A Custom-Built Charity Experience for Pella’s Top Leaders
Client
Pella Corporation — bringing its top 100 leaders together in Des Moines, Iowa for an annual leadership retreat.
Goal
Create a high-energy, competitive experience to build cross-functional connections and deliver a real, tangible impact for the event’s beneficiary, the Boys & Girls Club.
Event Format
A custom indoor experience featuring Pella-themed trivia, a relay gauntlet of mini challenges, and a Battle Bots build-and-battle tournament.
cityHUNT’s Role
While we’re best known for scavenger hunts, our Adventure Team designed and produced this one‑off experience from the ground up to support Pella’s specific vision and charitable goals.
Outcome
Deep engagement from senior leadership, stronger cross‑functional ties, and a powerful charitable moment that provided STEM tools and helped fund thousands of meals for Boys & Girls Club members across Iowa.
“We hired cityHUNT to be an expert in delivering an experience for our highest‑end leaders, and they absolutely showed up with the energy to own that moment. They kept 100 very competitive people fully engaged in a relatively tight conference room from start to finish.”
– Kourtney Baker, Corporate Events Manager, Pella
Client Background and Goals
Pella brought together their top 100 leaders — many of whom operate in hybrid or geographically dispersed contexts — for its leadership planning retreat in Des Moines.
For this particular retreat, they were balancing two priorities:
- Honoring Pella’s story and culture, including its heritage and recent 100‑year milestone
- Elevating their partnership with the Boys & Girls Club with an experience that went beyond a standard donation
Pella’s brief to cityHUNT included several non-negotiables:
- High engagement at scale: Keep 100 leaders moving and involved in a single room, not seated watching a stage.
- Clear competition: Pella’s leadership is “very competitive.” There had to be a clear winner by the end of the night.
- Inclusive design: Every leader needed an active role; no format where one person plays while the rest of the team watches.
- Brand and story alignment: The activity should nod to Pella’s history and line of business.
- Meaningful community impact: The Boys & Girls Club specifically asked for STEM toys that adults could use during the event and then donate for ongoing youth programming.
Event Design and Planning
A Custom Build, Outside the Usual Playbook
At cityHUNT, our core offering is large‑scale, app‑powered scavenger hunts that bring teams together in cities across the country. This Pella project was different.
The Battle Bots concept and the relay “gauntlet” were not standard cityHUNT products. They were a custom build that our Adventure Team took on because:
- The cause (supporting the Boys & Girls Club) was deeply aligned with our Make Awesome For Others mindset
- Pella had a clear, thoughtful vision for how they wanted to engage their leaders and their nonprofit partner
- The constraints — one room, tournament style, with STEM donations — demanded a bespoke solution
This event was about saying “yes” to the right mission and helping a client make a bigger impact than they could alone.
Building the Experience
Working closely with Kourtney Baker and Pella’s Corporate Events team, our Producing Creative Director, Justin Walker, designed a three‑part evening that balanced competition, brand storytelling, and charity:
1. Pella‑Themed Trivia
- Multiple rounds of trivia “with nods to our history,” including an on‑brand music round themed around windows and doors
- A game‑show style format with slides and visuals to keep energy high
- Teams of 5–6 leaders, intentionally mixed so people weren’t just with their usual colleagues
2. “The Gauntlet” – Relay Mini‑Challenges
A relay of “minute to win it” style activities, including:
- Tossing bags (cornhole)
- A jigsaw puzzle of Pella’s historical timeline
- Building a windmill with Magna‑Tiles as a playful nod to Pella’s Dutch heritage
- A window‑washing challenge using “putty paint” and Windex, tying directly back to Pella’s windows and doors
The gauntlet format ensured the event wasn’t a spectator sport. Leaders rotated in relay fashion so each person’s effort mattered to the team’s overall score.
3. Battle Bots Tournament with a STEM Giveback
- To meet the Boys & Girls Club’s request for STEM tools, cityHUNT recommended Battle Bots kits that adults could build and then donate.
- The Adventure Team sourced enough Battle Bots sets to equip all 16 teams and provide multiple robots for Boys & Girls Club locations across Iowa.
- A bracketed tournament structure would narrow the field from 16 teams to a single champion, satisfying Pella’s desire for a definitive winner.
Behind the scenes, Justin’s team also designed the physical layout, which included four preliminary arenas placed around the room for early‑round battles, as well as a “grand arena” kept under a curtain and revealed dramatically for the final battles. Pella’s production partner provided camera setups (“robot cams” and tripods) so the robot matches could be broadcast live on big screens during the event.
“cityHUNT designed the evening so everyone was participating — not just one person on an app. It was cathartic to have our top 100 leaders on site, working together on something that wasn’t actually work, and you could feel the camaraderie building in the room.”
– Kourtney Baker, Corporate Events Manager, Pella
Event Execution
Phase 1
Trivia and Warm-Up
Leaders arrived to find themselves assigned to mixed teams and immediately dropped into the Pella-themed trivia. This broke the ice without feeling forced, honored Pella’s legacy, and created an early leaderboard to seed the next phase.
The room’s engagement was obvious from the start: laughter, spirited debate over answers, and light-hearted rivalry between teams.
Phase 2
The Gauntlet
Next, teams moved into the relay gauntlet. Every leader had a role—throwing bags, racing to assemble a Magna‑Tile windmill, or “cleaning” the mock windows under a time limit.
A standout moment for many: seeing Pella’s president literally sprinting through the room during the relay, drawing big reactions from colleagues who rarely see senior leadership in that kind of playful mode.
Kourtney later said cityHUNT “created a space to have that moment for our leaders to be people… and just build camaraderie.”
Phase 3
Battle Bots Build and Bracket
With trivia and gauntlet scores on the board, teams sat down to build their robots. They had to interpret instructions under time pressure and delegate tasks to make the build efficient, troubleshooting and testing together before stepping into the arena.
Battles began in the smaller arenas, with cameras capturing every blow. The footage went live on big screens, turning the conference room into a mini sports arena as teams cheered each other on.
At the end of the preliminaries, the curtain dropped on the grand arena for the final bracket. The top teams faced off in front of the full group, with scores and brackets visible so everyone understood exactly where they stood.
By design, there was no ambiguity: one team walked away the clear Battle Bots champion.
Final Moments
A Boys & Girls Club Ambassador Joins the Finale
For the final moments of the tournament and charitable reveal, Pella invited a special guest: a young member of the local Boys & Girls Club, serving as an ambassador for his Club and an honored guest for the evening. He joined Boys & Girls Club leaders in the room as the last battles wrapped up and Pella announced the full scope of the donation.
Pella recognized him publicly, thanked him for representing his Club, and surprised him with gifts including multiple Lego kits and a pair of AirPods.
Kourtney shared that he “thought everyone was there for him,” and in a very real sense, they were: the entire night was designed to shine a spotlight on the Boys & Girls Club and the kids it serves.
“You guys created a space to have that moment for our leaders to be people and just build camaraderie. Watching our company president literally sprint across the room because she wanted her team to win is something our leaders are still talking about.”
– Kourtney Baker, Corporate Events Manager, Pella
Community Impact with the Boys & Girls Club
For Justin and the cityHUNT team, the most meaningful outcome was what this event enabled for the Boys & Girls Club. Because Pella tied the entire evening to their nonprofit partner, the night resulted in:
- A significant financial donation to support the Boys & Girls Club’s meal program — enough to provide thousands of meals for kids across Iowa
- A large shipment of Battle Bots kits and other STEM toys for Boys & Girls Club programming
- A moment of recognition and storytelling in front of 100+ senior leaders
As Justin shared internally, the real win was that cityHUNT could facilitate Pella’s giving in a way that maximized both experience and impact.
“We survey our guests after every leadership conference, and even without a specific question about team building, at least a dozen of our top 100 leaders called out this activity as one of the most memorable parts of the entire retreat.”
– Kourtney Baker, Corporate Events Manager, Pella
Why This Event Was Different
cityHUNT’s core specialty is scalable, customizable scavenger hunts that help teams explore cities, connect, and play together. That’s what most of our clients hire us for, and what we recommend in the vast majority of cases.
This Pella event was intentionally different. It was a one-off, highly customized build with complex logistics that we took on because the mission, partner, and timing were exactly right.
If you’re planning a leadership retreat, offsite, or large‑group gathering and want an experience that actually gets people interacting, cityHUNT can help you design it. Most of the time, that looks like a custom scavenger hunt.
Sometimes, with the right ingredients, it can look like something that’s never been done before.
