Bright Funds Team Virtual Paint Night

Celebrating a creative culture with our Bright Artists

At Bright Funds, the giving season, which is from October to February, is usually a busy one for the team. With special holiday donation events and new nonprofits popping up, we are working to help donors find the causes and nonprofits they want to support this time of year. Additionally, we are helping our clients create holiday giving campaigns to empower their employees to give back!

Connecting the team is harder when everyone is remote

As a team, we always try our best to make time to have Zoom chats with each other and schedule team activities, but like most companies who are all-remote, it can be a tough challenge to get everyone on the same schedule or prioritize our team activities with responsibilities. It can also be a challenge to find an online activity that doesn’t feel like work since we spend most of our time in front of a computer already. With the giving season mixed in, it becomes a harder thing to schedule.

Why we landed on a virtual painting event

Luckily, with some advanced planning and coordination, the Bright Funds team came together for a virtual Paint Night to kick off the holiday season! In our research, we found this to be one of the more popular activities for remote teams, and we wanted to plan something that would bring us together, as well as bring a piece of Bright Funds to our homes. The good thing about this activity was that we could do it together, but also independently if someone wasn’t able to make the Zoom party. Most of the team had to drop off during the painting session, but they did share their spectacular masterpieces once they were done. The instruction video was pre-recorded, so we were able to pause and let our paint dry or catch up whenever we wanted. This video is about an hour long, and with the pauses we took, it ended up being a little under three hours we spent together.

The Bright Funds team explaining how to show both the painting demo and the team in the same Zoom window.

How the event worked for our team

This was the first time I and many of the team had experienced a Paint Night, and safe to say, it went very well! Each person was sent a complete painting kit with brushes, an easel, paints and an apron. We pre-selected our painting, titled “Nordic Gnome”. It appeared to be the easiest of the holiday-themed paintings, and different from a normal painting you would see during the season (think snowy hills and trees!) When we started painting, it did not go as planned. Many of us were afraid we had used a majority of our paint color at the first step and were also concerned that the color looked nothing like the instructor’s painting. We trekked along, pausing when we needed to, and making comments about how our own paintings looked. Our team also has some in-house artists, so it was great to see how comfortable they were in the painting process and enjoying making it their own. We got through these tiny hesitations and hiccups, and everyone came out with beautiful and unique gnomes. I don’t know where mine will go in my home, but every time I look at it, I know I have a piece of the Bright Funds team with me.

If you are looking for a painting event vendor for your hybrid team, I recommend Painting to Gogh! They were patient with all of my questions, and their follow up was awesome. I especially loved that they notified me when all the painting supplies were successfully delivered to the team across the U.S.! We will definitely be using them again. You may also be interested in downloading our Virtual Volunteer Toolkit which has additional suggestions on how you can engage your remote and hybrid workforce with virtual events and volunteer opportunities.