A Digital Marketing Blog | Info You Need, That You'll Actually Want To Read Make your marketing better. Wed, 07 Jan 2026 21:59:28 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.8.3 /wp-content/uploads/2025/11/FS-Square-96x96.png A Digital Marketing Blog | Info You Need, That You'll Actually Want To Read 32 32 Your Guide to Creating an Engaging Internal Newsletter https://fullstacks.pro/how-to-create-internal-company-newsletter/ Mon, 07 Apr 2025 19:32:14 +0000 https://kpplaybook.com/?p=8097 Say no to boring internal newsletters. Learn how to build a newsletter that nurtures culture, fosters connection, and improves team members’ communication skills.

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Internal newsletters have a bad rap—they’re often seen as a waste of time because no one reads them. Why? Because they’re boring, formulaic, and seen as an inauthentic attempt to build corporate culture.

But it doesn’t have to be that way.

At their core, internal newsletters should be more than just a vehicle for company updates—they’re an opportunity to foster connection and improve communication in your team, both of which contribute to a healthier culture. When done with intention, they can become a valuable touchpoint that people actually look forward to reading (instead of instantly deleting).


This redditor didn’t see the benefit of an internal newsletter. It probably sucked.

How do you turn a stale corporate internal email into something better? Keep reading.

The impact of internal newsletters on remote team culture and success


If you’re going to create an internal newsletter, or revive and revamp your current newsletter, you want to know that it’s going to be worth the time and effort. It is!

We’re speaking from experience—at Full Stacks we started our internal newsletter (The Hundy P Gazette 💯) in 2023. What initially was a one-person job summarizing Slack convos and work updates has evolved into a fun, engaging internal newsletter that everyone contributes to. Even more importantly, everyone reads it!

As The Hundy P Gazette evolved, we started to notice how our lil’ newsletter was making a big impact on our remote team. Here are the biggest wins you can expect from an effective internal newsletter:

Humanize the workplace

People aren’t robots, but sometimes that can be hard to remember when you only interact with someone from the other side of a screen. When we know our colleagues as a whole—their challenges, their victories, their lives beyond the workplace—we collaborate better and feel more invested in each other’s success.

By sharing stories in your internal newsletter, the digital workplace becomes more human. It helps teams see beyond job titles to the real people behind the work.

During a hectic workday, it can be easy to get caught up in frustrations or interpersonal hiccups. But when you know your coworkers better and have some rapport and trust built, it’s so much easier to assume positive intent. Imagine you get a request from a coworker that feels really direct and maybe a little blunt. Instead of immediately jumping to “Why is she being so rude to me? This isn’t my job!”, if we get to know the people we work with we might instead think “Oh, she’s probably feeling anxious about her upcoming vacation and is actually just looking for support!”

While an internal newsletter isn’t going to solve team relationships overnight (that’s a whole other huge topic), it serves as an important, regular touchpoint that helps people connect with colleagues they might not interact with on a regular basis. By making sure that your newsletter includes personal stories and opportunities for your team to share what matters to them outside of work, you help everyone feel seen as the human beings they are, and not just the role they fill at your company.

Promote a culture of connection

Remote work offers undeniable benefits (goodbye, commute!), but it also creates new challenges for maintaining strong team connections and company culture. With team members spread across different locations and time zones, the casual water cooler conversations, coffee runs, and lunch room chats that once knit our workplace culture together have largely disappeared.


Remote teams miss these organic touchpoints, so it’s important to be more intentional and have a structured approach to promoting workplace culture—an internal newsletter can be one of those touchpoints.

One of our goals with our internal newsletter is to help bring back some of those organic conversations and connections that we were missing. Here are some of the ways that The Hundy P Gazette contributes to our company culture:

  • Creates a space to share cross-departmental and personal wins
  • Gives visibility to projects and people that fly under the radar
  • Captures and shares highlights from a very busy Slack so no one misses out
  • Offers a space for people’s interests, hobbies, and personalities to shine

If you’re catching up on messages after a focus session, it’s easy to miss a funny or important conversation on Slack or Microsoft Teams. Internal newsletters can help highlight these moments, which helps people feel part of a team versus a bunch of individuals working in silos.

If you have a strong work culture and your team members are engaged, they’re more likely to be happy. If your team members are happy, you’re more likely to retain them.

Develop skills

Not everyone at Full Stacks writes on a day-to-day basis. Some of us are busy coding, or diving deep into analytics. Giving non-writers the opportunity to write helps them find their voice and build confidence in their communication skills.

For people who write frequently, such as our SEO and ads teams, the newsletter offers a refreshing creative outlet free from the usual restraints (character limits, brand voice, and keywords!).

Regardless of your team’s composition—whether they’re seasoned writers or technical experts—contributing to an internal newsletter helps everyone develop new creative muscles and sharpen their storytelling abilities.

Beyond the written word, other skills can also be developed by contributing to a newsletter, such as:

  • Knowledge sharing (translating technical concepts into accessible language)
  • Storytelling
  • Visual communication (screenshots, emojis, photos)
  • Editing
  • Collaboration

Some companies see work that doesn’t directly generate money as a waste of time, but that’s a very narrow, short-sighted way to think about collaboration like this. Teams that have a creative outlet for improving communication skills are stronger and will be better equipped to handle the inevitable stress and conflict that comes in any workplace.

Keep everyone in the loop

One key part of an internal newsletter is, of course, sharing important information: process changes, upcoming closures, reminders about employee benefit changes, etc. You know, the important but kinda boring stuff that no one really wants to read, but they do need to know.

When you have a newsletter that is 80% fun, your readers are more likely to stick around and read the informational/important stuff. If your newsletter is 100% informational, your engagement is going to suffer—no one wants to read a corporate memo.

So include those important informational items, but keep them straightforward and to the point. Having an “Important Updates” section can help. Use bullet points and link off to broader documentation if needed.

Ideas for your company’s internal newsletter


We’ve curated a list of fun and boring ideas to help your internal newsletter balance engagement with essential updates.

Fun ideas

Your newsletter needs personality! Including fun, engaging content will transform your employee newsletter from a corporate memo into something that people look forward to reading.

Here are some fun ideas to consider including in your employee newsletter:

  • Brain teasers or puzzles (we like to create a Connections game)
  • Recipe or restaurant recommendations
  • Podcast/book/movie/TV show recommendations
  • Spotify playlists or song recommendations
  • Local business spotlight
  • Featured pet(s)
  • Fun stories (tales from vacation, celebrity encounters, the wildest thing that happened to you at work, etc.)
  • Advice and inspirational quotes (this doesn’t have to be work-related!)
  • Quick polls or surveys (these can be silly, or serious)
  • Contests
  • Memes

These ideas are just a starting point to get the wheels turning about what types of fun content can be featured in your company’s internal newsletter. Every team is different. The best content comes from your team’s passion and expertise.

You can also give enthusiastic team members their own newsletter column! For example, Liz, our resident Taylor Swift fan, keeps us in the loop with updates and fan theories, while Sammy recommends a sandwich every edition in her column, The Daily Sammy.

Boring ideas

An internal newsletter needs to be fun to draw people in, but it also needs to provide company news and updates so everyone is on the same page and aware of important changes.

Below are ideas for informational topics that you can include in your internal newsletter—just don’t only include these topics. (Otherwise it’ll be a snooze fest that no one will engage with!)

  • Important changes/company updates (processes, policies, tools you use, etc.)
  • Important dates (product or service launches, major client deadlines, holidays, etc.)
  • Important industry news (new laws/regulations, market trends, shifts in consumer behavior, etc.)
  • Meeting recaps
  • Training and professional development opportunities
  • Employee spotlights
  • Employee work anniversaries or birthdays
  • Client/customer success stories and wins
  • Department highlights
  • Upcoming events
  • Tips and resources
  • An update from the CEO

Make it easy for people to consume this type of content and be mindful of length. No one wants to read a two-page letter from the CEO, no matter how fun the rest of the newsletter was.

How to start an internal company newsletter


You’ve made it this far and you’re jazzed to start your team’s internal newsletter. Now what? It’s time to make it a reality.

Pick your tool

Our first edition of The Hundy P Gazette was in a Google Doc. We purposefully decided that it shouldn’t be “designed” or sent like a traditional newsletter.We needed it to be easy for anyone to jump in and edit (not just the designers on our team) and we wanted it to feel casual. The nice thing about Google Docs is that you can leave comments directly on different sections. Our team naturally started adding funny responses, tagging each other and making jokes.

If you have a PDF newsletter, or even if you send an email newsletter, you really lose the feeling that this is an interactive and engaging touchpoint. It becomes just a one-way information push.

We use Notion for internal documentation, so it made sense to eventually move our newsletter there. It offered the same benefits as Google Docs but also did more:

  • There is very little customization you can do in Notion, so everything looks good with minimal effort:
    • It’s easy to make the newsletter skimmable with headings, callouts, quotes, and other formatting features.
    • You don’t need to think about applying your brand or using the right typography, etc.
    • You have freedom but not too much, so you don’t get caught up in designing and instead focus on the meat and potatoes.
  • You also don’t need a template, you can just make a page and go.
  • Since we have internal documentation in Notion, it’s easy to reference policy or process pages that already live there.
  • It’s super easy to add images and videos (and for others to then download them, which Google Docs makes so hard for some reason…).

Notion not for you? There are so many awesome tools to choose from, like Canva or Figjam, which allow for layout flexibility and comments from team members—if you’re already paying for these services, it’s another way to utilize them!

Decide on frequency

How often you send out an internal newsletter will depend on how fast news moves at your company—and may depend on the size of your company too. We decided on a bi-weekly frequency. Weekly was too often for our team (we’d struggle to get enough content), and monthly was too long.

Doing something more often also makes it easier to do. If you’re creating a newsletter monthly or even quarterly, you’ll likely find it hard to get started, even if you have a process in place. A bi-weekly frequency helps build a routine—you’re less likely to procrastinate when the next edition is around the corner, but you still have breathing room and aren’t rushing to get the next newsletter out.

A higher frequency also makes it easier to remember company updates. A month is a long time. It’s much easier to reflect on what happened in the last week or two and add relevant company updates to the newsletter. (If something happened a month ago, it feels like old news!)

Based on all of the above, we believe that a two week cadence for internal newsletters is the sweet spot. It gives you enough time to gather meaningful content, is still timely, and is less overwhelming for your team.

You’ll also want to think about when your internal newsletter will get sent out. Do you send it out on Monday, so it’s something people can look forward to reading when they start their work week? Or do you schedule it on Friday, when work is winding down and people are more receptive to doing something that isn’t “urgent” or “mission critical”.

We schedule our internal newsletter for Thursday morning, which is the last day of the workweek for Full Stacks (we work Monday-Thursday).

No matter what day you choose, the most important thing is to send it when your team is most likely to be paying attention—not during lunch when people are away from their desk, or when a recurring meeting typically happens.

Create a process

Without a clear workflow, internal projects die. If you’re a marketing agency like us, treat your internal newsletter like you would a client project. You’d create tasks, assign roles, and communicate clearly. A process keeps the information flowing, quality consistent, and your team engaged.

Here are questions to ask yourself, to help you create a process for your company’s internal newsletter:

  • How are people going to submit?
    • We recommend creating a dedicated email address so people can easily send submissions.
  • What information do we need from submitters?
    • This is where a guide can also be helpful! Not only can it include content ideas, but it can also include specific information needed for certain newsletter features (e.g. photos for an employee highlight, what details should be shared for an event, etc.).
    • Don’t make too many rules for submissions though, you want to make it easy for people to submit!
  • When will submissions be due?
    • This could be one or two days before the newsletter goes out, depending on the workload of the person who’s creating it.
  • How will we track and organize submissions?
    • This could be as simple as filing the email submissions away into a folder so you know that it’s been included in the latest newsletter.
  • What happens if we receive too much or too little content?
    • If you have too much content, you can save some that isn’t timely for the next edition of the newsletter.
    • If submissions are looking a little thin, get creative. Share interesting articles, mental health resources, or just fun recommendations like podcasts, TV shows, or food ideas. And if you’re really stuck? Ask ChatGPT silly questions.
  • Who will create the internal newsletter?
    • This will depend on how your company is structured. This could be HR, admin, or anyone.
    • Also: who will be responsible for the internal newsletter when the lead is on vacation?
  • Who will review the internal newsletter before it goes out?
    • This could be leadership, or someone on the team who has an eye for detail and is good at catching typos.
  • How is the team going to be notified about the latest edition?
    • We use Slack—think about what works best for your team!

Remember that processes don’t have to be set in stone. You can always tweak it to fit your team’s needs!

Get buy-in

You’ve completed the steps above—now what? You need to get buy-in from not only leadership, but from employees too. Essentially you need to answer the question, “what’s in it for me?”

For leadership, you’ll want to touch on the benefits that we spoke about earlier in the post—humanizing the workplace, building culture, developing skills, and keeping everyone in the loop. Also discuss the resources (mostly time) that it’ll take to start doing this.

Once leadership signs off, it’s time to get buy-in from the whole team. Part of this includes highlighting that the internal newsletter isn’t just for boring corporate news, but for fun and engaging content as well. We did this by creating a guide for our team so they can see the type of content submissions we’re looking for. Setting up an easy submission process for content is another way you can increase submissions.

Being open and listening to feedback is also important. If people are asking the same question, it’s a sign that your process isn’t clear and can be improved.

What we’ve learned


Our newsletter has gone through a lot of changes since we first started it, and we’ve learned a lot along the way.

  • Make it clear that contributing to the newsletter is a part of everyone’s role. If you don’t do this, it’ll feel optional. Kind of like the bystander effect—someone else will surely write content for the newsletter and I won’t have to, right?
  • Create a guide for your internal newsletter. It should outline expectations (while it is a part of their job, it is not mandatory to submit every week), how to submit, and content ideas.
  • Set up a reminder a few days before the newsletter goes out. We do this by setting up a simple Slack reminder that goes out to the whole team. (We get the most contributions when we remind people to contribute!)

  • Make it easy to contribute! This could be sending in submissions via email, or a simple form. If it’s not easy, people won’t do it.
  • Read it together as a group. This makes it more of a connection moment! We did this by creating a calendar event for when our internal newsletter releases. Since our newsletter is in Notion, everyone is in there at the same time commenting. If you don’t end up using Notion, you can create a channel in Slack for everyone to talk about it.

Start small and stay consistent! Your first editions won’t be perfect, but as your team sees their colleagues contributing, they’ll want to join in.

Our best editions are when lots of people contribute and the newsletter becomes the collective voice of our team. When people from every corner of your organization contribute their stories, recommendations, and updates, your internal newsletter changes from a one-way broadcast into a conversation.

If you want more content like this, be sure to subscribe to our newsletter as we’ll be writing more about Agency Growth in the future.

Steal our process

  1. Every team member at Full Stacks is expected to contribute to The Hundy P Gazette. Some people submit three articles every edition, some less so.
  2. People are not required to submit an article for every single edition. If someone hasn’t contributed for a while, or the edition is looking thin, the editors will do some nudging.
  3. We created a list of article ideas for inspiration. People can choose to use the ideas or go rogue. While The Hundy P Gazette is mostly made up of non-work-related content, we also use it for client updates and important upcoming dates and events.
  4. We set up an email address for people to send their submissions to. With the help of Zapier and some magic, the submissions end up in a Slack channel for the editors.
  5. Every Monday of a newsletter week we send out a reminder in Slack to get those submissions in.
  6. We assign three editors to put all the submissions together and contribute as well.
  7. Every two weeks, we duplicate the most recent edition, update the edition number and date, and clear any content that isn’t timely.
  8. Our newsletter is published biweekly on Thursdays. We have a calendar event for the team that blocks 15 minutes of time at 10 am on newsletter days. We post a link in Slack, and everyone reads, comments, and feels smug about how clever we all are.

Creating an internal newsletter that doesn’t just collect digital dust in people’s inboxes might feel like a big ask, but it’s totally doable. Focus on making it fun, relatable, and genuinely useful—something people actually look forward to reading. Start small, stay consistent, and let your team’s personality shine through. You’ll know you’ve nailed it when people are chatting about it in Slack, sharing their favorite parts, and dropping jokes in the comments.

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Celebrate Your Wins and Partnerships https://fullstacks.pro/celebrate-your-wins-and-partnerships/ Mon, 20 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://fullstacks.pro/celebrate-your-wins-and-partnerships/ Trust builds marketing partnerships that last. Trust leads to projects that get rewarded because they achieve business goals.

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We’re not as great at shouting from the rooftops about success and awards as we are about people who park in our parking stalls. Moving forward, we will do better. We’re starting by celebrating Dog Jogs and our recent IABC Gold Quill Award of Excellence for their website.

When we first started working with Nikki and Steph from Dog Jogs, we constantly typed and said “Dog Jobs” which led to many conversations about which jobs our office dog (Penny) would be capable of.

Hint: not very many jobs at all.

Headphoned Penny, our office dog

We’ve experienced intense growth at Full Stacks since we started working with Dog Jogs in September 2017. We have 400% more dogs now!

Full Stacks's dogs

The four-legged growth we’ve experienced is nothing compared to how Dog Jogs has grown over their first two years. What started as a “side hustle” has become the go-to for pet services in Edmonton. Nikki and Steph built their brand on the foundation of an excellent website and their genuine care and compassion for the pets and pet families of Edmonton.

At the time of writing, we’re living in COVID-19 pandemic times and Dog Jogs has been diligent and careful in keeping up with Alberta Health Services recommendations. They’ve updated their protocols and processes to maintain physical distancing recommendations, and set up sanitization procedures for their team. The majority of their services during this time are for first responders, health care workers, and other people fulfilling essential roles.

Pet care is an essential service, and Dog Jogs’ commitment to providing care for essential workers has been celebrated by their clients!

Nikki and Steph made a choice to trust us and that respect continues to pay off for both of our teams.

We have a website that we can point to as an award winner. Not just because of its fun design (it’s really not hard to make a website look good when they have such great, seasonal dog photos), but because it performs consistently. Organic traffic is up 86% year-over-year, and before COVID-19 slowed things down, Dog Jogs was averaging over 500 services per month.

Dog Jogs organic growth

Organic traffic growth for Dog Jogs.

Our team hasn’t done a very good job of (publicly) celebrating our wins with Dog Jogs. Sure, we message in our shared Slack channel to announce the wins, but it feels a bit lacklustre.

Our lack of rooftop shouting and dancing has largely been a symptom of someone’s (their name rhymes with Sven) personal feelings about “humble bragging” and the (often unfair) belief that many agencies seem to celebrate award wins and website launches without consideration to whether a project actually helped a client do better.

What our team and the Dog Jogs team have accomplished together should be celebrated though! If we weren’t physically distancing right now, we would have gotten together for some sparkling cheer. Instead we exchanged “bottle with popping cork” and “clinking glasses” emojis.

To be honoured with an IABC award, entrants must demonstrate strategic alignment and tie the creative process and measurable results to business objectives. Submitting our work to award programs that focus on actual, proven results that prove clients truly achieved their objectives is very important to our team. It means that we built a solution that made our client’s business better.

Dog Jogs IABC Awards

  • 2019 Capital Awards, Award of Excellence: Communication Skills
  • 2019 Silver Leaf, Award of Excellence: Communication Skills
  • 2020 Gold Quill, Award of Excellence: Communication Skills

Our local Edmonton IABC chapter facilitates the Capital Awards and puts on a great award show as well, Silver Leaf is Canada’s premiere professional awards program celebrating excellence in business communication, and IABC’s Gold Quill Awards have recognized and awarded excellence in strategic communication worldwide for 40 years.

We’re proud of our partnership with Dog Jogs. We love their brand and all the pieces of their visual identity that we built together. We are thrilled that this partnership has been recognized as a success close to home and internationally, and we’re thankful to Nikki and Steph for putting their trust in our team.

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Team Building Activities for Small Teams https://fullstacks.pro/team-building-activities-edmonton/ Tue, 07 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://fullstacks.pro/team-building-activities-edmonton/ Team building can bring your team together! Learn about our favourite team building experiences in Edmonton.

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A strong and connected team works better together! Having great relationships strengthens our communication and collaboration. Corporate team building is often looked at as dull and ineffective, but it doesn’t have to be. (Boring team building events? No thank you.)

Our digital marketing team has seen changes over the years, but that doesn’t make us feel any less united. Our team has been as small as 3 and as large as 18 (which is still fairly small). Team building has been an important part of reinforcing our brand values:

  • Vocal — team building helps us feel comfortable with one another, allowing for us to be able to speak bluntly (e.g. “I don’t think that client is a good fit for us”).
  • Intelligent — team building can make your brain work in new and creative ways. We’re always learning from new experiences!
  • Collaborative — team building makes us feel closer together, and gets us working with people that we don’t work with as often or in different ways.
  • Ambitious — team building brings out our competitive side (sometimes) and gets us excited to try new things.
  • Reliable — team building gives us the opportunity to support one another in different ways and learn about our strengths and weaknesses.

Since we started doing more than just going for tacos all the time, we’ve tried to balance the following questions when planning “team things”.

What’s the right balance between a cooperative activity and just pure joy?

What do we want to feel when we finish an activity?

Do we talk about clients and projects?

Is there an underlying theme or message that guides the activity and conversation?

What should these things even be called? A Group Hang? A Party? Team Event? Team Building Time? Mandatory Extra Long Meeting?

We haven’t really answered any of these questions with certainty yet, but that has ended up being half of the fun. The simple intention of planning an activity for everyone where we go somewhere and do something together is often enough of a theme. It’s not like at summer camp when nearly every activity was meant to make you have an “Aha” moment about working together as a team. We go, we laugh, we relax, and one time we nearly died on the North Saskatchewan River. That was a pretty bonding journey.

One thing is a given: there’s always food. We care a lot about food.

Here are 10 Full Stacks approved team building activities in Edmonton. (They’re A++!)

Get Cooking

Get Cooking offers team building cooking classes which are perfect for small teams. Our team is very food motivated, so cooking together (and drinking wine) was a lot of fun! We enjoyed it so much that we’ve done two cooking classes at Get Cooking. The first time we savored an Italian feast together — crostini with arugula and walnut pesto, asparagus risotto, insalata caprese, chicken thighs roasted with potatoes and porcini mushrooms, and limoncello ice cream with biscotti. In the end our stomachs were full and we walked away with recipes that we could make at home. The second time around we learned how to make Christmas canapés, which was equally delicious.

Food brings everyone together — enjoy a tasty team building experience with Get Cooking! You can choose from a variety of cuisines to learn such as Italian, Japanese, Moroccan, Indian, and much more.

Food brings everyone together — enjoy a tasty team building experience with Get Cooking! You can choose from a variety of cuisines to learn such as Italian, Japanese, Moroccan, Indian, and much more.

Go Axe Throwing

Have you ever thrown an axe? No one on our team had before, so we decided to try it! We went to Axehole Axe Throwing and threw axes at spruce log targets until our arms were sore! An experienced trainer will teach you how to throw axes and give you tips, so you don’t need to be an axe-throwing expert before you go.

Channel your inner lumberjack and give axe throwing a try!

Two axes on two targets

Play Laser Tag

You’re never too old to play laser tag. We went to Laser City (when it was located in downtown Edmonton) and worked up a sweat running around and shooting each other with lasers. We got a bit competitive, but in the end we were all winners because we had so much fun, right?

Laser tag can teach you so many things — strategy, tactics, and how really out of shape you are. You can bond over how sore you are the next day!

Full Stacks team playing laser tag, illuminated by their glowing vests and laser guns in a dark room

Learn How to Segway

We learned how to operate a segway with the help of our guide and then went on an adventure around the river valley! For some of us, it was a fun and delightful trip. For others, it was a bit terrifying. We booked our tour with River Valley Adventure Co. and (most of us) had a blast zipping around. If your team loves Edmonton’s beautiful river valley and wants to experience it in a different way, this team building activity is for you.

How fast can you make a segway go? Find out!

Emma taking a selfie with the Full Stacks team riding Segways in a line in downtown Edmonton.

Organize an Instant Pot Lunch

It’s winter for 8 out of 12 months in Edmonton, so it’s important to keep your stomach full and happy. Buying an Instant Pot can help you with that — it can easily create a hot and delicious meal for the whole team to enjoy together. This isn’t a fun outing like most of the other team building ideas you’ll read here, but it is something that you can plan once a month to make the chilly winter months a bit more bearable.

You can get the whole team involved by deciding on the recipe, buying ingredients, preparing food, and eating together as you reminisce about the nice, warm summer days.

Here are a few instant pot recipes we’ve enjoyed:

Celebrate The Holidays

Is there a holiday that your team really gets behind? For us, it’s Halloween and Christmas! This year we decorated spooky Halloween houses. This let us flex our creativity and celebrate Halloween in a unique way. If your office enjoys Halloween, you could also host a costume contest or carve pumpkins.

For Christmas, we typically do a gift exchange (secret santa or white elephant), play party games, eat a lot of food, and play Rock Band. A Christmas party is a nice way to end the year, as it allows us to connect before we break for the holidays and return in January.

Halloween gingerbread houses made by the Full Stacks team, an illuminated BOO sign at the centre of the table

Make Terrariums

Since only a few people on our team have green thumbs, we went to Cory Christopher’s studio and made succulent terrariums! Cory’s workshop got us thinking about design and colour theory — it also made us wonder how long we’d be able to keep the succulents we chose alive. They’re hardy and don’t need a lot of water, but some of us have a talent for killing plants.

Cory has everything you need to create a beautiful terrarium — all you need to bring is your imagination!

Canoe Down the North Saskatchewan

Edmonton Canoe will drop your team off at the boat launch at Voyageur Park in Devon. From there, you’ll canoe (or kayak!) down the North Saskatchewan river and see a completely different side of the river valley. It’s an all-day trip, so pack a lunch and find a spot to eat along the river. The lazy current takes you downstream, so you’ll eventually make it back home even if you don’t paddle very hard. We highly recommend taking your team on scenic canoe trip during the summer!

Go to a Board Game Cafe

Cozy drinks. Snacks. An endless selection of board games. What’s not to like?

Our team had a great time at The Hexagon Board Game Cafe! 10/10 we highly recommend.

Full Stacks at a book cafe

Take a Pottery Workshop

Getting your hands dirty is fun! Get step-by-step instructions from an artist and get creative. We weren’t experts at throwing clay before this (and still aren’t), but we all walked away with unique mugs! Check out the pottery workshops at Viva Clayworks.

We hope that our experience with team building will help you pick an event that’s right for your team.

If you’re ready to do better marketing, check out our case studies and contact us. Our teams are stronger together!

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Edmonton Pizza Reviewed By Judgemental Digital Marketers https://fullstacks.pro/best-pizza-edmonton/ Fri, 20 Sep 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://fullstacks.pro/best-pizza-edmonton/ We ate and scored pizza from our favourite pizza places in Edmonton!

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Seven pizzas, each from a different Edmonton pizza business were evaluated on August 23rd, 2019 at the Full Stacks Pizza Penthouse. There were eight participants. Each individual participant was a self-proclaimed pizza expert.

On July 31st, 2019, Laura invited us to an event that would change our lives.

Screenshot of Laura's slack message

Earlier that day a few people were discussing what makes pizza good pizza. Is it sauce? Cheese? Ratios? And where does nostalgia factor in?

Jen went to a meeting and came back an hour later and was shocked to hear the conversation was still raging on. Everyone claimed that the conversation had in fact just picked up again, but either way, it led us to this:

Calendar event

We’re located above the Boston Pizza on Jasper Ave in Edmonton, so every day can be a pizza party at Full Stacks. We’ve eaten a lot of Boston Pizza. A lot. There have been many double pepperoni pizzas ordered and countless cactus cuts have been consumed. We don’t even have to go outside! We have a staircase that opens into the restaurant entrance.

But there is so much more pizza in Edmonton! So we had a pizza party and everyone on the team ordered a pizza from their favourite place to decide which pizza would win the title of “Best Pizza We Ate Today”.

We ordered pizza from:

Everyone had a scorecard for each pizza and rated it based on cheese, sauce, base, and toppings for a total of 20 possible points.

Pizza scorecard

LOVEPIZZA

Pizza: Donair Pizza
Nickname: “The Downtown Lunch”
Overall Score: 14/20

LOVEPIZZA is a place we frequent for lunch because of its close proximity to our office. We went there for a team lunch on Pi Day when they offered margherita pizzas for $3.14. Such a perfect promo! The donair pizza was their feature pizza in August and came topped with sweet sauce, donair beef, mozzarella cheese, white onion, and fresh tomato.

Love Pizza

Our Thoughts:
I was desperate for more sauce.” –Jen
Love the sweet sauce and crusty-ish base.” –Firdous
Donair pizza is always good.” –Brittany

Tony’s Pizza

Pizza: Pizza Bianca
Nickname: “The Garlic Lover”
Overall Score: 17/20

Tony’s is known for their New York Style pizza — super thin and crispy crust cut into large slices. Most of us have had Tony’s Pizza before, so we knew they’d score high. The pizza bianca we ordered comes with mushrooms, garlic, mozzarella, Parmigiano, pecorino cheese, basil, and olive oil. This pizza got two 20/20 scores!

Tony's Pizza

Our Thoughts:
Tony’s Pizza is the best.” –Dana
Love the smell of this pizza.” –Brittany
Flavour = awesome.” –Emma
Yes.” –Jen

Panini’s Italian Cucina

Pizza: Prosciutto Arugula
Nickname: “The Classic”
Overall Score: 15/20

Panini’s Italian Cucina offers a variety of Italian fare in addition to pizza, but we’re just here to judge their pizza. Our chosen pizza came with tomato sauce, mozzarella, fresh prosciutto, arugula, and balsamic reduction. If you love prosciutto you’ll love this pizza — it’s as simple as that.

Panini's

Our Thoughts:
Nice sauce — a little sweet but not too much.” –Laura
Toppings were the winner of the day.” –Emma
Prosciutto + arugula = win.” –Brittany

Dallas Pizza

Pizza: Pepperoni & Pineapple w/ Fresh Tomatoes
Nickname: “The Small Town Pizza”
Overall Score: 17/20

Dallas Pizza is a favourite of Jen and Emma’s because it’s got that doughy crust, tons of cheese, thick pepperoni vibe going. Most of us agreed that this style reminded us of our own favourite small town pizza joints. Pepperoni and pineapple isn’t a combo most of us have had before and — with the exception of Dana — we loved it!

Dallas pizza

Our Thoughts:
Pineapple, gross.” –Dana (who doesn’t know any better and wouldn’t even try it despite purchasing pizza for everyone else to try that had both fish and blue cheese on it)
Made my heart feel like Friday. Which it is.” –Jen
“Golden joy.” –Emma
Yes, just yes!” –Liz
Pineapple. Yes. Pepperoni. Yes. All the cheese. Yes.” –Sarah

Ragazzi

Pizza: Pizza Ragazzi (capicollo, capers, mushrooms topped with mozzarella & bocconcini cheese)
Nickname: “This Is Not My Order”
Overall Score: 13/20

We are big fans of Ragazzi for their pizza and their pasta (Laura has regular dreams about the carbonara). They are consistent and awesome, but somehow we ended up with the wrong pizza. Jen opened the box at the office and exclaimed, “This is not my order!” We’re curious to see whether Ragazzi would have scored higher if we’d gotten what Jen had planned for us. She actually ordered The Deluxe (prosciutto, Italian sausage, lightly layered mushrooms, and fresh artichoke hearts).

Ragazzi Pizza

Our Thoughts:
Too limpy of a pizza.” –Liz
Really, really delicious cheese.” –Laura
NOT WHAT I ORDERED.” –Jen

Artisti Pizzeria

Pizza: 4 Formaggi / Anchovy
Nickname: “The True Italian”
Overall Score: 13/20

Brittany is a big Artisti fan, but she is not a fan of anchovies or blue cheese. So when Dana brought in pizzas featuring both those ingredients, Brittany felt Artisti got sabotaged. Unfortunately most of us were inclined to agree and didn’t enjoy these as much as we might’ve. You can teach a person to fish but you can’t teach them to like it.

Artisti Pizza

Our Thoughts:
Look. I like anchovies in stuff. Not on stuff. End of story.” –Jen
Not too salty, good distribution.” –Dana
That cheese though!” –Liz
The anchovies were a bit too salty for me.” –Laura

Update: Artisti Pizza is now closed.

LEVA Café

Pizza: Magherita
Nickname: “Darren’s Favourite”
Overall Score: 18/20

This was our winner and it almost didn’t even make it to the party. Darren from Whitespark gave us a hot tip to check out Leva after we talked about our pizza plans in our newsletter. We are so glad he did. This pizza knocked it out of the park! Everyone loved it. Flavourful and melty mozzarella, crispy but chewy crust… this was everything a pizza should be.

Slack screenshot

Thanks, Darren… and sorry we didn’t invite you.

Leva Pizza

Our Thoughts:
Plain Jane and I like it.” –Sarah
Really good cheese and delicious sauce!!” –Laura
Wow.” –Liz
I can always eat this.” –Firdous

Awards

That was a lot of pizza! We were stuffed, to say the least. Despite being in a pizza coma, we managed to decide upon a few awards.

Best Pizza We Ate Today

We saved the best for last — LEVA Café was the winner with 18/20 points! (However, since we’re digital marketers we have to point out that they don’t have a great online presence and no website. They just have a Facebook page and they aren’t on Instagram, which we think is a great platform for any restaurant business!)

Second place was a tie between Dallas Pizza and Tony’s Pizza, but both win for different reasons. Dallas is great for that nostalgic small town pizza with a thick layer of cheese and generous toppings, while Tony’s is just a great overall slice.

LovePizza box

LOVEPIZZA’s awesome rectangular boxes. (Photo taken from the LOVEPIZZA website.)

Best Pizza Box

The award for best box goes to LOVEPIZZA. We love their sleek white boxes with their bold logo. Almost every other pizza place relies on a plain white box — they need to step up their branding game!

Best Online Presence

Best online presence was a tie between Artisti and LOVEPIZZA.

LOVEPIZZA kills it on social media, with an active Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram presence. They take advantage of their super instagrammable product by consistently posting delicious looking shots. They also responded to our tweet with a tasteful pun. 10/10, would @ mention again.

LovePizza tweet
Artisti’s website is clean and easy to navigate. It’s also got some personality and warmth. It looks like how a good pizzeria should look.

Our Pizza Dreams Came True

Our first annual pizza party was a huge success! We had a ton of fun and many of us walked away with new places to hit up when pizza cravings hit.

You tell us: where should we try pizza from next time? Did we miss the best slice in Edmonton?

The post Edmonton Pizza Reviewed By Judgemental Digital Marketers appeared first on Full Stacks.

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