVP campaign. The campaign features actual employees, celebrating who they are as people first with unique identifier taglines. We added a graphic overlay of a smile that both brings in our purpose as an oral health company and gives the impression of a hug, symbolizing support for our employees. This became a central symbol of the campaign.
From there, we had the central elements of our campaign, and we began to build it out for its internal debut with a complete design system. Company assets included employee brochures, office signage, presentation slides and more. Delta Dental introduced the campaign at an all-employee Town Hall to much buzz. The company launch included something that invited all employees to get in on the fun. We created an AR filter where employees could create their own Behind our smiles portrait complete with the signature smile graphic to share on social media. Employees also had the option to add their own email signature that included personal titles first and job title last.
The campaign also targeted potential employees with the creation of a video featuring three of our employees, as well as social media posts designed to attract talent and showcase Delta Dental’s culture.
Behind our smiles contributed to our organization’s culture in a big way by bringing out what makes us special. Employees introduce themselves as dog moms, human dads, music lovers, football fans, mountain bikers and a lot more in addition to their job titles. The Behind our smiles design system brought a fresh, branded and cohesive look to everything from our LinkedIn page to PowerPoint slides to holiday gift cards. That authentic feel plus the key messages of our employee value proposition have attracted new talent to apply. We have some numbers too, in case “data enthusiast” is one of your titles.
Internal
• In a post-Town Hall survey, 87% of employees said they feel proud to work for Delta Dental because of the campaign.
• Over 10,600 downloads of the “Behind Our Smiles” AR filter on Instagram. That translates to each employee in the company downloading the filter at least twice.
• 78% of Delta Dental employees opened the campaign launch message containing all assets, and 18% of those employees clicked through to view the assets, ahead of the average open rate of 61% and average CTR of 5%.
• ~1,070 unique views (1 in 4 employees) of the campaign assets on the Intranet.
External
• Job applications increased 36% over prior year, demonstrating the campaign's effectiveness in attracting top talent and boosting our social media presence.
• The boosted LinkedIn campaign generated 74,249 impressions with an above-average engagement rate of 1.7%.
