Thank God It's Friday: A Story of Transforming Business in Lockdown

Thank God it’s Friday – a feel-good phrase that has virtually no meaning during such disruptive and deeply unsettling times, and one that many people are probably feeling nostalgic about. It’s also one that was highly significant for our business.

It was 4.55pm on Friday, 6 March. Just 24 hours earlier, the UK’s first coronavirus fatality had been reported. While every department worked at full speed to finish the final touches for the 2020 People’s Postcode Lottery Charity Gala – an annual star-studded event due to be held in Edinburgh five days later – a few members of the Senior Management team gathered informally in our atrium.

We discussed the virus spreading across the country and Europe, when one of our managing directors asked, “Should we cancel the charity gala?”

What a question. The mood of our nation was still one of defiance, and though calling it off was unthinkable, it seemed right, even after months of rigorous planning. No one debated it: the answer was decisive and had no easy outcomes. “Let’s pull it,” we agreed.

It was one of the first major events cancelled in Scotland and … thank God it was Friday.

That allowed our teams a crucial 48 hours to not only postpone the event – which involved contacting every single participant, charity, and guest, including Sir David Attenborough – but also gear up for a remarkable business transformation. Our Marketing, Communications, and Events departments were thrusted into a weekend they could never have imagined.

Our strong 13-person IT team – who’d been quietly working on a plan to facilitate home working, specifically for our Customer Experience department – were also hurtling into action. In just a matter of hours, they’d prepared and repurposed laptops for home use for 150 people.

On Friday, the Customer Experience team – which is critical to the business – was working as normal in our Edinburgh headquarters. By Monday, they were all 100% connected and working successfully in their houses. Not one of them had previously worked from home.

That gave the entire office a confidence boost. Days later, all 350 of us were working from home and, incredibly, the business has continued to thrive. New players are still able to sign up via phone or online, and they’ve been doing just that in significant numbers.

In fact, throughout the lockdown, we’ve managed to maintain focus on our growing player base and customer retention has barely changed. We’re even still recruiting through face-to-face interviews online. With the Customer Experience team working from home, we’ve actually had far greater rota flexibility and have been able to answer more calls than usual during peak periods.

Though we’ve certainly had to adapt in other areas. In terms of brand recognition, we’re a business well-known for our catchy TV adverts, showing ambassadors knocking at people’s doors with prize cheques – something rightly not permitted during the lockdown. Sir Paul McCartney, who wrote the knocking at the door song “Let Em In,” once jokingly called it The Postcode Lottery tune.

So, our solution for the TV and radio ads, all edited in-house now (quite literally!), has been straightforward: we’ve switched to a lyric-free orchestral version of the song, which we’d recorded last year. It’s not a tune you’d easily forget.

That aside, our ad campaigns and planning have continued exactly as normal. However, managing media schedules sparked some big conversations. With many big brands pulling advertising, the market was volatile. At one stage, we considered whether we were at risk of over exposure.

In a crisis such as this, it’s tricky to predict public reaction, risk to reputation, and ultimately performance of the campaign. After some debate, we gave it the green light.

What had become glaringly obvious was that our creative needed adjusting, in particular, our TV advertising.

Our core visual is the moment when we visit winners at home. During the lockdown, we felt this would be misleading and had the potential to raise alarm that we weren’t in tune with the rest of the country. We quickly altered it.

After filming and production had ground to a halt, we still somehow managed to repurpose and adapt previously-shot footage for ITV’s Emmerdale sponsorship that we’d agreed on pre-lockdown. There was joy and relief when that went live.

We do love meeting winners across the country but, for now, our ambassadors are working from home and still revealing winning postcodes. They now meet winners via video calls, but one thing is noticeable: the reaction of winners hasn’t changed.

Our office remains open as the lottery is still fully operational. We have a restricted team operating the draws while adhering to safety guidelines.

Elsewhere, our amazing Charities team are spending every day in video meetings, speaking to trustees and maintaining the links they’ve built up with the thousands of good causes supported in Britain and beyond.

These charities really do matter to our players and are why we exist.

Every single charity, business, and person has challenges right now, but one thing that has come out of this pandemic is a new shared understanding of what everyone is going through.

That may continue for a long period. In the meantime, let’s all look ahead with hope to when we can once again say, ‘Thank God it’s Friday.’

Julie Paterson

Head of Marketing, People’s Postcode Lottery

@PostcodeLottery