The fourth Connect Conference kicked off with a full house on April 10, 2025, at the Eiffel Műhelyház, where representatives from HR, marketing, and communication fields spent an entire day networking. This year, we also announced the winners of the Blue Colibri Game Changer Award. Here are the awarded companies and their ideas that brought about change!
Inspirational speakers, best practices in internal and external corporate communication, memorable stories, valuable experiences, and the big announcement: who won the bronze, silver, and gold awards of the Blue Colibri Awards this year. At the IV. Connect, we announced the results of the competition for submissions under the slogan "Small Ideas, Big Impact!"
Awarding Ideas
The Blue Colibri Game Changer Award recognizes innovative and strategically conceived campaigns or solutions that achieve outstanding results in the areas of organizational internal communication, organizational efficiency, employee engagement, and community building. The main evaluation criteria include the novelty of the idea, its impact (the change it brought to the company's life), and the benchmark factor: how applicable the idea is for other organizations.
Güntner-Tata Hűtőtechnika Kft. –CoolDown 2025 – Sustainability Challenge
CoolDown is a year-round awareness-raising and team-building sustainability project that heavily relies on the features of the Blue Colibri app (News Exchange). The program emphasizes two-way, open dialogue between the company and employees. Full involvement, strengthening culture, increasing retention, and making the company more attractive were also focal points during the planning.
The main goal of the complex series of 7 campaigns was to engage blue-collar employees in sustainability throughout the year, for which a point-collecting program was also introduced. Activities included joint waste collection, insect hotel construction, car-free days, community work, garden beauty contests, and clothing exchange programs, successfully involving 300 employees, representing nearly 25% participation—an outstanding achievement among blue-collar workers!
Bonduelle Central Europe Kft. –BonduelleM Application
After employees had been using the application (BonduelleM) reliably, the company took it a step further: they sought activities that could utilize more functions from the app. They chose the yearly Health & Safety Week program, which involves all employees.
Bonduelle's primary mission is workplace safety in factories and promoting health awareness among employees—hence every March, all Bonduelle plants dedicate a week (with programs, challenges, and trainings) solely to these topics. The goal of Health & Safety Week is to enhance learning, development, good mood, and teamwork.
They compiled the weekly program, with the safety coordinator preparing the workplace safety test and the quality manager creating a questionnaire related to food safety culture using the app's quiz function. The results were promising: the completion rate of the workplace safety test significantly increased compared to the previous year. Their first communication about Health & Safety Week garnered 316 views, followed by inviting colleagues to participate. They posted updates about the first day and continued with new posts each evening throughout the week, often enhanced with short videos.
Tolnagro Group – The Charitable Santa Takes Action, or the Tolnagro Santa Surprises!
Dr. József Varga, the owner of the veterinary company group, took the lead role in the Christmas campaign. Anyone could submit a wish with a value of up to gross 25,000 HUF, and through a video podcast (Pawdcast) on the Tappancs app, they planned to draw 10 lucky colleagues whose wishes would be fulfilled. Out of 400 active users, 180 submitted wishes ranging from technical/kitchen items to clothing and video games.
They eagerly awaited the year-end Pawdcast conversation and the drawing, which took an unexpected turn: the owner decided to fulfill all 180 wishes! This amounted to nearly 4.5 million HUF worth of gifts.
The video, the post, and the news went viral within the company, including among those who were not previously Tappancs users, and practically everyone registered in the system to not miss out on similar moments/events in the future. Engagement also reached new heights, and József's popularity soared alongside Tappancs; the Pawdcast conversations are actively watched and anticipated, with many wishes arriving about who colleagues would like to hear similar discussions with.
Új ház Zrt. – Effective and Experience-Rich Training System
The organization set three goals regarding training: to make them more interactive; to present practical, market-tested practices worth sharing as knowledge in future trainings; and to differentiate among participants based on their activity and cooperation during training (the goal is to reinforce positive actions, not to penalize!).
The trainings involved in the project were broken down into 2-4 session events to integrate the new methodology. As a result, the events became much more popular in terms of timing and accessibility. They prepared practical tasks to be completed in daily work for the trainings. They parameterized the administrative function as “training activity,” activated point collection and ranking, and created a form for the training. The form's questions are scored (e.g., extra points for attaching photos), and both mandatory and optional questions were set so that the results could be influenced by the submitting employee's decision (diligence), along with creating certificate templates representing different levels.
Eventrend Group – "Promotional Video" to Encourage App Downloads
The company envisioned a truly spectacular campaign to ensure that as many employees as possible would get to know and download the Blue Colibri app. The campaign's uniqueness lay in their choice of a genuinely unique, creative solution: they made a promotional video featuring one of their well-known and popular colleagues based on their own script.
The film followed a full working day, showcasing how and for what the protagonist uses the app throughout the day. The goal was not only to encourage app downloads but also to showcase the most important functions, strengthen information flow, and increase employee engagement.
The end result was a huge success: as a result of the video, nearly 400 employees downloaded the app in one evening from a community of 1,000 employees.
This campaign is an excellent example of the power of creative storytelling and involving real colleagues in communication.
WHC Group – Circulation of Wellbeing: Comprehensive Wellbeing Program at WHC
The company supports the physical and mental balance and wellbeing of its colleagues with diverse and creative solutions while strengthening the sense of community and mutual care. The Navigator (app) is the central platform of the program: here they share information, knowledge materials, interactive challenges, expert content (topics include stress management, mindfulness, conscious year-end and year-start, etc.), and encourage active participation from employees.
They process topics in bite-sized content, sharing tips daily on certain subjects (e.g., healthy eating, physical activity, good sleep, or advice on developing a positive mindset).
During the two-month Summer Momentum movement challenge, colleagues compete in teams by comparing the minutes spent moving. The winning teams and the top 10 individual competitors receive valuable prizes along with webshop points.
To encourage employees to complete the Flow4Learning e-learning courses, they shared their colleagues' experiences on the Navigator. To support financial wellbeing, they created a collection of discounts through grouped links. Additionally, since corporate CSR activities are an important element of mental and community wellbeing, colleagues can also find information about these on the Navigator, and active participation in CSR events is recognized with webshop points.
Which company had the most downloads of the app? Who uses the app the most actively? Where is engagement the highest? This year, Blue Colibri automatically entered all its partners and awarded the most engaged organizations based on company size.
The winners (by company size):
• Under 200 employees: ElringKlinger Hungary Kft.
• Between 200 and 1,000 employees: Budapest History Museum
• Over 1,000 employees: ArrivaBus Kft.
