Tag Archives: vancity

Illuminating the network.

For several years at Vancity, from the time I was accountable for digital services and started working on initiatives to engage and strengthen community, I’ve been talking about illuminating the network. The more I learned about co-operatives, the more this idea grew. Localty

As a financial co-operative, Vancity has a great opportunity to continue to connect our members with each other, with our business members (businesses and organizations who rely on Vancity for their financial services and advice) and business members with each other. Lots of opportunity.

Recently, a project I’ve been working on for the past few months with some brilliant and capable colleagues launched as a test and learn pilot in Victoria, BC. Localty MapThe project is called Localty, because what else are you gonna name a loyalty program focused on local purchasing?

Localty is a mobile web platform connecting our members and the public to discover Vancity business members, and encourage them to promote these local businesses via social media and to shop locally. We want to encourage more people to steer some of their purchases away from multi-national chains and big box stores to small, local businesses.

Studies show that when people shop locally, there is a multiplier effect for that community, where more of their money stays local and stimulates local job growth and has positive outcomes for the environment and local infrastructure.

Localty BadgeI am excited about Localty because it is a pilot that could create significant local investments by our members into their local economies.

I am also encouraged by the way we created the program. The small team worked on it for three months, and are piloting something that shows potential but is by no means fully baked. The version we launched isn’t a full app, but a mobile website, so we could get something delivered quickly to start learning what works and where we misjudged our assumptions.

We added gamification elements, where people unlock badges and earn entries into winning coupons to spend at any participating local businesses. This way, we will quickly learn what it will take to shift people’s behaviours to spend more of their money at local stores and services. Eventually what we learn could influence other loyalty and rewards programs we currently have or are considering.

If we’re successful, what better way is there to bring our values-based banking model to life and show off our co-operative network, while adding real value to our business members, the general community and back to Vancity. I see this as an amazing win-win-win.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vm5FHiWYIhI

What do you think?

That was so last year.

Vancity 2013 Annual Report
For six months at the end of 2013 and into 2014 I was privileged to lead Vancity’s Communications department on an interim basis between permanent leaders. One of the projects I was most interested in was leading the team during the creation of our 2013 Annual Report.

At Vancity we create an integrated annual report, combining our reporting on our financial performance and metrics with our social and environmental performance and metrics. We do this to get a more holistic view of what we’re trying to do, where we’re successful and where we’re falling short and still need to improve what we’re doing.

It’s a great companion piece to our 2014-16 Three Year Plan, which we released publicly in March. In our annual report, we talk about our successes and dilemmas as we orient ourselves more and more towards our vision of redefining wealth and putting an increasing amount of our capital (financial, human, social, etc…) towards positive impact in our communities.

In her letter at the opening of our Annual Report, our CEO Tamara Vrooman has a quote that I think summarizes what credit unions should be all about.

Our role is to ensure that the money our members entrust to us for their own financial future is invested in ways that also ensure a healthy, collective future.

The microsite alone will give you a sense of how our 2013 was, what we accomplished and where we still need to focus. It lets you build your own report from the sections that most interest you, and includes this video that gives an overview of our 2013:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3OF_N72l15k

I invite you to take a look.

Vancity’s plans to accelerate impact.

I wrote a blog post for the CU Water Cooler today about the public release of Vancity’s internal Three Year Plan.

Vancity

Why publish our internal plans? It’s all about transparency and getting the word out about what we’re doing, in the hopes that publishing our plans will be useful to our sister credit unions and co-operatives, as well as values-based banks and organizations focused on marrying their economic performance with environmental and/or social performance.

Check it out, and please comment on the article if you have something to add.