Change Everything | Social Signal

Client: Vancity

To celebrate Vancity’s 60th anniversary, and to support their advertising campaign (slogan: “You can change everything when you change your bank”), we helped them create ChangeEverything.ca. Visitors can make a list of the changes they want to make (from small personal changes to big world-changing transformations), join other community members’ changes and blog about them. Twice honored by the prestigious Webby Awards, ChangeEverything.ca is recognized as the leading credit union innovation in social media.

How we helped

• Working with Vancity, and armed with no more than an URL and the campaign slogan, we developed and sharpened the site concept.
• We created a technical blueprint and selected the Drupal platform – Vancity’s first use of open-source technology.
• We were the community builder, advising Vancity’s ad agency on design, and developing the site in-house to a tight deadline.
• We were an ongoing community advisor, supporting Vancity in hiring and training their community animator, helping them deal successfully with a hostile contributor and guided them through the launch and early development of the community. We worked with them through a round of feature upgrades and helped them develop their first Viva la Resolution! contest, focused on New Year’s resolutions.

Impact

ChangeEverything.ca has garnered Vancity widespread news coverage and peer acclaim, and is now a thriving, four-thousand-member strong community.

Lessons

We quickly learned the value of having a persuasive, visionary internal champion within an organization, especially for a first venture into social media. The project clearly demonstrated how the character of the initial influx of participants and content can shape the future of an online community. And as appealing as the concept and technological execution have been, a critical factor in ChangeEverything.ca’s success has been Vancity’s investment in a full-time community moderator – proof of our rule that social media projects require at least as great an investment in people as they do in technology.