Calgary Stampede:
Onboarding at Scale

As an organization, the Calgary Stampede maintains a core staff of 1,200 employees. During the summer festival over 3,500 seasonal workers and 2,500 volunteers will be hired to support an abundance of different events and tasks throughout the city. Often the final hiring and enrollment for volunteers is conducted right up until the festival start date.

Our credo was at the forefront of our minds during every stage of this project:

• We dream big – When we say big… this is ‘The Greatest Outdoor Show on Earth’, so there’s nothing bigger, and it all happens in The Calgary Stampede needed an effective and efficient training program that would streamline their massive onboarding process of over 6,000 people in a 4-6-week period. That’s pretty darn big!
  
  
• We keep it real – The deployment of these courses to more than 6,000 people every year requires meticulous planning to ensure onboarding goes smoothly. We’re there in real time, including evenings and weekends, to support this intense undertaking and help with any technical challenges that arise. We’re also there to support their onboarding services through the XACT LMS platform to ensure everyone completes the required health and safety and customer service training.
  
  
• We’ve got your back – In the spirit of partnership, we felt it was the right thing to do to waive the annual fees during the COVID 19 pandemic when the event was unable to run in 2020 and 2021. Then, when the event was able to re-open, we partnered with the Stampede to develop customized COVID training for event hosts.
  
  
• We love what we do – We were passionate about ensuring that the language and feeling of the event was embodied throughout each course, as well as in their learning portal for deployment. To accomplish this, we incorporated an animated persona of one of the event’s founders, Guy Weadick, and we were thrilled that it resulted in a fun-loving, service-focused tone throughout the experience.