Employee Recognition for Marketing & Consulting Teams | Karma
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Staff appreciation that actually resonates with your creative and consulting teams

Marketing and consulting teams are full of younger employees who need recognition to feel different from a shoulder tap. Karma makes appreciation fun, public, and tied to the values your agency or firm actually stands for — in Slack, MS Teams, Telegram, or the standalone web platform.

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  • 19

    Company values integrated into Karma at Lexema — every kudos tied to culture

  • 1493

    Karma points issued all time at Lexema (15-person team)

  • 135

    People at The SaaSy People — 80% remote, all voices heard in recognition

  • 800+

    Microkarma issued at Lexema in one year — appreciation in the flow of daily work

Marketing and consulting teams need a new language of appreciation — the shoulder tap doesn't work anymore

Most people in marketing agencies are 25–30 years old. They grew up with public recognition as a normal part of life. A private "good job" from a manager doesn't land the same way a public kudos from a peer does. And in hybrid teams, if appreciation is only visible in the office, remote employees become invisible.

What Lexema and The SaaSy People discovered

  • "People are more willing to share their opinions and tell people they're doing a good job" — César Pérez, Lexema. Public recognition changes the culture of candour
  • 19 company values integrated — every kudos at Lexema names which value it reflects, so recognition reinforces culture rather than just feeling good in the moment
  • Karma works equally for the person in the office and the person working from home — hybrid teams stop being two-tier recognition cultures
  • At The SaaSy People, every team member — regardless of role or seniority — has an equal voice in recognising excellence, not just managers

What marketing and consulting teams struggle with

  • Younger team members expect recognition to be public, immediate, and peer-driven — not a quarterly performance review comment
  • Hybrid work creates a two-tier recognition culture — in-office employees get seen, remote employees get forgotten
  • Company values stay on the website — nobody connects daily work to the values the agency was built around
  • Creative and consulting work is hard to measure — recognition is often skewed toward client-facing roles and misses the people doing the foundational work

Two teams that made staff appreciation a daily habit

A 15-person digital marketing agency in Mexico and a 135-person UK consulting firm — different scales, same insight: recognition has to be public, values-linked, and accessible to everyone.

    • Marketing Agency
    • 15
    • Mexico

    19

    Company values integrated

    1493

    Karma points all time

    Karma mafia

    Team members spontaneously formed groups giving karma to each other for weekly wins — fun and culture-building at once

    We needed a fun and public way to show appreciation to all employees — especially to speak the language of a younger generation who need more than a shoulder tap.

    César Pérez

    Co-Founder, Lexema

    Read the full story
    • Consulting
    • 135
    • UK

    135

    Employees

    80%

    Working remotely

    All voices

    Everyone — regardless of role or seniority — has a voice in recognition

    Karma helps us celebrate each other, build stronger connections, and create an environment where people genuinely feel valued. It's not just recognition — it's motivation.

    Chris Malkin

    Senior Director of People & Operations

    Read the full story

Five features marketing and consulting teams use every day

Every feature works in Slack, MS Teams, Telegram, and Karma's standalone web platform — so hybrid and remote team members have exactly the same recognition experience regardless of where they're working.

  • Peer-to-peer recognition

    Public kudos tied to company values — the fun, visible appreciation that Lexema's team formed a "Karma mafia" around. Works the same in the office and from home.

    See how it works

  • Rewards & gift cards

    Gift cards, charity donations, custom non-monetary perks — a rewards catalog your team configures. Points earned through peer recognition, redeemed on their own terms.

    See rewards

  • Milestone automation

    Workiversaries, birthdays, and achievement badges celebrated automatically — making staff appreciation week feel like it happens every week, not just in March.

    See milestones

  • Anonymous feedback

    Pulse surveys in Slack so your team tells you what they actually think — not what they think you want to hear. Especially useful in creative teams where candour is a cultural value. Available for Slack.

    See feedback

  • Culture analytics

    See which of your 19 company values are actually driving recognition — and which are just words on the website. AI-powered analytics from recognition and survey data.

    See analytics

  • All customer stories

    See how teams across marketing, consulting, software, e-commerce, and education have built recognition cultures with Karma.

    Read stories

Frequently asked questions

What are good staff appreciation ideas for marketing agencies?

The most effective staff appreciation ideas for marketing agencies are public, peer-driven, and connected to the creative contributions that define agency work. Rather than top-down awards or generic gift cards, Karma lets agency teams give each other kudos directly in Slack or MS Teams — tied to a specific campaign, deliverable, or client win. Points accumulate toward a rewards catalog the team configures themselves, and scheduled leaderboards celebrate top contributors publicly every week or month.

How do you run an employee engagement program for a hybrid team?

Hybrid teams need engagement programs that work equally well whether someone is in the office or working remotely that day. Karma solves this by living inside the tools the whole team uses regardless of location — Slack, MS Teams, Telegram, or the standalone web platform. Recognition isn't tied to being physically present: a kudos sent from home counts exactly the same as one sent from the office, and milestone celebrations fire automatically whether or not the team is together.

How do you give positive feedback examples to younger marketing employees?

Younger employees in marketing agencies tend to respond better to public, immediate, peer-given recognition than to formal manager feedback. Good examples of positive feedback for this context include: '@Maria++ for the campaign concept that landed the new client — pure Innovation'; '@Ben++ for the social copy that outperformed last quarter by 40% — this is what Customer First looks like'. Specific, public, and tied to a company value. Karma makes this the default mode of recognition rather than an occasional gesture.

How do consulting firms build a recognition culture across a large remote workforce?

Large consulting firms with distributed teams need recognition systems where everyone — regardless of role, seniority, or location — has an equal voice. Karma's peer-to-peer model means a junior consultant can recognise a senior partner, and a remote team member in a different country is visible in the same recognition feed as someone in the head office. The SaaSy People, a 135-person UK consulting firm with 80% remote staff, used this approach to make appreciation a daily habit across the whole organisation.

How do you connect company values to employee recognition in a marketing team?

The most effective way to connect company values to recognition is to make value-tagging part of the recognition act itself. In Karma, every kudos can be linked to a company value — so when someone gives recognition, they also name which value the contribution reflects. Lexema, a 15-person digital marketing agency in Mexico, integrated 19 company values into Karma. Over time, the recognition data shows which values the team actually embodies day-to-day versus which ones remain aspirational.

Ready to get started?

If you're ready to get started with Karma, sign up now and explore the benefits of the recognition for your team. You can also reach out for a free demo.

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Karma bot privacy policy

Effective date: 18 August 2026

This Privacy Policy explains how Sliday LTD ("Sliday", "we", "us", or "our") collects, uses, shares, and protects personal data. It covers both the Karma application (for Microsoft Teams, Slack, Telegram, and the web) and the https://karmabot.chat website.

Who we are and how to contact us

The data controller is Sliday LTD, a private limited company registered in Cyprus under company number HE450506, with its principal place of business at Pavlou Valdaseridi 2A, 1st floor, Larnaka, Cyprus, 6018.

For any privacy-related enquiry, or to exercise your data protection rights, contact us at hi@karmabot.chat.

Privacy matters are overseen by our Legal Advisor / Operational Security Manager, Stas Kulesh. A dedicated Data Protection Officer has not been appointed, as Sliday LTD is not required to appoint one under Article 37 of the GDPR; privacy responsibilities are held by the Legal Advisor.

Personal data we handle and where it comes from

From the Karma application

When your organisation installs and uses Karma, we process the following personal data, obtained from Microsoft Teams / Microsoft Entra ID (Azure AD) and from your use of the application:

  • Display name — from Microsoft Teams / Microsoft Graph
  • Email address — from Microsoft Teams / Microsoft Graph
  • User Principal Name (UPN) — from Microsoft Graph (/me)
  • Microsoft Entra (Azure AD) object ID and tenant ID — from Microsoft authentication
  • Profile photo — from Microsoft Graph (/me/photo)
  • Team and channel names — from Microsoft Teams
  • Karma activity (karma given and received, associated messages) — from your use of the app

Where Karma is used with Slack or Telegram, the equivalent identity and workspace data is obtained from that platform instead.

From this website

  • Contact details you give us — such as your email address and name when you subscribe to updates, request a demo, or contact support
  • Usage and device data — IP address, browser type and version, pages visited, date, time and duration of visit, referring page, and similar diagnostic data
  • Cookies and similar technologies — see "Cookies and website analytics" below

Why we process personal data

We process personal data to:

  • Identify you and link you to your organisation's Karma workspace
  • Operate the core recognition ("karma") features, leaderboards, and adaptive cards
  • Display your name and profile photo within the app
  • Deliver notifications and service communications
  • Administer subscriptions and billing
  • Provide customer support and respond to your enquiries
  • Monitor, secure, maintain, and improve the service, and detect and address technical issues
  • Send newsletters, marketing, or promotional material where you have chosen to receive it — you can opt out at any time via the unsubscribe link in any email, or by contacting us

Lawful basis for processing

We process personal data on the following lawful bases under the GDPR:

  • Performance of a contract — to provide the Karma service to your organisation
  • Legitimate interests — to operate, secure, and improve the service, where not overridden by your rights
  • Consent — for marketing communications and for non-essential cookies and analytics, where consent is required
  • Legal obligation — where we are required by law to retain or disclose data, including for tax and accounting purposes

Where your organisation is the controller and we act as processor, processing is carried out on your organisation's documented instructions.

Who we share personal data with

We share personal data only with the sub-processors listed below, each of which is necessary to deliver the service and is engaged under an appropriate data processing agreement. This is the complete list of sub-processors with access to personal data. We do not sell personal data.

Service sub-processors

  • DigitalOcean — application hosting and managed database
  • Amazon Web Services (AWS) — profile photo storage (S3)
  • Cloudflare — edge delivery and web application firewall
  • Microsoft — authentication, the Teams platform, and Microsoft Graph
  • Stripe — subscription billing and payment processing
  • Sentry — error monitoring
  • MailerLite — notification and marketing email delivery

We do not store or collect your payment card details. That information is provided directly to Stripe, our payment processor, whose use of your personal information is governed by its own privacy policy (https://stripe.com/privacy). Stripe adheres to the standards set by PCI-DSS as managed by the PCI Security Standards Council.

Website analytics and marketing providers

The https://karmabot.chat website additionally uses:

We may also disclose personal data where required to do so by law or in response to a valid request by a public authority, or where necessary to protect our legal rights, prevent or investigate wrongdoing, or protect the safety of users or the public.

Cookies and website analytics

Cookies are small pieces of data stored on your device. We use cookies and similar technologies (including beacons, tags, and scripts) to operate the website, remember your preferences, keep the service secure, and understand how the site is used.

The cookies we use fall into these categories:

  • Essential cookies — required to operate the website and keep it secure
  • Preference cookies — to remember your settings and choices
  • Analytics and marketing cookies — set by the providers listed above to measure traffic and advertising performance

You can instruct your browser to refuse all cookies or to notify you when a cookie is set. If you refuse cookies, some parts of the website may not function correctly.

We do not currently respond to browser "Do Not Track" (DNT) signals.

How long we keep personal data

We retain personal data for the duration of your organisation's active subscription and for six (6) months after subscription cancellation, after which it is deleted. This applies to customer account and identity data, profile photos, and karma transaction records.

  • Database backups operate on a rolling 7-day point-in-time recovery window, so any backup containing erased data is automatically superseded within 7 days.
  • Upon a verified data deletion request, we action it as promptly as reasonably possible and in any event within one month, as required by the GDPR.
  • Billing and accounting records may be retained for longer where required by law.
  • Operational data — error telemetry, security logs, and backups — is disposed of automatically as it ages out of the relevant service's retention window.

Full details are set out in our Data Retention and Disposal Policy.

Your data protection rights

Subject to applicable law, you have the right to:

  • Be informed about how your personal data is used
  • Access the personal data we hold about you
  • Rectification — to have inaccurate or incomplete data corrected
  • Erasure — to have your personal data deleted
  • Restriction — to request that we restrict processing of your personal data
  • Data portability — to receive your data in a structured, commonly used, machine-readable format
  • Object to our processing of your personal data
  • Rights relating to automated decision-making and profiling — Karma does not carry out automated decision-making producing legal or similarly significant effects
  • Withdraw consent at any time, where we rely on your consent

To exercise any of these rights, contact us at hi@karmabot.chat. We may ask you to verify your identity before responding.

Making a Subject Access Request (SAR)

To submit a Subject Access Request, contact us at hi@karmabot.chat. We respond to all SARs within one month, as required by the GDPR, unless the request is complex or numerous, in which case we may extend the response time by a further two months and will tell you if we do. We maintain a data mapping process that lets us locate and retrieve all personal data held about a specific data subject across our systems — principally the production database and the profile photo object storage — so that a SAR can be fulfilled thoroughly.

International transfers and safeguards

Karma production data is hosted in the United States (DigitalOcean SFO region). As Sliday LTD is established in the EU (Cyprus), this involves a transfer of personal data to a third country.

Such transfers — and transfers to other sub-processors located outside the EU/EEA, including Microsoft, AWS, Cloudflare, Stripe, Sentry, and the analytics providers listed above — are protected by appropriate safeguards, principally the Standard Contractual Clauses (SCCs) incorporated into each sub-processor's Data Processing Agreement, supplemented by those providers' certification frameworks, including the EU–US Data Privacy Framework where the provider participates.

Sliday LTD takes all steps reasonably necessary to ensure that your data is treated securely and in accordance with this Privacy Policy.

Your right to complain to a supervisory authority

You have the right to lodge a complaint with a data protection supervisory authority.

Our lead supervisory authority is the Office of the Commissioner for Personal Data Protection of the Republic of Cyprus:

You may also lodge a complaint with the supervisory authority in your own country of residence.

Security of data

The security of your data is important to us. We apply technical and organisational measures appropriate to the risk, including encryption in transit, access controls, vulnerability scanning, and error monitoring. However, no method of transmission over the internet or method of electronic storage is completely secure, and we cannot guarantee absolute security.

Children's privacy

Our service is not directed at anyone under the age of 18. We do not knowingly collect personal data from children. If you are a parent or guardian and believe your child has provided us with personal data, please contact us and we will take steps to remove it.

Our service may contain links to sites we do not operate. We have no control over, and assume no responsibility for, the content or privacy practices of any third-party site. We encourage you to review the privacy policy of every site you visit.

Changes to this Privacy Policy

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. We will post the updated policy on this page and update the effective date at the top. Where changes are significant, we will notify you by email and/or a prominent notice on our service before the change takes effect. We encourage you to review this policy periodically.

Contact us

If you have any questions about this Privacy Policy, contact us:

  • By email: hi@karmabot.chat
  • By post: Sliday LTD, Pavlou Valdaseridi 2A, 1st floor, Larnaka, Cyprus, 6018