Deutsche Bahn is known as Germany's largest railway company and one of the world's leading mobility and logistics corporations. In short, they move thousands, if not millions, of people and goods every single day. One year ago, the Deutsche Bahn launched the internal and external pivotal global strategy Starke Schiene, dedicated to rethinking transport, reducing CO2 emissions, getting more people to choose the railway while connecting Europe, and positively contributing to the economy.

More than 320.000 people worldwide work at Deutsche Bahn. Getting everyone on board with a strategy that involves significant changes for every area of the business can be challenging. remove.bg was a small but impactful part of the solution in unexpected ways and created the baseline for an internal Starke Schiene campaign amongst the employees.

Four years ago, the corporation created a place where every employee could go to get the information they needed - DB Planet – a social intranet. With more than 225,000 users, the platform has become a space of participation for almost two-thirds of the employees. Nevertheless, Deutsche Bahn is aiming to get every employee on board, to increase the number of active users, improve interaction on the platform, and use it to increase the awareness of the new strategy - Starke Schiene.

It was quite clear from the beginning that Deutsche Bahn wanted every single employee to be involved. Their internal communication team needed an easy-to-use solution that would make creating employee-driven content easy and could slot into their existing online platform DB planet. That’s where remove.bg came in.

One of Deutsche Bahn’s creative agencies suggested using remove.bg - turns out we were the perfect fit. remove.bg was successfully integrated into the internal communication platform DB Planet — as a tailored solution to encourage employees to participate and show how they contribute to the strategy Starke Schiene by creating pictures such as the one below.

Employees could easily snap a picture on their phones, upload it to DB Planet, remove the background (with the remove.bg integration), set it on a branded Starke Schiene backdrop, and add a personal slogan stating/highlighting how they and their department are contributing to the global strategy. This was not only a great way to create content, but it also got employees actively involved in the strategy and thinking about how they could add to the big picture. Once everything was up and running, Deutsche Bahn didn’t seem to have any technical issues along the way. “remove.bg was very easy for the employees to use, we didn’t have any complaints and we were incredibly impressed by the quality of the results from day one.” stated Jürgen Schirm, Deutsche Bahn.

Although Deutsche Bahn met some challenges along the way during implementation, we were there to support them. Everything worked out fine in no time: “Anytime an issue popped up, we were able to speak to the remove.bg team right away, get answers quickly, and were always treated with friendliness, competence, and respect.” Jürgen Schirm continued.

For Deutsche Bahn, remove.bg not only provided an easy-to-use software solution that removes background images, but it ended up doing so much more – and continues to do so. By actively getting employees involved in creating Starke Schiene images, the internal communication of Deutsche Bahn was able to not only create hype and excitement around the new global strategy Starke Schiene, but also:

• ensure employees are actively contributing to the overall company strategy,

• snap and edit over 4,000 employees’ created images,

• get employees to interact with each other offline,

• trigger creative ideas,

• get more people to become active on the social intranet DB Planet and

• create unforgettable memories and interactions amongst employees they won’t forget.

Deutsche Bahn has a father-son duo working at the company - they got them together to celebrate 30 years of working together at Deutsche Bahn and contributing to a Starke Schiene and shared it across all internal channels. This story almost had us tear up here at the remove.bg office, to be honest.

All in all, the campaign has triggered sub-campaigns and challenges where employees have to get another 100 employees to participate in creating a Starke Schiene image and slogan. And a lot of them seem to be getting very competitive.