About Better Collective

Founded in 2004, Better Collective is the world’s leading sports betting media group within the iGaming industry (online gambling). They provide iGamers and sports fans with betting tips, bookmaker information, and other educational tools to help them get the most out of their betting experience and bet responsibly.

Today, they have 14 offices around the world, more than 600 employees, are listed on NASDAQ, and their headquarters is in Copenhagen, Denmark.

Better Collective headquarters in Copenhagen, Denmark

IT and their Workspace journey

We interviewed Martin Andersen, the former IT manager at Better Collective, who managed their IT duties and Google Workspace setup for 4,5 years. He shared with us that when they started, the founders decided to “go Google” as their apps integrated well with each other. Better Collective has been using Google Workspace for around 17 years.

As with most companies, external collaboration was essential for Better Collective’s day-to-day operations. According to Martin, they relied on sharing files and folders on My Drive (since Shared Drives didn’t exist at the time), and that was the norm for a long time.

HR, the proactive ally of IT

At Better Collective, HR had always been interested in IT-related solutions and Data Transfers. Over the years, HR and IT created several awareness campaigns about external file-sharing through presentations, morning meetings, and Slack channels. Through those, they were educating staff on what could and could not be shared externally. Additionally, employees were told to manually go through their sharings and revoke any unnecessary access to them.

“I have never worked with a HR department I could consult with as much as I could in Better Collective, so when I introduced them to the Tricent Compliance Tool (Tricent), HR immediately asked me for a report as to “How many of our files can be accessed by third parties?” High praise to them!” said Martin Andersen.

A smarter clean-up solution

Better Collective was introduced to the Tricent through Apps People, a Google Workspace partner. With Tricent, Better Collective and their users gained a complete overview of who could access their files. What’s more, the company learned about their top sharers, how many files each user had shared, and many other useful insights.

With Tricent, Better Collective had a much more efficient way to clean up their shared files. While unsharing every single file is technically possible, it would affect the existing collaborations of many users. Not to mention, it would also take more effort remembering all the people that need access to the files, and manually sharing each file with them (again).

Consequently,  Better Collective decided to go with Tricent, as it provided an automatic process to clean up files. With Tricent, admins were able to set up clean-up rules and users were able to decide themselves which files needed to be unshared and with whom.

Now, the next step was to encourage users to clean up their files - meet Bob and Alfred, the two turtles that made it happen.

Alfred (left) and Bob (right)

Turtles might be slow, but they’re fast at cleaning up files

It all started with Martin randomly seeing a YouTube clip of two turtles saying “sharing is caring” and he thought to himself, “I could make a campaign out of this.” And so he did.

"When we started with Tricent, I made an awareness campaign about the Tricent Compliance Tool and what it should be used for. I also started a competition, where those who cleaned up the most had a chance to win a prize. We drove the campaign quite intensively for a month and really started to see some results.”

Martin bought two stuffed turtles and named them Bob and Alfred. He took many funny pictures featuring them and used headlines such as “sharing is caring”, “keep your cool - don’t share like a fool”, and many more along the lines of how to unshare files. The awesome part about that? People loved it!

“It created surprisingly much traction. People got attached to these turtles and wanted to know where they were, what they were doing, and how to win them.”

Martin wanted to create a fair system. He awarded his colleagues abroad with more points for unsharing files, since he was not physically near them. The top unsharers got more points as they spent more time cleaning their files, and likewise employees who actively used Tricent Compliance Tool were awarded more points.

One turtle was sent to their office in Serbia. The other turtle travelled to their office in England, and that made the whole organization feel included in the competition.

The results

Although Martin didn’t have any prior experience with making a gamified campaign like this, he managed to get people to clean up 50% of externally shared files in just two months. What’s more, users now know the importance of cleaning up their shared files and how to use the Tricent Compliance Tool.

“In some cases, external file-sharing is great, but it's also dangerous. We just have to clean up after a project is over,” said Martin.

The benefit of Tricent for Better Collective was that it made people aware of their sharing habits via email and graphics. Additionally, the admin tool provided a good overview with reporting and insights, which was very much needed for compliance purposes.

The introduction of Tricent also relieves some pressure off the IT department. “It’s not the IT department itself that will continue to create these awareness campaigns. Now there is an email, which already has that functionality. It’s kind of an awareness campaign in itself,” noted Martin.

What’s great is that despite the campaign ending, people are still cleaning up their shared files.

Conclusion

Martin’s creative strategy made the cleanups entertaining, transparent, and fair. Using gamification for something as unappealing as unsharing, turned it into a fun task instead. With inspiration from YouTube, Martin gamified the adoption of the new tool, making the whole process engaging, exciting, and pleasant. “I think I might make a direct copy/paste of this campaign in the future. It was fun, surprising, and effective,“ said Martin.

It’s also worth mentioning that having a vigilant HR team matters enormously. A proactive approach to data protection that extends to HR issues gives a helping hand to the IT department, making it a team’s effort to protect the company from human errors.

Better Collective’s case is a great example of teamwork and taking an awareness campaign to the next level in a creative way. We hope their story can make onboarding your users to Tricent more entertaining for them, and that unsharing will become less of a tedious task and more of a fun one.