NZ Secret Santa – Post-Game Round-up 2016

Hey Santas! You did it! You survived another year of NZ Secret Santa and Christmas! (and so did we!)

If you played, thank you so much for playing. This game wouldn’t be what it is without you. If you didn’t play, we hope you had fun lurking on the hashtag and that you join in on the fun next year! Now let’s get to the nitty gritty. The Good, the Meh and the Ugly.

The Good

The Badges

Holy Santa’s beard, you loved the badges. Big old tick on something that worked super well. The number of people who wanted to go above and beyond to add badges to their dashboards was awesome.

Partnering with CanTeen

In the end we had seven huge boxes of presents to send to CanTeen and most of them were extra presents that you bought out of the kindness of your hearts! CanTeen Christchurch told us that they’ll have gifts for Christmas, birthdays and end of treatment celebrations, which made me cry beautiful, ugly happy tears. Y’all should give yourselves pats on the back, you’ve made a real difference to people in need this Christmas.

The Tweeting

I checked the data and since November, the #NZSecretSanta hashtag was used over 22,000 times. We were trending for the first and last halves of registration and have been trending for most of the last few days, so thank you for tweeting!

The International Coverage

This is going to sound a little pompous, but we’re used to a news story or two about NZ Secret Santa, but the amount of international interest we had this year was phenomenal and totally unexpected. We were on Mashable, the Huffington Post, ABC News, Marie Clare and so many more. You’ve helped NZ maintain its status as a pretty darn cute country, so pakipaki to that, Santas!

The Bad Santa Gift Stash

We don’t want to need it, but we do need a little extra support to ensure everyone gets a present as we get eager and well-meaning Santas who just don’t end up playing. The Bad Santa Gift Stash this year was amazing. Thank you again to all of our sponsors, who can be found on this link here and are a great option for if you need last minute really early Christmas presents. (Phew, good save 2017 Libby)

The Meh

Disengaged Santas/Bad Santas

Unfortunately, we had Bad Santas/Disengaged Santas, as we do every year. On the plus side, the Bad Santa numbers are the lowest they’ve ever been! On the minus side, the Bad Santas let down some long-time players who have voiced their dissatisfaction with us. While we’re always open to feedback on how we can cut these numbers down, we’re still inclined to not put restrictions in place on who can and can’t play based on things like tweet count or whether an account is locked, because we don’t feel it’s in the spirit of the game.

The Timelines

We hear you. Our timelines were too tight and we totally agree. The Elves were completely caught off guard by the earthquake, which ruined a fair few of our plans for the game (including an early surprise match, d’oh). We’re looking at changing the timelines next year to fix this so there’s more time to do EVERYTHING.

The Earthquake

So in case you’re not aware, the Elves are a few employees from NZ Post. The two that run the Twitter account are Libby (yours truly) and Aj. Along with a handful of other Elves, we’ve been displaced from our workplace since mid-November, which screwed a few of our plans. I had put together a whole content calendar of fun stuff to do that had to be thrown out the window as the paperwork was still in the building. Our mascot, Kiri, had to be left behind on our floor, which made us sad because we had ideas to do an Elf-on-the-Shelf type content series with her. And Aj was planning on doing an early match (as mentioned previously) one week into registrations, but because we were displaced along with so many other people, we didn’t feel it was fair or feasible to do so.

The Ugly

The Dashboard

There’s no nice way of putting it, the dashboard was borked this year. There were a lot of reasons this happened, like extra gifts, charity stuff not performing as expected but mainly because…

Issues at the Storehouse

As part of the game, we rely on people who work in different departments within NZ Post to help us out in the logistics side of things. This year we had a brand new Chief Logistics Elf who did an amazing job (especially for their first run at things!)

However.

When checking in presents the expected level of vigilance/care wasn’t taken. This is likely our fault as assumptions were made that whoever took over from our previous Chief Logistics Elf would be good to go with little (read: no) training. Obviously, not the case.

Among the issues were presents going to the wrong people, completely unrelated parcels ending up in the game and some presents getting misplaced. That last one had a number of Santas stressed and the Elves completely stressed too. It was a really small number of people, but to anyone who’s present didn’t end up where it should have…

We’re sorry.

We can’t emphasise this enough, we’re really well and truly sorry. It genuinely hurts our hearts when people have bad experiences with the game. We do this game because we love it so much and we love the Twitter community so much. I wish we could explain what happened here, but we can’t. Things were meant to be somewhere and they weren’t. And that sucks. We understand if it has negatively affected your experience with the game and we totally understand if you don’t want to play again. We hope you change your mind, but again, we understand if this is it for you.

2017?

Things are looking positive (not necessarily concrete, but positive!) for having #NZSecretSanta again this year. The Elves are already putting their heads together on how we can change and improve the game. There may be big changes coming. Or there may not, we’re not sure as only ideas have been floated about at this stage and we’re not sure how feasible some of these ideas are and we probably won’t really talk about it again until maybe June or July this year. We’ll be sending out a post-game survey in the New Year, so please keep an eye on your inbox and provide us with your feedback!

Wishing you all the very best for the holiday season!

Lots of love,

Libby, Aj and the Elves xx