Tag Archives: vancity

An afternoon with Majora Carter.

It is days like this when I have to pinch myself for working at such an amazing organization.

Today Vancity helped bring Majora Carter to Vancouver to speak to a group called The Strathcona Business Improvement Association. They are a group dedicated to improving an area of Vancouver that could use some extra care to bounce back, and these business owners are playing an “important role in the business development, safety, security and street enhancement in Strathcona.” Part of their focus is to create a green business focus, making the neighbourhood an epicentre of sustainability in Vancouver.

Majora Carter gave a talk about how she helped bring back an area of the South Bronx through environmental renewal. Her TED talk is an inspiring story of economic injustice and an environmental response to it. Well worth watching.

Listen to the Vancity Board of Directors election podcasts.

This year we tried something different at Vancity. Any of the 12 people running for the three open slots on our Board of Directors could record a podcast and we published them on vancity.com.

This gives our members a chance to get a feel for the candidates, through their written statements, their Ask A Candidate responses and now through a short podcast. Take a listen.

By the way, that’s my colleague Robin voicing the intros.

A sneak peek of the new vancity.com

VancityFor 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.