Two new Vancity commercials began airing this month. Both get to the heart of our new Good Money brand platform, which connects the dots between the business our members do at Vancity and the work Vancity does to support the communities where we operate.
I am tremendously honoured to be the voice in both of these commercials (although there is another voice at the end). All the people in the spots are our real members or staff.
This one is about our Jumpstart savings account and enviroVisa:
This year my team had some big projects that we spent the better part of the year working on. It’s been a good year, and we’re ending it on a great note, launching two projects of incredible value to our members in the last week.
On December 6th we released our iPhone App. Earlier this year we launched Mobile Web so members can use any kind of smartphone to do their banking in a way that is optimized for a small screen size, touch screen and browser. It was very important to us to launch Mobile Web first so all members have access to Mobile Banking. Then we could spend our calories on a really great app for our members with iPhones. Why iPhones? When we look at the metrics of site visitors to Vancity.com we see that of the traffic on our site coming from users on smartphones, the vast majority is from iOS. Over time we anticipate adding other apps for other devices, but with our member base iPhones took a clear lead.
I’ve written before of our partnership with Central1, the credit union central for all CUs in BC and Ontario. They created this app with major input from two credit unions: Vancity and Mt. Lehman. We focused heavily on the user experience, which I believe will pay off with members. In only a few days we already have 49 reviews of the app in the App Store, almost all of which are a full five stars. It’s a very rewarding experience.
And today we launched Interac e-Transfers. This is a standard feature in Canada which allows any Canadian to transfer money to any other Canadian via email or text message. All the big banks have long had this feature, but we had lagged behind. So it feels good to play catch up in this way and launch e-Transfers for our members. It is a much needed service, and now it’s available in Online Banking, Mobile Web and our iPhone App.
Launching these great new services wouldn’t be possible without great partnerships. I have amazing staff in my department who bring these projects to life, we have outstanding relationships with our colleagues in our IT division and our partners at Central1.
It’s a fantastic way to end the year, launching exciting new features, responding to the needs of our members who have been asking for these services for some time now, especially e-Transfers, and starting 2012 with the capacity to take on a bunch of new exciting projects.
So have a happy New Year, and here’s to a great 2012!
Today Vancity unveiled its refreshed brand, including two new TV commercials.
For the six years I have been at Vancity, I have tried to explain the philosophical construct that is our business model. It is so simple really, we reinvest our members’ money back into community, and increasingly into community projects that create positive impacts directly in our members’ communities. Local and organic foods, affordable housing, social enterprise – areas like these have significant social, financial and environmental impact in our members’ lives and the lives of their neighbours. Rather than make money like any other financial institution can and then grant out money to projects (although we still do a ton of that), we want the way we invest our members’ money and make money for the credit union to have impact.
It’s actually quite simple, but I was starting to wonder if our brand could effectively capture this simple truth. Whether our brand could inspire our staff and our members equally.
And then a few weeks back, I saw what our agency Wasserman + Partners and my colleague, our VP of Marketing, Rich Seres and Linda Cekal, our Marketing Manager of Brand Experience had been working on. It’s so simple: Make Good Money. We make Good Money for our members by putting money to good.
So here are the ads. We made a 60 second “anthem” ad to really express what the Good Money brand promise is all about:
And a 30 second ad showcasing our Sustainable Wealth Management offering:
These ads are shot in real places across our Vancity trade region and only feature our real members and staff. I am totally honoured to have my voice included in the voiceover in these ads. I have a deep and powerful connection to Vancity and all it does to improve the lives of people in my city and beyond, and to be the voice of Vancity is humbling and incredibly meaningful to me.
Major kudos to my new boss Linda Morris, my amazing colleagues at Vancity and at our agency. I hope you enjoy the ads as much as I do.
Note: This is my fourth in a series of blogposts on Vancity’s social media journey over the last five years. Both Ron Shevlin and The Financial Brand have written very good posts recently on the topic of social media ROI, so I thought I’d join in.
I find it interesting and troubling that so much of the focus on social media has been on ROI. I am starting to think that this whole discussion thread is very close to pointless.
[I love this cartoon by the amazing and brilliant Rob Cottingham.]
Some people have successfully measured the ROI of social media and proven its value. Great. And there are some case studies, especially for larger companies with expensive and complex customer service channels, where the ROI is pretty good. But for the rest of us, honestly, it’s a stretch at best.
Truthfully, even if you do measure the ROI of social media, it likely pales in comparison with the ROI of other digital tactics such as email, multivariate testing, usability enhancements or search engine marketing. In most cases, social media is a bad bet from a purely ROI perspective. More relevant is the fact that most organizations aren’t sophisticated enough to measure the ROI of it anyway.
I believe that the reason many companies have gotten involved with social media is that some people in Marketing and Communications departments personally like Facebook and Twitter and then introduce these tools into their organizations. If the culture of the organization isn’t permissive, progressive or ready, that can be an abdication of professional responsibility – to put one’s own preferences and proclivities ahead of the needs and abilities of the company who hired them.
The other danger with this approach is that it starts from the middle. Social media is the kind of activity that the whole organization needs to get behind. If a handful of people in Marketing or Communications “own” it, and the C-suite isn’t behind it (or aware of it), it’s going nowhere fast.
As an aside, my take on ROI for successful business casing is that there needs to be a definable and beneficial financial return balanced with a strong alignment with the mission, vision and values of the organization. In other words, it’s usually about hearts and minds. Rarely can a business case achieve a perfect balance of both, and when it can it’s an amazing opportunity. When it comes to proving the value of social media, it’s about furthering the organization’s vision and brand, more than the financial return.
So if you’re sick of the same old Comcast and Best Buy case studies trying to rationalize social media, you’re not alone. Instead, connect your social media strategy inextricably to the ways you already engage community.
At Vancity, the accountability for social media rests within the Digital & Community Engagement department I manage, the same team that manages our community project grants, sponsorships and events. These are activities where the expectation of ROI is softer or even absent because these initiatives relate to the deeper purpose or, dare I say, mission of the organization. The way I see it, most traditional companies’ sole mission is to maximize profit for shareholders, and arguably not directly related to their customers, making social media a harder fit for traditional companies to embrace. (I know some will disagree with this, but my opinion is that companies focus on customer service merely to increase shareholder value – I prefer the co-operative model where the customers themselves are the shareholders.)
My advice is: don’t get caught in the ROI trap. Align strategically with areas where your organization currently engages its customers, members or stakeholders – make a real link with the mission of the organization. If you have to prove true ROI, if your organization requires it for everything you do, change focus to email marketing or some other digital marketing tactic and please the organization that way. Otherwise, I would suggest that you’re not being true to the nature and culture of your organization and therefore can’t authentically leverage social media anyway. Or you’re simply at the wrong organization and need to be at a company where you can do what you think is right, while also doing what is right for the company that hired you and signs your paycheques.
Again, thanks to Rob Cottingham for letting me use his Noise to Signal cartoons in my post.
I was lucky enough to be asked to speak at the World Credit Union Conference, which took place last month in Glasgow. I spoke about Vancity’s five year history with social media, and some of what we’ve learned and achieved. It was an amazing experience, full of people from around the world who believe that access to fair credit is an economic imperative and a vital community service. I met with people from around the world whose credit unions are the only option for people in their communities to get access to a safe place to put their money and an ethical and reliable place to access some amount of credit to get ahead.
One of the best experiences I had while there was visiting a local credit union. For me, it was a real eye opener.
We visited the Drumchapel Credit Union, located in the North section of the city, and one of the oldest credit unions in Scotland. We met with their staff – some of whom are volunteers – and some members of their Board.
From their website:
In many areas Credit Unions give their members access to credit, that they would not be able to obtain from most other financial institutions or would have to pay a high price for.
Coming from British Columbia, I made an assumption that any credit union operating in a modern, wealthy country like Canada or Scotland would be pretty similar. I assumed that they had a membership that needed reasonably sophisticated services like online banking and mortgages – things I associate with the credit unions I know. But this credit union services an impoverished community, with high unemployment, facing issues of social inclusion and integration. Their members simply wouldn’t get service from a bank or other financial institutions. They are the unbanked. If it wasn’t for Drumchapel Credit Union, some of their members would resort to the underground economy, which would put their money, and perhaps personal well-being, in jeopardy.
Some of their staff are volunteers partly because unemployment is so high, and partly because their small credit union performs a vital community service and people in the community feel obligated to support it how they can.
The group of us visiting the credit union were mostly from Canada, Australia, Ireland and the US – all reasonably wealthy and modern organizations – and we were all moved by the spirit of the staff, the commitment of the Board members, the necessity to the local community and the graciousness and hospitality of everyone we met. I think we were all touched, and reminded of the roots of our own organizations, many of which began for similar reasons to provide critical community banking services to their communities.
It was the most memorable part of an amazing trip. Anyone reading who cares about credit unions and the vital community service a financial co-operative should be performing should think about attending a World Council of Credit Unions conference. For me, it was an experience I’m honored to have had, and consider to be a highlight of my career.
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