Monthly Archives: April 2007

Net.Finance

On April 19th I’ll be talking about ChangeEverything.ca at Net.Finance. I’m pretty excited about my presentation, and am ready to go. This week I had two practice runs, one for our agencies TBWA and Social Signal, who created ChangeEverything.ca, the other at Credit Union Central of BC. I received great feedback which has made my presentation better.

Net Finance is a conference at the intersection of eBusiness and the world of financial institutions. It would have been hard for me to believe a few years back that this would have gotten me excited, and yet here I am raring to go. I am speaking on the “Financial Services Innovation Forum” day.

I think my presentation really tells the story of ChangeEverything.ca as a form of social marketing – as engagement rather than traditional marketing. I hope I capture how this came about, why we did it, and how the site has been a success. I’ll blog after the presentation, and if I can, throughout the conference about what I’m learning. Between me and Colin, we should sum it up pretty well.

A follow up on my America Saves post

I was speaking to some people at Vancity about the issue of serving the underbanked and underserved, both of which are areas where we focus strongly. Two interesting things came back.

1> Someone in our Sustainability division (who shall remain nameless) came back with this nugget:

Money is like sex, you can have a lot of it or none of it and still have an unhealthy relationship to it.

2> Catherine Ludgate in our Community Business Banking division told me this story:

I was at a conference last week with a woman from Micro Business USA, and she was talking about the different mindsets of folks along the income spectrum. In her 30+ years of doing microlending and setting up savings programs, she said she has learned that poor and low income folk generally think of what they earn only in terms of their hourly pay (and certainly not about savings). An income cut above, the lower middle class earners think about their weekly earnings. Middle class earners think in terms of their monthly income, and upper middle class earners think in terms of annual income. The truly wealthy (however that is defined) think ahead in terms of three to five to ten year investments they will make.

Her argument was that changing how folks identified their value (hourly to weekly to monthly to annually to forward looking) is the first step in changing other behaviours, like the ability to save. And that change in thinking can lead to movement out of an income group, as the woman in the case study in the NY Times article moved.

I thought those were two good and valuable insights.

My original post is here.

ChangeEverything.ca is a Webby Award Official Honoree

After a lovely four day weekend, I arrived back at my desk at work this morning to find out that ChangeEverything.ca had won the status of Official Honoree at this year’s Webby Awards.

From their site:

Congratulations on being selected as an Official Honoree

Your submission has been selected as an Official Honoree of The 11th Annual Webby Awards. As a result of the exceptional quality of submissions this year, the Academy has chosen to recognize work exhibiting remarkable achievement that was not selected as a Nominee. Out of more than 8,000 entries submitted to the 11th Annual Webby Awards, less than 15% are deemed Official Honorees.

After years of producing web sites, this is my first Webby. Needless to say, I’m extremely excited. And just in time for my Net.Finance presentation next week!

Thanks and cheers to Kate Dugas and the team at Social Signal for making this happen.