Camelot's goal as the operator of the UK National Lottery is to maximise returns to National Lottery projects by continually offering lottery tickets in a range of socially responsible ways. Since its founding in 1994, Camelot has made a winning business of running one of the world’s most successful lotteries. By putting players first and offering an integrated multi-channel experience, it has achieved an unparalleled track-record in innovation and long-term, responsible growth.
Camelot employs around nine hundred people, mostly based at its head offices in Watford.
In November, Camelot held a conference for 160 middle and senior management to explore the company’s five-year vision and strategy, as well as to seek views on how best to achieve its strategic objectives.
“The OMBEA data has made it much simpler to get buy-in from around the business!”
Simon Leibling, Head of Programme Delivery, Camelot Group
Ombea ResponseApp was the solution chosen by Camelot. This is a smartphone alternative to the Ombea ResponsePad voting keypads. With ResponseApp, each delegate can vote directly from their smartphone into the presenter’s PowerPoint slide deck.
Although National Lottery players trust lady luck to smile upon them and deliver a life-changing result, Camelot didn’t leave the success of the conference to chance: Instead, they adopted a focused approach to ensure the conference fully engaged people in thinking deeply about the company’s digital future. Their strategy was to move delegates ‘out of their comfort zone’ by using a non-conventional seating plan and deploying Ombea voting technology to get delegates responding to a range of important topics in real time, with the results immediately displayed and used by the conference speakers.
Questions included: ‘traffic lights’ to see how people felt about the strategy; ranking questions used to vote on the best team assignment; and open text questions during breaks to create an inclusive channel of communication between the conference organisers and delegates.
Feedback about the event was also collected to improve future conferences. Ombea’s class leading analytics ensured the conference organisers had all the data from the votes at their fingertips and were able to interrogate this after the event to extract maximum strategic value from staff participation.
Bringing so many middle and senior managers together for an event such as this is a big commitment for a company, but it can pay real dividends when staff share crucial expertise and critical insights. Camelot wanted the conference to be about genuine engagement with staff views rather than a more passive opportunity for information delivery. This conference achieved that goal by combining the programme’s design with numerous opportunities for employees’ voices to be heard. Ombea’s voting technology ensured this could be done in an efficient and timely way.
We caught up with Simon a few weeks after the conference to find out how the Ombea data had come to life at Camelot. “So far we’ve used the charts and graphs in presentation meetings to build the story around team engagement and particular areas of interest. The open-text responses have helped us follow up after the conference to ensure that commitments and suggestions made on the day are implemented. Obviously, there’s a lot to do, but the Ombea data has made it much simpler to get buy-in from around the business”.
