Oath's Omaha Office

Sarah Reeves Program Manager, Parenting ERG Co-Chair

Many government programs exist to assist families in need with basic necessities such as food, shelter and clothing. However, one important need often goes unmet for many families with young children is diapers.  The price of diapers often equals the cost of a meal for a family.  This problem has been particularly burdensome for the rising number of homeless families with children in Omaha.

The Omaha Parents Employee Resource Group stepped up to the cause by sponsoring a Christmas in July Diaper Drive. Nearly 150 employees of the Omaha and La Vista offices collected almost 19,000 diapers to benefit local non-profit Open Door Mission. The Mission gives away more than one million diapers a year to homeless families, victims of domestic violence and the working poor in the community.

We were proud to partner with such a noble cause like Open Door Mission, which offers safe shelter and hot meals for homeless men, women and children throughout the Omaha area. Their campus offers 816 beds and serves more than 2,000 meals daily to 275 people living in poverty.  

Our Oath community is filled with good, generous people, and this drive goes to show what our people can do when they join together. I’m so proud of what we’ve accomplished for the some of the most vulnerable children in our community.

ABOUT OATH

Yahoo is now part of Oath and a member of the Verizon family of companies. Oath, a subsidiary of Verizon, is a values-led company committed to building brands people love. We reach over one billion people around the world with a dynamic house of 50+ media and technology brands. A global leader in digital and mobile, Oath is shaping the future of media. For more on Oath, visit www.oath.com.  

By Jacqie Leise, Sr Mgr, Account Operations, Yahoo

It's amazing to see Yahoo and Habitat for Humanity team up for such an important project in our area. I am thrilled to work for a company that is willing to give back to the community in such a personal way. It's truly amazing to see everyone in our community come together.  

The old adage ‘it takes a village’ is alive and well here in Omaha. Today, Omaha’s Habitat for Humanity hosted a 24-hour online charitable challenge for the metro area, which included a special “Sign a Stud” event at the Yahoo office.

The day’s charitable event represented a great cause for our communities in greater Omaha, but our Yahoo event was the culmination of something even more special to me, my family and the Yahoo community.

A fatal natural gas explosion in July 2016 destroyed a rental home owned by my husband and me, and sadly took the life of 30-year-old Omaha property inspector Clara Bender-Rinehart. It was a tragic and horrible accident that left us wondering how we were going to move on and how we could possibly help the neighborhood clean up their homes.

We knew that donating this property to a deserving family would help facilitate a positive outcome in the wake of such tragedy. It was our partnership with Habitat for Humanity that helped turn this idea into a reality. Habitat Omaha quickly provided the resources and organizational support to start reconstruction on the property.

While working with Habitat, we learned that the Yahoo Employee Foundation (YEF) had decided to grant $75,000 to Habitat for Humanity of Omaha. YEF is a grassroots, philanthropic organization that provides Yahoo employees easy and accessible ways to give back to their communities. Since 1999, YEF has granted more than $20 million in more than 1,000 grants to hundreds of organizations globally. We immediately requested that these funds be used to rebuild on our property.

Yahoo Omaha will be sponsoring the 2017 Big Omaha conference on May 18 and 19. This is the biggest event of the year for Silicon Prairie's startup and tech community. Now entering its ninth year, the conference connects attendees from across the nation for an intimate, inspiring and invigorating two days of talks from venture capitalists, founders and digital entrepreneurs. This year’s sponsorship is focused on two areas: sustainability and inclusive diversity.

Yahoo partnered with Big Omaha’s sustainability initiative to reach its goal of becoming a zero waste conference. Together, we hope to eliminate the need for plastic water bottles from the conference by providing each attendee a water bottleand sponsoring refilling stations throughout the Big Omaha campus.

Diversity and inclusion is a huge focus for Big Omaha and Yahoo. We are thrilled to be hosting a speaker panel on diversity and inclusion. Additionally, Margenett Moore-Roberts, Global Head of Inclusive Diversity here at Yahoo, was invited to be a speaker to share her story and Yahoo’s commitment to inclusive diversity.

You can get involved in the action by watching the guest speakers live on the Big Omaha Conference website, so don’t forget to tune in!

Christina Farahani, Jenna Schulte, and Bre Phelan were honored to accept the 2017 “Best Place to Work for the Advancement of Women” award at the Omaha ICAN Women’s Leadership Conference.

The acceptance speech highlighted why Yahoo Omaha was honored with this award, including its “extremely active chapter of Women in Tech,” said Farahani. “This employee resource group is an affinity-based community that offers opportunities to shape our company culture, influence products, develop leadership skills, and form connections throughout Yahoo and our community.”

Phelan added that “since opening our doors in 2009, we’ve been extremely passionate about fostering women’s growth and advancement in the workplace, especially during a time when inclusion and diversity are paramount to success. Each day, we strive to push the envelope further by providing mentorship programs that enable female employees to learn from other women leaders at Yahoo.” In her closing statement, Schulte thanked all Yahoo Omaha WIT members and the leadership team for making this award possible. She echoed that “it is because of your hard work, dedication, and passion for women’s advancement in the workplace that we received this honor.”

According to their website, ICAN’s (Institute for Career Advancement Needs) annual Women’s Leadership Conference – held for over 20 years in Omaha, Nebraska – is known to be powerful, insightful and authentic, representative of the leadership trends and transformations present in today’s workplace. The 2017 conference theme was “The Work-Life Challenge” and explored how women can balance their career with their family/life goals. Yahoo also had a booth at the event and gave away free swag including Yahoo-branded bags and lip balm. A beautiful purple flower bouquet was raffled to one lucky winner at the end of the event.

In attendance were over 2,600 local men and women leaders, including a few high school students chosen as part of the ‘ICAN Teen’ program.

You can view the entire acceptance speech below:

by Bre Phelan, Ad Creative Tech Project Management Lead Yahoo Omaha is proud to accept this year’s Best Places to Work for the Advancement of Women Award. Announced by Omaha-based Baird Holm LLP and the Institute for Career Advancement Needs (ICAN), we were recognized as a local company that has effectively created a culture that attracts, retains and advances women in the workplace. Along with our Omaha offices, our La Vista data center was also recognized in this award.

As noted by the sponsors, “Yahoo actively fosters leadership development at each level and with every employee, through various formal mentoring programs, individual growth plans, skill development opportunities and community involvement.”  

This is the first time we’ve received the Best Places to Work for the Advancement of Women Award. The announcement comes shortly after being named the Best Place to Work in Omaha in the large company category by the Omaha Chamber of Commerce earlier this month.

Our Women in Tech (WIT) Employee Resource Group in Omaha is one of the most active in all of Yahoo, and we’re proud to say that 50% of our leadership roles are held by women. We’re delighted to receive this award and recognize the talented and hard-working women who make Yahoo Omaha a thriving workplace.

Alexi Wellman, VP, Global Controller, Yahoo Omaha

Yahoo is proud to accept this year’s award for Best Place to Work in Omaha. Announced today by the Omaha Chamber of Commerce, we earned the top spot among numerous other large companies (200 employees or more) in the region. The award is determined exclusively based on employee responses to surveys and participation in the Chamber’s program for at least four years.

Since Yahoo opened its doors in Omaha and neighboring La Vista, we’ve strived to create an engaging and inclusive work culture for our employees. Combined, our Omaha and La Vista campuses now boast more than 300 employees and are still growing.

Within our office, employees are able to focus on and excel at the work that inspires them. This is in part due to our creative and fun work space, a mentality to always find ways to do things smarter, better, faster, and a commitment to finding career opportunities.

Our work to foster employee development is not limited to Yahoo’s offices. We also keep our eye on the future with regard to new talent – and with a community focus. Just this last year, Yahoo Omaha invited the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and the University of Nebraska at Omaha to compete in our first-annual Yahoo Advertising Knock-out Challenge. This was a unique opportunity to match university programs with our marketing needs for talent development. And we’ve started a growing internship program, which will include at least 17 summer interns this year alone.

Coupled with our employees’ ongoing engagement with the community and an expanding data center operation at our La Vista campus, it’s clear we think Omaha and all of Nebraska continue to be an exceptional place to grow our business. Or as we like to call it: home.

By Bre Phelan, Lead Creative Production Manager

At Yahoo, our technical innovators are complemented by our creative talent. The arts and creative thinking are valuable to our business and to innovation. This symbiotic relationship between art and science helps drive development of products that are both powerful for our users and beautiful. With that, we recently welcomed with open arms an opportunity to help grow creative talent right in our backyard. Yahoo Omaha invited the the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and the University of Nebraska at Omaha to compete in our first-annual Yahoo Advertising Knock-out Challenge. This was a unique opportunity to match university programs with our marketing needs for talent development.

At our Dodge Street office in Omaha, we hosted university students who workshopped solutions to our Yahoo Advertising Knock-out, a marketing challenge that tested the public relations, social media, campaign strategy, budget planning and media buying acumen of 12 teams of six students. The challenge:

Yahoo Sports has been an undeniable force in the Fantasy Sports game for 20 years with millions of users coming every year to play their favorite sports, including the most revered, Fantasy Football.

With major competitors including ESPN.com, NFL.com and CBSSports.com, Yahoo Sports is looking to maintain it's dominance across the desktop and mobile app and continue driving new users to play on Yahoo Fantasy Football.

With a $2M budget, your team’s challenge is to identify belief-based audiences and create a full-funnel marketing plan to engage those users. The plan should strive to be ROI positive and tackle multiple strategies to reach and engage the target audience. Belief-based audiences examples include:

People with not enough time


People who chose the fantasy platform all their friends use

People who aren't interested in football


People who are already in too many leagues


Three ‘Hoos, Hobson Powell, Bre Phelan, and Jillian Droge judged the innovative student proposals. Students’ solutions included the following tactics:

The first place winners employed numerous innovative tactics across social media, including a partnership with Amazon's Alexa and encouraged families to participate in the Yahoo Fantasy Football app with the tagline "Who Said Draft Time Can't Be Family Time".


The second place winners proposed "taking Yahoo fantasy to the office" to promote inter-office collaboration and camaraderie.


Other teams’ tactics included:


Leveraging prominent social media influencers to recruit new Yahoo Fantasy Football users;


Using the Yahoo Blitz bot to make the Fantasy Football experience approachable and enjoyable to target audiences, experts and beginners; and


Deploying Yahoo campus representatives to evangelize Fantasy Football. 


First place winners: Joe Franco (UNO), Elizabeth Stevens (UNO), Megan Nelson (UNL), and Hannah Paxton (UNL)

Second place winners: April Knipp (UNO), Amy Nielsen (UNO), Haley Schepers (UNL), and Linsey Armstrong (UNL).

The Yahoo judges were extremely impressed with the student presentations and were blown away by the caliber of their unique and well-thought-out ideas.

Through partnerships like this, we’re doing the important job of helping to grow the workforce of tomorrow and to build a stronger more prosperous future for our local economies.

Yahoo Omaha is beyond excited to host our first-annual Yahoo Advertising Knock-out! We invited 24 college students from the Universities of Nebraska at Omaha and Lincoln to participate! We kicked things off this morning and presented students with a real-world advertising challenge. We cannot wait to see the amazing solutions created by these bright individuals.

Bre Phelan, a Lead Creative Production Manager at Yahoo, kicked things off and welcomed the students to Yahoo.

Yahoo’s VP of Optimizations Services, Hobson Powell, gave an amazing intro to Yahoo and what our Omaha office has to offer.

Jillian Droge, a Yahoo Creative Strategist, wrapped things up and unveiled our unique real-world challenge!

Earlier this week six Omaha Yahoo’s attended the all-day Make ___ Happen conference (”a conference for doers”) put on by the Greater Omaha Chamber.

Make ___ Happen is an unanswered question, an incomplete phrase, a ___ that each individual must fill in for themselves. Check out Yahoo’s very own “doers” Lindsay Jonas & Bre Phelan in their promotional video on Facebook. 

Like minded business and community leaders throughout the Omaha metro were inspired to reach beyond the status to reach beyond the status quo, stir something up and create real plans of action to make a positive impact.

Our Omaha Yahoo’s are already back in the office making ___ happen.

Friday we hosted high school and middle school teachers from OPS for their annual curriculum day. This was an opportunity for teachers to get out of the classroom and into local businesses where they can find out first hand what their students need to learn if they want to work at Yahoo. Focus areas for the day included Accounting, Marketing, and IT.  What better company then Yahoo Omaha/La Vista to tackle these fields!

Parker Thornburg, Director of Accounting, spoke to OPS teachers regrading ideal job candidate traits and our finance department.

Zach Woodruff, Senior Supervisor at the Yahoo La Vista Data Center, spoke to our tech stack and the specific IT skills that we look for in our job candidates. 

Yahoo Omaha once again sponsored the Big Omaha conference for 2016. Big Omaha is the biggest event of the year for the Silicon Prairie's startup and tech community.