Company Retreat, but Make it #Camp

At the end of a whirlwind year of impact, we knew we needed a moment to pause, reflect, and realign. Cue: Camp NURA: Rest and Reset—our first-ever company retreat, in our second home, New Orleans. For a full week, we stepped away from the grind, set our out-of-office replies, and fully leaned into the idea of unplugging to strategically plan for our future while strengthening our team dynamic.

What unfolded was a mix of deep strategic thinking, belly laughs, childhood nostalgia, competitive board games, caffeine-fueled survival tactics, and a few inside jokes that will live on forever.

Pack Your Bags - We’re Going Camping! 

The camp theme? A Pinterest find turned full-blown reality. We ran with it, creating custom merch—tote bags, T-shirts, playing cards—all the essentials for a true camp experience. But beyond aesthetics, we wanted this retreat to be an intentional reset button—a chance to define NURA’s future, clarify our mission, vision, and values, and take a hard look at our brand positioning. What does our marketing agency exist for? Who are we here to serve? What does impact really look like?

So we packed our bags, set our Slack statuses to “OOO,” and made New Orleans our home for the week. And yes, we ate well.

Baby Pictures and Board Games

We kicked off Camp NURA the best way possible—by roasting our younger selves. Everyone brought childhood photos, and we spent the night reminiscing about how our personalities have (or haven’t) changed. It was equal parts hilarious and heartwarming.

That first night set the tone for the week. Vulnerability, laughter, and the kind of safe space that allows for real conversations. In between the deeper moments, we played board games, watched girlhood classics like The Parent Trap and The Princess Diaries (both cinematic excellence, for the record), and learned some pretty key personality traits about one another:

Amina is the most competitive person on the team. She taught us a Pakistani board game, Ludo, and when we tried to adjust the rules to make it “easier,” she was not having it.

Baleigh will never say no to food. Our Communication Strategist can throw down, and despite being tiny, she eats like a grown man. We quickly learned she is 100% useless without her coffee, and ensuring she was caffeinated became a team-wide priority.

Anna is the group’s “mom.” As our Project Manager, she naturally took charge of making sure everyone was where they needed to be, when they needed to be there. If we had an itinerary, Anna was making sure we stuck to it.

On the contrary, Sherin has selective memory and forgot more than half the retreat itinerary she planned alongside Raina, who insisted on driving everywhere, even though she’s blind without her glasses (and it was raining most of retreat week). During Camp NURA, we made a TikTok about our “toxic traits,” and you can bet some of these discoveries made the list.

The Work We Came to Do

Camp NURA was intended for us to have plenty of fun, but we weren’t just there to play—we had work to do. We headquartered at Common House New Orleans for the week and brought in Meredith Eicher, a leadership and business coaching expert, to facilitate a deep dive into NURA’s core identity. We enlisted her to help us answer big questions like:

• What makes us different?
• What kind of impact do we want to have?
• Who are the clients we want to serve?
• How do we refine our brand voice and positioning so that it aligns with the impact we want to make?

We knew we had to get out of our own way to be able to work as a team and think creatively, strategically and purposefully. As such, we needed Meredith and her colleague, Daren (both of whom showed up dressed fully in retreat theme as our camp counselors), to walk us through the process of getting to our company’s self-discovery goals. By the end of the session, we had not only sharpened NURA’s mission, vision, values, and voice, but we also landed on a visual brand refresh. We had an idea of where we were heading, but this retreat gave us the clarity to communicate it. 

After retreat, our design partner, Marcus, took our doodled concepts from the retreat and transformed them into the fresh, refined look that now represents NURA. 

The Unscripted Fun

Every day had a planned activity, but some of the most memorable moments were the unscripted ones.

We took on an escape room challenge that put our problem-solving (and patience) to the test. Our room was school-themed, and the only way to escape was by earning grades in every subject. We had unlimited clues, but we gave ourselves a five-clue limit. Our game master gave us an A+ in every category, especially teamwork. 

We took a ferry to Algiers Point to meet Cubs the Poet. Each team member sat with him for a one-on-one session, where he typed out a personalized poem based on their energy and story. The poems reflected exactly where we were in our journey, capturing the moment in a way that felt almost surreal.

We laughed (a lot). Between a parking boot fiasco in the pouring rain, the need for ongoing dairy-free detective work, and constant reminders to Sherin about what we had planned next…there was never a dull moment!

More Than a Team, a Family

By the end of Camp NURA, it wasn’t just about what we accomplished—it was about how we grew together. This retreat strengthened the foundation of our agency, not just for 2025 but for the future we’re building beyond that.

Yes, we’re a small but mighty agency, but we know this is just the beginning. The work we put in during that week—the strategy, the soul-searching, the trust-building—is setting us up to scale our impact in ways we once only imagined.

As cliché as it sounds, we really did become a family. And like any good family, we left with inside jokes, a newfound appreciation for each other, and a whole lot of memories that will fuel the next chapter of NURA’s impact.

That’s why, as we celebrate Founder’s Day in mid-March, we’re taking what we built at Camp NURA and putting it into action. Our inaugural day of service will be a reflection of the values we committed to at retreat—community, impact, and intentionality. This is more than just a team—it’s a movement. And as we continue to grow, we’re committed to making sure that our work doesn’t just exist in strategy decks and branding exercises, but in real, tangible service to the communities we care about.

And yes, we made sure Baleigh got her coffee every single morning.

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