The Challenge
Accenture’s Spain office runs a Christmas celebration for employees every year, as does Avanade, its joint venture with Microsoft. Both are well attended and genuinely enjoyed. For years, almost none of the photography reached the people in it.
The obstacle was not effort but policy. Internal privacy rules and GDPR obligations meant event managers could not simply post a gallery of identifiable employees. The safe option was to share almost nothing - in practice, ten or twenty hand-picked photos from an event that produced hundreds. The rest went unused.
That is a real cost. A company photographs its own celebration precisely because those images carry something back into the workplace. Withholding them protects privacy and loses the entire return.
What Kampfire Did
Accenture first activated Kampfire in December 2023, returned in 2024, and by December 2025 was running it across two events on consecutive days - Avanade’s celebration in Madrid on the 21st, Accenture’s on the 22nd.
How it worked:
- Privacy-controlled by default: photos were distributed under GDPR-compliant controls rather than posted to an open gallery, so sharing them no longer conflicted with internal policy
- Find yourself with a selfie: employees uploaded a selfie and received the photos they personally appeared in, instead of scrolling a folder of strangers
- One-click opt-out: anyone could remove a photo they appeared in without going through an organizer, which is what made the whole approach acceptable internally
- Measured for the first time: organizers could finally see whether the photography was being used at all
- Two events, two identities: each celebration ran its own fully branded Hub - Avanade’s and Accenture’s, shown below - rather than a shared generic gallery
The Results
Across the two celebrations, 349 photos produced 892 personal matches - each photo reaching, on average, more than two of the people in it. Employees downloaded 597 of them.
The pattern is clearest at Avanade, where a deliberately small shoot of 84 photos generated 401 personal matches and 282 downloads. That is 3.4 downloads for every photo taken. A photographer’s output stopped being a folder nobody opened and became something each attendee had a personal reason to visit.
For a company that had previously been able to release ten or twenty images per event, the change is not incremental. Every photo became available to the people in it, and the privacy position got stronger rather than weaker.
Why This Matters
Internal events are held to a higher privacy standard than public ones, and rightly so - attendees are employees, participation isn’t really optional, and the images sit inside an employment relationship. That standard is usually met by sharing nothing.
Accenture and Avanade show it can instead be met by sharing carefully: personal delivery rather than an open gallery, an opt-out that belongs to the individual rather than the organizer, and compliance built into how photos are distributed. Three consecutive years of use suggests the balance holds.
