The challenge
Lowe's holds a national sales meeting in Las Vegas every year. In August 2017, Lindsay from headquarters in Mooresville, North Carolina asked whether a charitable team building event could run inside the meeting itself, at the Sands Expo, for more than 3,000 managers at once. She wanted the give-back to happen on the meeting's own floor.
What we ran
We put four charitable builds in front of her: Bike Build Donation, Build-a-Guitar, Build-a-Wheelchair and Wagon Build Donation. She chose the bikes.
Scaling a program that usually runs for a few hundred people to 3,500 meant 500 sets of Craftsman tools, 180 BEST support staff, a safety inspection on every bike and a hand-off plan with the Boys & Girls Clubs of Southern Nevada.
Event day
On February 7, 2018, 3,500 Lowe's managers from the U.S., Canada and Mexico filled the Sands Expo and Convention Center. Teams earned bike parts through iPad challenges, built, then wrote a note of encouragement to tie to each bike. Seven-time NASCAR Cup Series champion Jimmie Johnson built alongside them.
As the last inspections finished, children from the Boys & Girls Clubs arrived, and each was handed a bike, a helmet and a lock by the managers who built it.
The result
1,048 bikes, helmets and locks went home with Nevada kids that afternoon, a record for a single bike build. One manager said it was amazing that the company goes out of its way for the communities around it; another had flown in from Canada and was enjoying every second. That is what a give-back on the meeting floor is for.
