Special Delivery
The Brief
They’d been chosen as future leaders. Nothing about the build-up said so.
Deloitte University had hand-picked its next cohort of future leaders for a flagship programme. The build-up didn’t match the honour. A standard joining pack would land in the inbox with everything else, the pre-read skimmed or skipped, and people would arrive carrying the exact habits the programme existed to change. Being chosen should feel like something. This felt like admin.
The Solution
Treat the invitation as the first lesson.
Special Delivery is an augmented reality experience sent ahead of the programme. Three objects, each carrying a theme from the course, come to life in the room around the participant, while a voice-over tells them what they’ve been chosen for. Nothing to download. Just a moment that stands out, the way they had.
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Being chosen is a powerful moment. Most leadership programmes waste it.
Deloitte University is where the firm develops its leaders. This programme was its flagship: a hand-picked cohort, identified as the firm’s future leaders, about to be asked to think and lead differently.
A programme like this is one of the most expensive bets a firm places on its people, and those in it are the ones it can least afford to lose. If the first thing they receive is paperwork, the investment starts to slip before day one.
The harder problem was habit. Everyone selected had ingrained ways of learning, and the programme needed them to step outside those. Conventional pre-course communication does the opposite. It confirms that this will be a course like every other course.
Our Approach
Nudge them out of their habits before the programme asks them to.
We started with the course itself: its objectives, its themes, the outcomes it was built to deliver. One thing became clear. If the programme was going to ask future leaders to break their learning habits, the invitation had to break the habit of invitations first.
Working with the course facilitators, we storyboarded and iterated until a storyline held. Three objects, chosen to symbolise the course’s key themes, became talismans. Each appears in the participant’s own space and leads them through, while a voice-over embeds what the programme is about and why they’re in it.
We built it in WebAR so it opens straight from a browser. No app store, no download, no excuse not to open it. The technology stayed invisible. The feeling of being selected didn’t.
Key Project Assets
WebAR Invitation Experience
A browser-based augmented reality experience sent to every participant ahead of the programme, turning the pre-read from a document to skim into an event to step inside, with nothing to install.
The Three Talismans
Three objects, each symbolising a key theme of the course, that appear in the participant’s own space and lead the way, so the programme’s ideas arrive as things to hold, not headings to read.
Storyline and Voice-over
A narrative developed with the course facilitators and carried by voice-over, embedding the programme’s key messages while the talismans do the showing, so people finish knowing what they’ve been chosen for.
3D Motion Design
Bespoke 3D motion that brings each talisman to life in the room around the participant, built to feel like an event rather than an animation playing on a phone.
Impact
Pre-course communication rarely gets measured, let alone praised. This did both. Every respondent said the experience lifted their enthusiasm for the programme, and the client’s thank-you arrived the day after the participants’ feedback did.
Project Insights
From being told to feeling chosen
The pre-programme moment is the most neglected part of any learning journey. It’s where the joining instructions live, and where the feeling of being chosen quietly fades. Yet it’s also the cheapest moment to influence: the audience is primed and paying attention, and almost nobody uses it.
Special Delivery shows what happens when you treat that moment as the first lesson, not the last piece of admin. The technology mattered. The idea mattered more: if you want people to arrive thinking differently, the way you tell them they’ve been chosen has to feel like being chosen.
Thank you for being a partner that always wants to deliver the most exceptional experience to our people. Looking at the feedback from participants yesterday it seems to have added value to them too, enhancing their understanding of the journey and exciting them about what they will learn.
Pete German — Deloitte University EMEA
