Tag Archives: changeeverything

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.

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.

Focus groupie

We held a focus group with members of the ChangeEverything.ca community. Fascinating stuff.

I don’t want to give away anything proprietary, but the trust the members of the focus group have in Vancity is amazing. It’s a bit of a virtuous circle: they use CE because they trust Vancity as a local, mission-driven organization with strong roots in, and ties to the community (if we replaced the Vancity logo with one of the big 5 banks, they wouldn’t even have tried the site even if everything else remained the same), but it goes the other way too because their trust in Vancity has improved because of CE and our lack of ulterior motives.

We also walked away with a lot of usability issues to address and some interesting functionality enhancements, which hopefully we can afford to make. There are some frustrating issues with the site, and seeing it through their eyes makes me happy the site is so sticky that it keeps our users coming back in spite of the technical issues. They all really liked the design, the open space, the colours. The Vancity brand lends itself well to this kind of endeavour, both aesthetically and thematically.

Watch the site over the next few weeks and even months for changes we’ll implement as a result of this amazing and inspiring evening.