To educate Four Seasons employees on the impact of not complying with GDPR, we produced a fun and colourful compliance animated video inspired by Pop Art that contributed to an effective and engaging learning experience.

Background

The EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) unifies all EU member states’ approaches to data regulation under the same framework, establishing guidelines for the collection and processing of personal information. It’s designed to ensure that EU citizens’ data is not used irresponsibly by organisations which hold their data, protecting individuals and putting them in charge of how much information is shared, where, and how.

This is the biggest development in data protection laws since the 1990s and is a reflection of the rise of the digital era, and the amount of data produced in the last few years. All businesses and public sector organisations holding personal data must comply or face hefty fines.

Challenge

Four Seasons Health Care, which specialises in providing high quality nursing, residential, intermediate and specialist dementia care to over 14,000 residents, has a network of over 250 care homes and employs 16,000 professionals, most of whom handle or are exposed to sensitive resident information daily.

In order to comply with GDPR, our client needed an effective way of educating employees on what GDPR is, how it affects every Four Seasons Care Home employee, what the implications of non compliance are, and what measures can be put in place to remain compliant.

With most of our client’s staff aged 19-26, and 45+, our brief was to find a way to specifically target those two main audience segments, whilst also appealing to the rest of the workforce. And at all times staying away from a culture that focuses on blame and scare tactics; instead, it needed to encourage discussion and teamwork, always with the care homes residents as the top priority.

Solution

After suggesting three potential approaches, our client opted for an animation inspired by Pop Art that presents staff and residents in scenarios where sensitive information is being handled.

The Pop Art-inspired approach was the definite winner for a number of reasons:

• immediate visual appeal
• serves as the perfect vehicle to communicate impact
• when applied to offline materials its visual style stands out against existing Four Seasons communications, while at the same time the colour scheme perfectly complements our client’s brand palette.

By choosing animation filled with colour and playfulness, the learning experience is more effective and rewarding at the same time.

The compliance animated video was intended as a training solution for e-learning and face to face sessions, where Four Seasons staff would train colleagues, aided by the content-rich animation – 12 minutes in total*.

Length wasn’t an issue as the animation is structured to allow facilitators, or employees watching it on our client’s e-learning portal, to pause, gather their thoughts and engage in discussion, promoting an interactive learning experience.

We commissioned an illustrator, who provided our team with black & white outline drawings. We coloured these in the brand palette to produce the full storyboard, before moving on to the animation phase.

The script focuses on a conversational style that helps the audience identify straight away, and presents a unified team ready to help each other overcome any potential barriers to comply with GDPR.

POW (Protect Our Workplace) serves as a call to arms – We’re all in this together – and quickly gets across the need for immediate action, a perfect way to complement a visual style that is emphatic and immediate, confident and at the same time approachable.

When selecting the voiceover artist we were careful to match it to the style of the compliance animated video and our client’s aim of not causing worry to employees: if following a set of simple steps, compliance with GDPR is easily achievable. And a young, warm, not authoritative, female voice was the perfect choice to transmit this message.

From a technical point of view, the animation style we applied is also full of energy and confidence: it pans out, moves across and focuses on the characters, bringing them to life.

Faced with the strict GDPR deadline, we put a team of motion designers together. To ensure consistency in style, we developed our own presets, or default animation style, including transitions and text effects. This created a framework which different motion graphics artists working at the same time could work with.

The team used Adobe After Effects, which allowed them to apply a parallax effect to various elements, control timing, animate the background without taking over from the main animation. Instead of HD, the animation was produced in 4K (double the resolution of HD), which provides crisper quality and allows the client themselves to scale down the animation, depending on the device where it will be used.

As well as the compliance animated video, we also produced other collateral to support Four Seasons’ efforts to help employees comply with GDPR, including a 32-page comic book version of the animation, distributed to all 16,000 employees, ‘Spot the breach’ posters, leaflets, screen saver and Post-It deskdrops.

(*) – We have included an abridged version of the 12-min compliance animated video for illustrative purposes.