Ready and raring to present.

I spent a big chunk of this past weekend creating my presentations for both Net.Finance 2008 and CUES Experience.

Net.Finance 2008It’s funny to look back at my initial presentation from last year’s Net.Finance about ChangeEverything.ca. It was so full of words and clunky. I am relying mostly on images and my own storytelling now to get the message across. It’s a big evolution, and I’m excited to see how it will go over.

My talk at Net.Finance will be Corporate Social Responsibility As Key Differentiator, which may be like speaking socialism to a room full of bankers. Hopefully I can at least make it funny and entertaining. I am pulling data from our experience at Vancity as a community-driven organization, proving the model that social marketing can break through the clutter, epsecially in our heavily commoditized industry.

CUES ExperienceAt CUES my talk is called Credit Unions and Social Media: A Case Study, and will cover a lot of the same ground, but deal a lot more with social media and go into more detail around how ChangeEverything.ca works. I have the luxury of a 75 minute session, which is by far the longest talk I have given. It’ll be nice not to be pressed for time, and be able to engage in a discussion throughout, rather than at the end, time permitting.

Partnership Symposium 2008I’ll take what I learn from them to shape my end of the year keynote at the Partnership Symposium 2008. I’m really excited about it. My talk is called Engaging with the Social Economy, and I’m just starting to wrap my head around what I’ll cover. It will deal with how credit unions are uniquely positioned to use the banking platform to make our society a better and more equitable place.

Please let me know if you’ll be at any of these events. I look forward to seeing you there.

Can you help me with nicer graphs?

I don’t like Microsoft products. There I said it, and hopefully you’re not offended.

For an upcoming presentation I want to create some charts and graphs nicer than anything Excel can spit out. And I don’t have Keynote, which is probably the solution I should be looking at. In the meantime though, are there any good web 2.0 offerings that allow you to input data and create nice looking charts and graphs?

If you do, please comment here with the URLs or email me at william [at] azaroff [dot] com.

Many thanks in advance…

BarCampBank continues East, West and South.

BarCampBank in San Francisco & New EnglandLast summer I attended an amazing event called BarCampBankSeattle. It was a coming together of, and collaboration between, some amazing bank and credit union folks from across North America. I wrote a few blog posts about it at the time.

Jesse Robbins organized this first-of-its-kind-in-America conference, and now he’s written about two more BarCampBank events that are happening. It was also covered by NetBanker and Frederic Baud.

The next two events will be:

BarCampBank San Francisco
Saturday, March 29, 2008
UC Berkeley campus – Soda Hall in the Wozniak Lounge
RSVP @ EventBrite ($25)

BarCampBank New England
Saturday, April 5th, 2008
America’s Credit Union Museum, Manchester, NH

And now I see that there will be a BarCampBank Dallas. This is spreading like wildfire. Innovation is taking root among some bankers, which is exciting. Hmmm, maybe we need a BarCampBank Vancouver…

Unfortunately, I can’t attend any of these events, although I truly wish I could. Lots of great people will be there, and you can see exactly who will be attending at each event’s homepage.

I hope some of you attendees will blog about it, so the rest of us can feel included. It is worth noting that Morriss Partee is behind a couple of these and seems to be the thread between SF and NE. Morriss, looks like you’re gonna need to go to Dallas too.