Importance of managing promotional staff who work on their own

October 19, 2010

On Friday the 15th October, Ngage delivered a national sampling campaign for Wilkinsons in conjunction with Kavanagh Communications, to sample their new ranges of own brand products.

Ngage employed 50 promotional staff nationally throughout the UK for a single day of in-store sampling at 50 separate Wilkinsons stores. There are a number of ways to ensure that an activity like this is a success and there are some fairly easy wins to ensure that all promotional staff arrive, that they are proactive and self motivated and that they are able to work unsupervised.

Firstly the agency that you use must be able to demonstrate a proven track record of being able to deliver a campaign similar to yours, Its always a very good idea to get a reference from past customers on how they have performed. From personal experience all agencies I know of that have attempted to deliver campaigns in a large number of geographic location – mess it up!

There are a number of questions in addition that you need to ask before allocating work to the agency:-

1) Can you demonstrate how thorough your database of staff is within each geographic area, including how recently all these staff have worked for the agency?

2) How do you ensure the promotional staff will arrive on time and not leave early?

3) How can you guarantee that all promotional staff will arrive?

4) If they are sampling food, can you demonstrate how many of your staff have food and hygiene certificates?

5) How will you manage the staff on the day, ask for detailed information including ways of communication with the staff and take careful note of how long it would take to contact each of the staff members?

6) How and when will you receive a report?

I know it sounds logical but when you are discussing these points with the agencies, you need to be very practical in your calculations for example, if all promotional staff are starting their shift at 10am, and there are 50 promotional staff, you need to take into consideration that it will take approximately 3  minutes to speak to each employee at the start of the day. This would mean that if the agency had one staff member contacting staff at 10am, the agency would only be able to confirm if all staff are in place after 150 minutes. Therefore 2.5 hours later can they only start reacting to no-shows, and that’s far too late!

For every campaign like this management and process is vital. The best way to control this as a client brand is to agree a penalty clause for lateness / non-arrival of staff, and get each of the retail outlet managers to email you by 10:15 to confirm staff have arrived and all is ok, this will allow you to be one up on the agency.

If you would like to discuss more specific ways to control this type of activity, please contact Mark Meurer on 0845 680 0682.