We were looking for an original way of celebrating our 20th anniversary. We wanted motivate our people and get them excited about the agency’s next 20 years. Whatever we did had to be all about us – something so Alma that no one else on the planet could claim it. Our goal was to create a celebration that would be a morale booster, for the 111 people who put the soul in Alma. These are creative people aren’t easily impressed. In fact, their standards are so high that we really needed to do something out of this world.

Although this project was aimed at making people happy to be an Almatar in our collective universe, it was important that it had some philosophical heft to it. That’s where the soul part came in. We customized small Lego figures with the face and hairstyle of each employee. We made sure that each weighed 21 grams. We arranged them on a tiered platform, with a clear plastic shield and sent them out to a desert launch platform. We attached a camera to record the journey of 111 little souls from Earth to the vacuum of space and back again.

Like souls and their weight, our results are not exactly tangible. But the 111 owners of these Almatar souls renewed their sense of pride through this unusual way of celebrating the 20-year milestone. They got a huge kick out of it, understanding what we were trying to say. We enhanced our Alma souls’ sense of belonging to a place that seeks to elevate not just the work, but the spirit as well. In the end, we had 111 happy, inspired and renovated souls, who bragged on their social media profiles about how cool Alma was using the hashtag #myagencyisbetterthanyours.