Meet the P-Staff

Gabbi Sanchez Mallona

Published in

Zendesk Design

5 min readApr 23, 2019

Creating Anna Florence, our corporate puppet

Hi! My name is Gabbi. And on my right is Anna Florence, Zendesk’s model employee. Let me explain…

As Zendesk’s Communication Designer, my job is to figure out a way to graphically explain corporate messages to the entire company in a digestible and captivating fashion — it’s a challenge that I really enjoy. About a year ago, our OG, badass, knowledgeable, and theatrical Senior Internal Communications Manager, Hannah Lawrence, said that we needed to get with the Instagram story-times and should start incorporating video into our internal communications. Why? Video is awesome (duh), but the real reasons are that video:

Displays nonverbal communication
Engages audiences
Prompts sharing
Presents quick and rich content
Incites action
Enhances social communication

Also, the last thing people at a tech company want to do is read another email. In fact, 75% of employees are more likely to watch a video than read text. (I got this stat from some website of a tool named Panopto…but no mo’ stats, I promise.) However, once we read that, we were sold. Hannah even sent me to an Internal Comms video conference. I saw what other companies were doing, and even though some concepts were cool, they still felt dense and “too corporate.” We definitely wanted something a bit more fun and engaging — Zendesk isn’t like other tech companies, both culturally and aesthetically, so it was hard to relate to anything we were seeing from other companies.

**So how could we make corporate videos feel less…corporate-y?**

At first the obvious models that stood out to us were news parodies and interviews — things like Saturday Night Live’s weekend update, Vogue’s “73 Questions”, and Behind the Actor’s Studio. We wanted to do it all, but we didn’t know where to start. So, we came up with a solid plan complete with logistics, tools, criteria and a set process. In the end, we decided that we needed a hero — a true brand champion. A sassy, intelligent, funny human…we needed Hannah Lawrence.

She was a clear winner. Just look at this email.

Sadly, Hannah already does enough work as it is. As the senior Internal Comms Manager, she’s responsible for MC-ing our Town Halls, coming up with the content for our monthly newsletter, distributing weekly highlights, and managing various corporate slack channels — and she’s funny and charming to boot. We obviously did need a clone of Hannah.)

So what did we come up with?

After many brainstorms and sifting through ideas, we met with Toke Nygaard (Zendesk’s Chief Creative Officer and Chief Cool-Dude, if you ask me.) We told him about our video dream plans, the need to capture the essence of Hannah without actually having her do the videos, and as it turns out, Toke had a dream of his own… a puppet dream. Suddenly, the stars aligned — the idea of Anna Florence was born. (Hannah Lawrence, get it?)

But who was Anna Florence? To figure that out, we gave her a life of her own. We had to make sure that she wasn’t ACTUALLY Hannah — after all, Hannah would be introducing her at many Town Halls. To simplify things, here’s where we landed:

Anna Florence is a model Zendesk employee
She works in Advocacy
She is SUPER excited about our product launches, corporate announcements and internal news

And yes, okay…, even though she is kind of a kiss ass for corporate values, there is something very real about her. After all, Anna was based on a real person at first.

As a far as the show that we would create, we had a few ideas…

…but in the end, we had a clear winner:

Nowadays, the show has expanded to various parts of the company. And with the help of our badass video team, we have a swanky new episode monthly — we’ve totally upped our game.