Tag Archives: technology

The social web as community platform.

Vancity, like many mission-driven organizations, is involved with lots of community activities and events. We ask our members to vote for organizations to donate money to and for our Board of Directors, as well as asking them to engage in a variety of community events that we’re involved with or sponsor.

Now that ChangeEverything.ca has been operating for almost a year and has well over 1,000 registered users, it’s big enough we can use this community platform to engage people in the issues we are involved with. Let me make it clear that we won’t use it to promote our product or services, our rates or promotions, nor our main credit union or banking functions. But we can use it to engage people in the myriad of community activities we’re involved with, activities that our members say they want to know more about.

Now, every mission-driven organization doesn’t need their own social networking site to do this. Vancity’s Online Community Moderator, Kate recently used Facebook as well as ChangeEverything.ca to launch our Bike Share Program. The details, as well as how to get involved are listed at ChangeEverything.ca, but she used Facebook as a way to get the word out about the kickoff event. You can see our Facebook event here.

I would argue that Facebook represents an important, free opportunity for credit unions to leverage, and expand the knowledge of what they’re doing in the community among their members and prospects. Not as a place to directly acquire new members (although that may be a happy outcome), but as a place to engage your community (whether members or not) around your mission. It’s an advantage credit unions have over banks because they’re inherently more community-oriented and therefore have more credibility in a place where people gather online.

When I first happily got sucked into the world of Facebook, I noticed that there were already two Vancity groups, one for employees and one for investors. These weren’t created by Vancity intentionally, but the community wanted a place to discuss issues about us. We can either be passive and watch these conversations about us take place, or we can engage back and inform these discussions, not direct them, but get involved and see what we can learn by doing so. As long as the people involved understand and respect Facebook and aren’t there just to obviously shift the focus to a sales and service approach, we should find ample opportunity there.

Oh, and next time you’re on Facebook, please say hello.

The Members Project by Amex

I have been thinking about what to write about The Members Project, American Express’ new member engagement initiative. In case you’re not familiar with it, here’s the nutshell:

Amex is donating $1 for every cardholder (member) that registers on the site, up to a maximum of $5 million. Cardholders can propose worthwhile projects that need funding, and can discuss each others’ projects on the site. In stages of voting the ideas are winnowed down to a single winning project which will receive the funding.

I hope it’s a successful initiative. As an employee of a credit union, I can attest that it’s often difficult engaging members to take action, although their healthy marketing budget will help a lot. Makes me jealous. I like this kind of social marketing, which helps a company do well by doing good.

The clincher for me was that I did a Google blog search for The Members Project and the vast majority of the results were posts about worthwhile projects and initiatives that could use the money, as opposed to a meta-level discussion about the Amex initiative itself. That struck me as a very good sign.

Here’s what I searched.

Thoughts?