Marketing Theme Inspires Online Community
Vancity's 'ChangeEverything' blog goes way beyond the average in online marketing.

By Karen Bankston

October 18, 2006

This is bonus coverage from "Web Wonderful" from the November 2006 issue of CUES' Credit Union Management magazine.

It started as a traditional marketing campaign around a theme of change, but when Vancouver City Savings Credit Union decided to make the most of that theme on the Internet, it ended up creating a whole new online community.

ChangeEverything goes well beyond the territory of a corporate Web log to function as an online social network. Participants are invited to suggest changes they'd like to make in their lives, in their neighborhoods or region, or around the world. Proposed changes have ranged from raising money for AIDS medical research to abandoning Daylight Savings Time to getting out of bed earlier.

People advocating these changes blog about their progress, and other participants are welcome to chime in with suggestions, encouragement and action on their own. That simple idea has gained a great deal of attention in cyberspace as bloggers and high-tech observers watch to see how ChangeEverything develops.

Canada's largest credit union, with $11.8 billion in assets and 340,000 members, had already applied the theme of change to its TV ads, billboards and messages across the cars of sky trains in Vancouver, British Columbia, when marketers started thinking about an Internet campaign.

"When it came to an online component, it made sense to do something a little bit different," says William Azaroff, Vancity's interactive marketing and channel consultant. "Once we decided to build a whole new community on line around the idea of positive change, it came together pretty quickly."

Vancity worked with Social Signal, a Vancouver-based Web developer that specializes in building online communities, to design and structure the site. Then the credit union launched a "soft intro" this summer by inviting "change makers" in the Vancouver area to preview the site and offer their ideas through ChangeEverything.

Among the people invited to participate early on were activists with environmental and social nonprofit groups as well as politicians, artists and other people who might be open to and advocate for change. "We don't want the community to be overly political or serious, so we invited a variety of people," Azaroff says.

Those people became ChangeEverything's first participants, and they invited their friends and family to join in the community. About two and a half weeks after launching the site, Vancity identified the first user who had apparently come to the site on his or her own, without an invitation from the credit union or early participants. They dubbed this participant "User Zero."

"With a community like this, we've been told that the first 500 users set the tone for an online community, and so far for ChangeEverything, it's been a positive, upbeat tone," Azaroff says. "Our moderator hasn't had to intervene or remove any comments."

Powered by the online buzz over its fresh approach, ChangeEverything has taken off. "The blogging world picked up on us in a major way," Azaroff noted. Social Signal's Rob Cottingham had been writing about ChangeEverything in his blog. Open Source CU picked up the story and even devoted six minutes in a podcast on credit union blogs to ChangeEverything. The online community was also cited on TechCrunch (a "Web log dedicated to obsessively profiling and reviewing new Internet products and companies") as "a nice alternative to the user generated advertising model."

Though one of Vancity's goals for ChangeEverything is that it reinforce the credit union's standing as a community leader, the credit union has no product sales or member growth targets for the site. The online community lists Vancity as sponsor, but there are no links to the credit union's financial services.

Vancity acknowledges other online networks like 43 Things for inspiring its approach. Participants of that community list the things they want to do (fall in love, beat all the Final Fantasy games, be more organized, learn a new language) and then are linked with others with the same aims.

Vancity's time and cost commitment to design, launch and maintain the site is "not huge" by the standards of a big credit union, Azaroff says. The credit union has committed Azaroff's and a full-time moderator's position to keep the site up and evolving. The moderator oversees posts to and dialogue in the community, intervenes in any disputes and introduces new features like the recent addition of a Google map where participants have the option to identify their locations to add to the sense of community.

Another recent upgrade on ChangeEverything aims to enhance the functionality of connecting participants by the keywords they select to describe their change. For example, a participant interested in purchasing a hybrid car might select the key words hybrid, gasoline and environment and see a list of other ChangeEverything participants involved in similar areas.

Though online communities are by their nature global, and ChangeEverything has been visited by users in India and Europe, the vast majority of participants continue to be from Vancouver, Victoria and British Columbia's Lower Mainland.

"We have this vision of someone wanting to 'get a speed bump on my street,' for instance, and then other people offering their support and suggestions and maybe even getting together in person to make it happen," Azaroff says. "We love that our footprint for this community is regional-it helps us to know and serve our community better."

Karen Bankston is a free-lance writer and editor and the proprietor of Precision Prose in Stoughton, Wis. She writes about credit unions, business and technology.

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