A friend at UBC passed along a job posting for their Director, Interactive and Development Marketing. He described it as a
…strategic leadership role to engage over 400,000 UBC alumni and friends through a full suite of online media, including development of a UBC online community, and a significant ad campaign. Could be a real career milestone.
The job description is:
Reporting directly to the Development and Alumni Engagement (DAE) Chief Communications Officer, the Director, Interactive and Development Marketing is responsible for creating and implementing marketing strategies to secure donor and alumni engagement through traditional and social media. The Director will be responsible for supporting the University’s mission of providing alumni, donors, and friends of the University with meaningful opportunities for engagement and investment with the University. The Director works with various University clients to develop integrated marketing communications and outreach plans and campaigns in support of the portfolio’s priorities for the University with regards to donor activity and alumni engagement. The Director develops processes to oversee the execution of these plans, tracks deadlines, and manages issues, and budgets and ensures accurate reporting. The main areas of focus will be social media, traditional media, business activities, and issue management.
Jobs like this don’t come open very often in Vancouver, I think it would be an amazing opportunity for the right person.
A year and a half ago or so, I was introduced to two guys in Vancouver who were trying to start a new top-level domain for companies and organizations doing good environmental work – .eco. Their resumes and backgrounds were impressive, and they seemed to really know what they were doing, but still, I thought, what are the chances that these two guys could actually create a new top-level domain?
Cut to last week, and I run into Trevor Bowden, one of .eco founders, and they have made truly remarkable progress.
They just launched their website, doteco.info, which is great blend of useful information and videos about what they are trying to accomplish, ways to participate and help spread the message, and information about their current supporters (some of whom are truly impressive). All in a very nice looking website. Pulling off an informative and good-looking website about a new concept is very difficult.
The .eco system will display current, detailed eco-information to anyone with a browser, anytime they need it, anywhere on the planet. It will do this by collecting information from people when they register .eco domain names for their companies, organisations, products, or even themselves and then displaying that information on a standardised, open platform.
What they want to do with .eco is very impressive. They would link it to verifiable environmental action, so those using the .eco domain would be showing off a badge that they had made progress on reducing their environmental impact.
They have one major competitor, namely Al Gore and a group who are also trying to start a .eco top-level domain. I’m a big fan of Al Gore, but it’s kind of fun to watch some guys from Vancouver put together a very different and very compelling alternative to a .eco domain and see if they can give the bigwigs a run for their money.
I think the .eco domain is useful. A company like Toyota could assume that people going to toyota.eco would be at their site for specific reasons, and they could highlight their environmental products and policies and corporate initiatives front and centre. It could be a form of built-in audience segmentation (those who choose to visit a .eco version of the site instead of a .com), and not just a redirect to a main corporate site.
So check out doteco.info and see what it’s all about. It may be coming to an Internet near you…
This was truly a team effort: Julie, our recently-departed designer, did an amazing job; Wendy, our usability expert and project manager, shepherded the project through usability testing and led the team wonderfully; and Roberto, one of the newest Canadians, expertly managed a lot of the content and big fixes. Our extended team at Central 1 did all the front end development and did a great job. It’s truly an honour to work with Vancity’s WEB Team (WEB stands for Web Engagement & Banking)!
For as long as I’ve been at Vancity, which is three and half years, I’ve been wanting to redesign our main website. We have some amazingly talented people at Vancity, including Julie our graphic designer. She has taken our current visual style and adapted it, bringing it up to a more appealing look. We didn’t want to give it a massive redesign, as the site basically works, and we didn’t want to jar our members too much.
On our current site below, our site navigation has always struck me as odd. We are one of those FIs who lump all of our products and services under the tab “products & services”. How many people think of themselves as buying a financial product or service? People need a new savings account or a loan or a credit card.
In a Forrester review of vancity.com in 2006, they pointed out that we needed easier ways to get site visitors straight to a product. So we added the Quick Links below to achieve this. When we added these links, I was skeptical they would do much. But a great percentage of the traffic hitting our main Visa page comes from this one link on our homepage. So obviously Forrester knows more than I do.
We changed the navigation so it reflects both our in-branch product literature, as well as the main products people navigate to on our website. The goal was to create a simple, attractive homepage that better reflects our brand graphic standards in offline media. We brought the site to 1024×768 because over the last two years we have seen the percentage of our site visitors who have a monitor sized at 800×600 or less shrink from about 20% of site traffic to under 5% today.
We also took this opportunity to upgrade the security certificate to EV SSL, so people on newer versions of IE and Firefox see the green bar in their browser bar when they come to the site, assuring them it is authentic and not a phishing site.
Here are some screenshots of the homepage and our new ATM/Branch Locator with Google Maps integration (click on them to a see a bigger version). What do you think?
The majority of site visitors log in to online banking, and now as they check their accounts, or pay a bill words like Banking, Loans or Investing are there clearly across the navigation. Financial products are not an impulse buy, we need to get in front of people while they are in research mode. Our new navigation should be more useful for our members as they can more easily get to information that was once obscured and is good for the company as we should see more traffic navigating through the site to valuable pages.
The new look of vancity.com launches April 9th. Come and check it out.
PS: Here’s a screen of the MyBusiness homepage and a MyCommunity page, as asked for by darrylh.
A few months back I met Igor Faletski, founder of Handi Mobility, a Vancouver-based company that develops mobile services and applications.
They launched an extremely impressive service for TransLink, Vancouver’s transit authority, that lets you see the next five arriving buses at any given stop via SMS or iPhone. Impressive guy and company.
We chatted about mobile banking, but as a credit union we get our services from Central1 Credit Union, the credit union central covering BC and Ontario. I have spent the last two days with them and my impressive peers from CUs across Canada in User Group meetings covering the future of online and mobile banking for credit unions. We are in very good hands. Their strategy around mobile banking especially is smart, forward thinking and yet also pragmatic. High marks from me.
When I met with Igor, he mentioned he was developing a service he couldn’t quite talk about yet. And then last month I was at a session about mobile applications here in Vancouver, and Igor was on the panel. He unveiled a glimpse of his new service, and now it has launched.
It will create a mobile friendly version of your website in a snap. For free. And then if you want extras you can pay for them. It’s a way to test a version of your site optimized for today’s mobile browsers quickly to see what it can do for you. I would think that credit unions who want to experiment optimizing their service for smart phones, but don’t know if it’s worth spending a lot of budget on it would be able to take advantage of this service and gain some excellent knowledge. If you have your web developer spend a couple of hours with the CSS this service spits out, you can make it look even better.
And then it will mirror your main site. When you update content on your main website, the mobile site will automatically optimize that content for mobile browsers.
The Internet Marketing Conference is making its way to Vancouver on September 11-12, 2008 and they have released their full agenda.
It is truly an astonishing lineup, and I’m very pleased to have such a great mixture of international speakers who will be coming to town alongside local speakers who are doing some amazing work. It should be an incredible event, well worth checking out.
Well, it’s always nice to be number one (well, maybe not).
Yesterday comScore released their study which shows that “Of the 37 global markets individually-reported by comScore, Canada ranked number one in adoption of online banking, with 67.1 of Canadian Internet users banking online in April 2008.”
It also shows…
RBC Financial group led the category with 4.6 million visitors, followed by TD Bank Financial Group with 4.5 million visitors and Bank of Montreal Sites with 3 million visitors. Among those banks in the top 10, Bank of Montreal Sites experienced the greatest increase in visitation during the past year, growing 22 percent.
I wonder if my friends at BMO are surprised by this.
The study also showed that the heaviest users of online banking are 45-54 year olds. At first this may seem surprising, but in fact, they are also likely the heaviest bankers: “The segment shows both high penetration (73 percent) and the heaviest frequency in usage (12 visits and 157 pages per visitor per month).”
So can we just admit that online banking is just banking. If your financial institution still talks a lot about online but still has its heart firmly in the branch, here’s some ammunition to change the conversation.
This is a big international conference, which has occurred in Barcelona, New York, Bulgaria, Montreal, Helsinki, Stockholm, Berlin, Las Vegas and Copenhagen over the last few years. It was held in Vancouver back in 2002 and now it’s returning.
The list of speakers is crazy-good. They include Jeremiah Owyang (Forrester), Gary Angel (Semphonic), Darin Sarlabous (Aeroplan), Adam Audette (AudetteMedia), Anil Batra (Zero Dash 1), Geno Prussakov (AM Navigator), June Dershewitz (Semphonic), Andre Charland (Nitobi), Eric T. Peterson (Web Analytics Demystified), Tom Leung (Google), Bob Page (Yahoo!), Jason Burby (ZAAZ), Darren Barefoot and Julie Szabo (Capulet Communications), Robbin Steif (Lunametrics), Xavier Casanova (Liveclicker), and Jonghee Jo (Victoria’s Secret).
I’m incredibly honoured to be among them, presenting about Vancity’s online efforts, engaging people in our values and socially responsible brand.
Vancouver doesn’t bring this kind of A-list together all that often, so it’ll be great to get them all here at the same time to discuss what’s happening in the world of online marketing.
On a personal note, after several presentations in several different cities over the last few months, it’s nice to have the summer away from conferences, and then have the opportunity to speak in my home town.
Oh, and by the way, for those of you who wonder about the efficacy of LinkedIn, the conference organizers, who are based in Sweden, found me via LinkedIn and after a few emails back and forth asked me to present.
One of the things I love about the Vancity brand is that it’s complicated, and therefore a challenge to express succinctly. Vancity is a credit union that uses its profits to give money back to its members and the community. Sounds simple in a way, but there’s a complication as soon as we have to express how we do it and what it costs.
The more money Vancity makes, the more money it can give to the community, and it gives money in a myriad interesting and meaningful ways. Many prospects and members want to know what all this good work will cost them; surely they must pay extra. This sentiment always strikes me as odd – no one expects to pay more at a big bank when their stock prices are high, and yet they’re returning profits in the form of dividends to the shareholders. It’s the same with us, except the money goes to something meaningful.
So all of this is to say that when we launch a new brand campaign, it’s always tricky to engage people around our mission in a way that rings true and feels like us, but is still entertaining and works as marketing.
This week we are launching our 2007 TV spots, outdoor advertising and our web site to promote Vancity. This microsite launched yesterday, and I think it does a nice job conveying our brand and who we are. I’m curious what readers think.
