Looking for fun ways to prepare your intranet for Halloween? Here are some intranet tricks to treat your site on this sugar filled day.

As Halloween is quickly approaching, I wanted to share some fun Halloween-themed intranet tricks you can implement to increase employee engagement. Not only that, but these tricks can be used over and over again, slightly modified for any holiday or company event you want to promote.

Design a Halloween Intranet Theme

Perhaps one of the simplest ways you can gear your intranet up for Halloween is a quick theme change. Changing the theme from time to time is a great way to keep employees engaged and logging into your intranet. As the intranet manager, don’t worry if you don’t have a background in design – you don’t need it! Using our Simple Theme Editor feature, you can quickly change the theme of your intranet, whether it just be a change of color scheme or something more. Here are some other design-related intranet tricks and ideas that you can try this Halloween:

• Change your navigational icons by adding a ghost, pumpkins, witches or any other Halloween icons
• Change your header logo to a spooky image (you can always set this so it only changes on the Intranet Home Page)
• Include background images of something spooky like a cemetery
• Change the overall theme including color scheme, fonts, links, etc. (you can save this theme and use it again next year!)

For our own intranet, SQintranet, we decided to change up our theme by adding Halloween styled icons to each of our top navigation sections. This brought out the spirit and fun of Halloween, but kept the site fully functional. Our Graphic Designer also decided to take matters into his own hands by creating a zombie-themed header logo. Below you can see the ways we spookified our intranet using some design change elements.

Halloween Intranet Contests

• Create a photo album with pictures of your employees in their costumes
• Have employee’s thumbs up and comment on their favorite costumes
• Post the winning costume on the home page in an image widget

Now that you have a fun (and spooky) design theme, it’s time to ramp up your intranet even more in the spirit of Halloween. Another fun intranet trick you can implement is an intranet contest leveraging the Photo Album application and Online Forms. As an example, I had the pleasure of working with one of our outstanding customers last year who created a pumpkin carving contest solely on their intranet. Users uploaded a picture of their jack-o-lantern to the Photo Album, and colleagues could vote for their favorite one using an Online Form.

Try this festive intranet trick on your own intranet by creating an album with the Photo Album application, allowing all employees to add a photo and title description. Next, create an Online Form containing a drop-down menu of all the titles of the photos submitted to the contest. Voters can then select their favorite photo based on the title and submit the form! Remember to restrict the voting to one vote per user in the Online Forms Application to prevent cheating. As the photos are added to the Photo Album application, it is easy to create a slideshow on your intranet homepage so that all users can easily view the images that have been uploaded so far.

Intranet Games

Another fun, Halloween-themed intranet trick is to host a game using your intranet so employees can play from their desk. Last year, we played Halloween Intranet bingo. Simply allowing employees to pick up a bingo sheet at the beginning of the day, then release the numbers through our intranet throughout the day. Again this keeps employees engaged and looking for the updated numbers on the intranet throughout the day.

There are a number of tools you can use when playing this game to release the bingo numbers, however, the simplest application to use is the Message Box. Creating a Message Box on your Intranet Home Page, you can periodically release the bingo numbers as they are selected. Employees will see the numbers appear on their home page in real-time as you add them. Once the game is over, you can also display your winner or winners in the Message Box as well.

Activity Polls

Are you planning a team building Halloween event? Get employee input to find out what is most popular by using Quick Polls. You can add a Quick Poll directly on your Intranet Home Page that lists out some fun Halloween ideas for users to choose from such as going to a haunted house, having a Halloween party or going to a spooky corn maze.

Another way you can utilize Quick Polls is by having a poll on a group costume theme to dress as for the company party this year. Think of the YMCA Village People or Team America.

Spookify Your Intranet

While these are all great ideas for this Halloween, you can apply any of these intranet tricks to other holidays as well. Are there any holiday-themed changes you make to your intranet or other fun, festive intranet tricks that you’d like to share with us? We’d love to hear them! Please comment below.

How do you use your site to engage employees during the holidays? Leave us a comment below!