Tag Archives: web 2.0

Viva La Resolution! part 2

A year ago, we ran the Viva La Resolution! contest on ChangeEverything.ca for people to name their New Year’s resolutions, and if they blogged about them at least three times, they could win $500.

The entries last year were amazing. The story of EnviroWoman, who resolved not to use any new plastics in 2007, provided amazingly inspirational stories and drew a ton of new visitors to the site. She won the contest, and had to be paid in an alternative to the Visa gift card we were giving, because we just couldn’t give her plastic as a prize.

LJMK came in second with her resolution to de-clutter her life. And degan came in third place when she resolved to run a marathon.

Now, a year later, we’re re-running the contest, looking for people to name their 2008 New Year’s resolution and blog about it. The prizes have been doubled, so the winners will receive $1,000, $250 or $100 in the form of a Vancity mytreat Visa gift card.

Please spread the word.

A whole ‘nother level of online community.

I love Open Source software. The self-organizing of people to collaboratively create something they feel is worthwhile is an amazing model.

I’ve written a lot about ChangeEverything.ca here, but I have never written much about Drupal, the platform CE was developed on. This week we launched a small bit of new functionality to the ChangeEverything community called nudge. It’s a fairly simple application:

…you use it to tell the creator of a change or the writer of a blog post that you’re inspired by what they’re doing… and you want to hear more. Click it, and ChangeEverything.ca instantly sends that person an email – including, if you want, a personal message from you.

But the thing I love most about it is that when we wanted to add this feature to the site, there wasn’t a module available that did this. So after custom-developing “nudge” for the CE community, we released it free to the world as a module for any Drupal site.

Now that’s community!

UPDATE: Here’s a post on the subject from Social Signal.

An online community about banking? Really?

Ever wondered where bankers go to discuss financial services issues online. Well neither had I, but then Brad Garland of The Garland Group invited me to join Banktastic.com.

What’s Banktastic? Here’s how the site positions itself:

A community helping bankers quickly find relevant, industry specific information and share it with others.

It could just as easily have been called CreditUnion-tastic, but that’s just not as much fun. People are discussing all kinds of issues like:

  • Who will win the p2p lending wars in the US – Prosper, Zopa, LendingClub, Virgin?
  • What is your favorite bank marketing campaign of all time?
  • Just wondered what some of our experts thought the next big thing will be in banking? I still meet with smaller banks that think that remote deposit capture is new and they have a problems getting a good marketing plan created. Any ideas?

The site is in “semi-private beta” which means you need to be invited to join. I still have one invite left, let me know if you want it.

Thanks to Brad and Mark (I was fortunate enough to meet them at BarCampBankSeattle earlier this year) and the gang at The Garland Group for creating this forum. I look forward to seeing where it goes.

UPDATE: I neglected to give my friend and CU influencer, Morriss Partee his due props here. His EverythingCU is a great repository of information about all things Credit Union. They have 5,621 members (including me) and have tons of topics and discussions daily about all kinds of topics, ranging from

  • Getting management approval for cutting edge campaigns
  • Auto Lending Channels
  • Philosophy and Practice
  • Web Site Re-design
  • The best ad you NEVER Ran
  • Name change?
  • You know you’re a marketer when…

It’s an amazing resource, and I owe it to Morriss to give him a plug along with Banktastic.