Every year our Annual Report captures who Vancity is with greater clarity. This year’s document, just released, tells our story in a vibrant, holistic way. We moved last year from having a separate Annual Report and Accountability Report, to a single, integrated Annual Report, telling our complete triple bottom line story. It’s well worth reading.
Vancity also produced a video to capture the essence of our Good Money brand promise. The story in the video is emblematic of the kind of work the team I just joined does – developing business opportunities that simultaneously create positive community impact. The video tells the story of the iconic Save On Meats in downtown Vancouver, and how it was saved as an important community resource and asset.
This week at the Credit Union Central of Canada conference, I delivered my last presentation on social media. It’s been 5 years since I started talking about social media, and it’s time to hang up that topic and start something new. The influence filmmaking has had on my career is a topic I’ve been wanting to speak about for a long time now.
Check out my post about my new presentation on the CU Water Cooler site. And hopefully I’ll see you there in October.
Up until last Monday, my career has had two distinct phases.
When I was a kid, all I wanted was to be involved with films and theatre. I acted as a kid, and in high school I started directing and working with video. For a dozen years I made films. Sometimes I had a day job, sometimes I was lucky enough not to, but from 18 years old to about 30 I produced, edited, wrote and directed short films and one feature.
I always had a rule for myself. After each film was made I looked at it starkly and honestly and asked myself, Am I truly great at this? After my feature, I began to realize that I was decent at filmmaking, but not great. Not if I was truly honest with myself.
And that could have been the beginning of a huge unraveling for me, because my commitment to filmmaking was so great that I starved myself of a backup plan. I was flying without a net.
But my net came in the form of the dot.com era (no pun intended). I was making films in Seattle, and my experience with digital distribution and production was interesting to a few local startups. My vine swing from independent filmmaker to digital producer was beginning.
And soon enough I felt very fortunate to have something other than filmmaking to do, something I loved, seemed to be great at, and something that paid the bills a whole hell of a lot better than no-budget filmmaking. And the digital world has been fascinating, inspiring and has served me very well. That has been my career for the last dozen years, since I was 30. Funny how these eras seem to come in a dozen years for me.
At the beginning of last year, a new vine swing began for me. I started doing Community Engagement work at Vancity. My department gained the honour of distributing some of Vancity’s grants, and overseeing sponsorships and community events. It was something totally different, spoke directly to the mission of Vancity, and all the reasons I was a member and, later, employee of this great organization. It also said something about Vancity leadership that they saw abilities in me that no one had ever exploited.
Now, I am beginning the third chapter in my career. I am leaving digital behind completely, and am embarking on community engagement and development full time. It’s a big exciting move. In the digital arena, I have long been both a leader and deep subject matter expert at Vancity. And now, I get to work with people with far more experience and depth in community development than I have. I am no longer the subject matter expert.
So I begin my new journey as Director, Business & Community Development at Vancity, still overseeing community events and sponsorships, but joining a department running multiple granting and microfinance programs, managing financial literacy initiatives for our members and their neighbours, investing in local businesses having a positive impact in our communities, and developing focus in critical areas where Vancity can create positive change, all to help achieve Vancity’s vision of Redefining Wealth. It is an unbelievable honour and opportunity. I get to work with amazing and inspiring people, and develop relationships with community partners and members.
So let my third chapter begin. Given my track record, check back in to see what I’ll be doing at, say, 54 or so.
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!
Every year our Annual Report captures who Vancity is with greater clarity. This year’s document, just released, tells our story in a vibrant, holistic way. We moved last year from having a separate Annual Report and Accountability Report, to a single, integrated Annual Report, telling our complete triple bottom line story. It’s well worth reading.
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