How to Create a Team Cookbook

Guest Blogger - Mar 31, '21 - Cookbook Ideas - Cookbook Stories - Corporate

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Team Cookbooks are a great way to bring your members together and to learn about everyone’s backgrounds. If you’re interested in building a team cookbook, we suggest taking a page out of La Tasha’s SurveyMonkey cookbook. We spoke to La Tasha about her inspiration behind the cookbook, and we wanted to share her story to inspire those of you considering your own team cookbooks.

“As a surprise for the team, I created the Quarantine Cuisine cookbook from the 2020 cooking challenges,” says La Tasha. “The monthly team building events had themes such as 'One Pot Meals' and 'Sweet Tooth'. Team members then submitted recipes and photos of their delicious dishes for that month’s theme. The team would vote on their favorite dish, which determined the winners highlighted in the cookbook.”

CreateMyCookbook offers a few different options for inviting contributors to submit recipes to the team cookbook. We have an internal emailing system that allows users to type a short message and deliver the invite via email to all of the contributors. We also supply every book creator with a shareable contributor link which they can include in an email in an external program that will take contributors directly to the team book and allow them to type up a recipe for submission.

LaTasha took a different route that worked best for her and her team members. “I used Wufoo by SurveyMonkey to collect recipe and photo submissions. Wufoo allowed participants  to easily fill in a customized form and upload photos of their creations. I even received a real-time notification when a team member submitted a new recipe.”

You can learn so much from people just by discussing food because many of our childhood memories and traditions revolve around the kitchen and the dishes that were put together inside of them. La Tasha put in the extra effort to learn about her team members by including a section in her cookbook called “Get to Know the Chef.” “I most enjoyed learning fun facts about each contributor and what their recipe means to them. The activity was a great way to allow our  tastebuds to travel during the quarantine with recipes from India, China and Poland reflecting the diversity of the team.”

When gauging the success of her team cookbook, La Tasha reflects on the idea that their cookbook “keeps the team engaged despite the ongoing virtual environment, and it’s great to see team members continue to post pictures of recipes from the cookbook.”

We’re so happy to be a small part of SurveyMonkey’s cookbook story. We can’t wait to see what else they cook up in the future!

If you’re interested in creating a team cookbook and would like more information, check out our Corporate cookbook page.

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