We love hearing from our beloved Warp It members, especially when they go into detail about their relationship with the platform, their successes, and their problems.

One of those problems that we’ve been hearing from several customers is that they’ve managed to max out the goodwill of their Communications department. The Comms team have hundreds of messages to get out and so a reuse project means very little to them. So, without them on your side anymore, who should you visit?

The guerrilla communications tricks in this article are communications that you can do yourself without the need for the Communications department or their permission.

Trick one - Desktop Icon

Instead of visiting the Comms team, go and pay a visit to your IT department. What you’re going to do is to ask them to introduce a Warp It desktop icon to every computer and laptop on the network or at least those that they can influence. This is a great idea because most people will engage with Warp It once they are on it, but getting them on it can be a challenge. The more visual stimuli they receive, the better.

This is a one hour job.

Read our article about the Warp It desktop article

Trick two - First day at work

Instead of visiting the Comms team, go and visit the HR department. What you’re going to do is ask them to change their approach to welcoming people on the first day of their new job. Of course, you’re going to ask them to explain that Warp It is your reuse platform and that the organisation cares about sustainability and keeping reusable assets in-house. That’s a given, but there are a few other tricks you can have up your sleeve:

• When a round of job interviews start, get HR to tell them to look on Warp It for office equipment for the new hire
• HR is the first to know when someone is fired - get them to list those freed up assets on Warp It
• Get HR to build a ‘New Staff Reuse Checklist’ to try and find things on Warp It that will make the new member of staff feel more welcome, like a bin, mouse mat, company mug, memory sticks, or a wall calendar
• OR on the new member of staff’s first day at work, hand them the checklist and let them decide for themselves, teach them how to use Warp It, and then leave them to claim those items

These tips are just scratching the surface of what HR can do. We wrote a full guide here.

It may take one HR member less than an hour to call up the interviewers, to find out if anyone has been fired recently, and to build a New Staff Reuse Checklist.

Trick three - The biggest procurers need to use the system

Instead of visiting the Comms team, you’re going to visit the Procurement department, and you’re going to ask them for a list of people in the organisation who do the most procuring; those who order the most furniture, equipment, and supplies.

Once you have this list, you’re going to send an email, make a call, or pay a visit to those people, and educate them about your resource system. You’ll need to talk about cutting budget spend, you’ll need to show them how the system works, and you might even need to show them some high-quality listings to get their interest levels up.

If you go here, we’ve written an email template to help you start that dialogue.

If you want to be even more forceful, you can add your staff to Warp It yourself via a spreadsheet. Here’s how to do that.

Trick four - Send a memo

Instead of visiting your Comms team, try and get onto everyones staff meeting agenda. This sounds like a massive ask but if you stand out from the crowd you can achieve it for sure!

Remember memos? Before emails each meeting would be interspersed with a memo. Well let's take it back to the old school and distribute memos about your reuse scheme or culture change project.

There’s a full guide to sending a memo here.

And a memo template that you can download for free here.

Trick five - Get the porters on board

Instead of visiting your Comms team, go and pay a visit to the porters, logistics, or transport team, whatever they’ve come to be known as in your organisation.

Porters are your secret weapon for reuse. If the aim of your communications is to direct people to Warp It instead of procuring new, why not go to the people who handle the disposals too? Now, once you’ve convinced the porters to send people to Warp It when they want a disposal, those people can naturally start engaging with the system. Of course, the porters can still move items to storage, but making sure that they tell disposers to list the item on Warp It first is a bold trick, but a surefire way to get participation.

Everything you need to know about winning the hearts and minds of porters is here.

Here's another Warp It hack

Use our templates to save time and get ideas!