Open SoSi: Concept Jam Workshop Report

Notes from the

Vancity / Citizens Bank
web opportunity workshop

Conducted March 6, 2006

Vancouver, British Columbia

by Alexandra Samuel
and Rob Cottingham
Social Signal Networks, Inc.

Note:
This was the first workshop we did with the approach that evolved into the
Concept Jam. It identified opportunities for building on Vancity’s community
engagement and reputation – opportunities that were later developed into a
vision for ChangeEverything.ca.

We are grateful to Wiliam Azaroff and the visionary team at Vancity for
extending that community spirit in yet another way, by permitting us to share
this document with the social media community.

- Alexandra Samuel & Rob Cottingham, October 15 2009

Introduction
Following a presentation by Alexandra Samuel in February, Vancity
asked us to facilitate a workshop with Vancity and Citizens Bank staff on
March 6 to explore some of the most promising opportunities for
applying new online communications technologies to the organizations’
goals. Eight staff members joined Alexandra Samuel and Rob
Cottingham for a two-hour session.
The workshop began with each participant suggesting opportunities for
advancing Citizens Bank’s and Vancity’s business, service and CSR goals,
both organization-wide and within their own departments. Five key
themes emerged from that discussion, as well as several cross-cutting
ideas.
The discussion began by brainstorming and grouping an expansive list
of potential opportunities for Vancity, based on participants’ thoughts
about 2 questions circulated before the workshop:
• What are your department's three most important opportunities
for increasing your reach, effectiveness or efficiency in the next
eighteen months?
• What are Vancity or Citizen Bank's three most important
opportunities for increasing reach, effectiveness or efficiency in the
next eighteen months? These don't have to be online or web
opportunities; we're interested in talking about the range of
opportunities or priorities that could be supported by online
innovation.
After a brief survey of some of the leading new tools for online
communication, we broke the group into 2-person teams, and
challenged each team to identify ways that the latest web tools could be
used to address oneh of the five major areas of opportunity that
emerged from our initial brainstorm. Each team then presented their
ideas to the group, which mapped them according to their estimated
value and ease of implementation.

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Themes and opportunities
Participants contributed their ideas about how Vancity or Citizens Bank
could improve their reach, effectiveness or efficiency, either on- or
offline. They suggested a wide range of potential opportunities that we
divided into five broad themes:
• Brand visibility and PR: opportunities to increase awareness and
enhance the value of the Vancity and Citizens Bank brands among
members, potential members, and the local and international
community. Discussion focused on blogs as a vehicle.
• Member interaction: opportunities to increase the frequency and
quality of member encounters with Vancity or Citizens Bank staff,
services or fellow members. While initial emphasis was on ways to
increase interaction among members, conversation shifted towards
increasing the frequency and effectiveness of communications to
members.
• Local/grassroots visibility: opportunities to increase the visibility or
reputation of neighbourhood branches and activities, or to use
community branches to increase member connection to the Vancity
brand. Online presence for local branches consistently emerged as a
potential avenue or support for other valuable online opportunities.
• Profile for CSR activities: opportunities to increase member and
public awareness of and participation in Vancity’s corporate social
responsibility activities. Emphasis was on easy ways to dramatically
extend the footprint of current activities.
• Employee engagement: opportunities to increase employee
effectiveness, often by enhancing internal information flow. While this
theme was the last to emerge from our discussion, the low cost and
high value associated with most of the ideas generated significant
excitement.

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Brand visibility and PR
- cross-selling among brands
- network of related sites
- more relationship among sites
- blogs lead to word of mouth
- more brand personality (currently
limited to site and newsletter)
- visible/visual representation of brand
- story-telling
- promoting blog
- human image / small / intimate
- clearer Citizens Bank / Vancity
relationship
- wider distribution for Vancity Story
Member interaction
- feedback mechanisms
- member to member
- small biz community
- supporting involvement
- financial literacy/skills educations
- newsletter alternatives
- email address collection
- targeted e-mail
- member participation in Vancity
Story
Local/grassroots visibility
- increasing branch presence online
- visibility of community-level CSR
activities
- branch as gateway to involvement
- bulletin boards in branch
- discussing local initiatives
- demonstrating community
involvement
- local financial education
- viral marketing: community to
community
- share local success stories
- personal stories about Vancity’s
community impact
- branch home page to aggregate
news
- member participation in Vancity
promotion – toolkit for members to
promote membership
Employee engagement
- via branch activities
- sharing best practices across group
of companies
- what marketing approaches worked
- Web 2.0 intranet
- improving intranet usability
- branch issue exchange
- anonymous discussion?
- project reports and discussion
- sortable and searchable information
- Vancity Story project
 Profile for CSR activities
- global visibility
- sustainability team
- individual level connection to CSR
- leadership FAQ
- increasing knowledge of CSR activities
- connecting w. other CSR communities
- issue advocacy online (e.g. Make Poverty
History)
- assist partners and grant recipients:
opportunities to promote their work, assist with
advocacy
- blog by grant recipients, e.g. Vancity Award:
what’s happening now with projects that won?
- block party kits
- proposed actions
- sharing best practices
- logistical support for meetings

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Applications of web technology to opportunities
Here are the ideas that the workshop’s two-person teams developed, as
mapped by difficulty and value by the group. We have highlighted the
six applications that appeared to the group to offer the most value for
the least degree of difficulty.
Time permitted only a very cursory assessment of each dimension,
however, and the opportunities themselves were the product of a
relatively brief (but highly productive) period of brainstorming.
Accordingly, we stress that these should be seen not as
recommendations but as illustrations of the kind of directions Vancity
and Citizens Bank might wish to investigate further.

About the dimensions

High- or low-value: How great an impact would this application have on

Vancity or Citizen Bank’s brand, capacity and/or effectiveness?
High- or low-difficulty: Would pursuing this application be resource
intensive? Are there significant structural or cultural barriers to realizing
this opportunity?
Please note that when the group mapped its applications onto these
two dimensions, items were placed along a continuum – so, for example,
some items on the “high-value” end of the spectrum being rated as
higher value than others. While we have categorized applications
according to which quadrant they appeared in, even within each
quadrant there are significant differences in how valuable or how
difficult any one opportunity was rated.
Finally, please also note that participants mapped nearly every
application into a high-value quadrant. Only one application received a
low-value, low-difficulty rating, and none were judged as low-value, high-
difficulty.

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High-value, low-difficulty
New hire training and
awareness for internal
advocacy (Web 2.0 tools)
Blog monitoring: what are
people saying about our CSR
activities
Branch web site aggregating
local content
Blog as feedback mechanism
- top 10 issues posted on
developer’s blog
- for branch network: top 10
post on intranet with
solutions
Employees could have a set
of bookmarks they maintain
and share within their
department
Contest: blog about Citizens
Bank/Vancity, win a prize
Community initiative blog with
comments
Sharing personal (member)
stories through blog
posts/comments
Employee/branch forum/blog
Financial planning blog /
column on branch web
site/blog from in-branch
planner
Sustainability blog with
comments
Photo contest
Flickr
- tags for partner-sponsored
events
- groups/aggregate to branch
page
Community involvement photo
sharing
Financial literacy resource
library
March 6 web opportunity workshop
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High-value, high- Low-value, high-
difficulty difficulty
RSS feed from intranet home Wiki for global sustainability
page activities
Opt-in email
- broken down to types of
services: marketing,
education, branch news,
CSR, small biz, rates (further
broken down)
- valuable online content
would members to share e-
mail address
Event calendar
- news feed
- send-to-a-friend/meet-me-
there function
SRI/tax/RRSP/RESP resource
library
Online community
- small business using social
bookmarking: del.icio.us,
knowledge base, ticker
- CSR
Company blog (employees)
CEO blog
Social networking
- link members to member
businesses
- not just traded transactions;
expertise
Social networking
- introduce lenders and
borrowers to do business
- we are conduit for low-profit
business
Social networking /
microlending
- already doing this
- network small businesses
- facilitate their success
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Lessons and next steps
We emerged from the workshop with several insights into how the
latest generation of web tools offers new opportunities to Vancity and
Citizens Bank:
1. Opportunities exist in five areas:
• Brand visibility and PR
• Member interaction
• Local/grassroots visibility
• Employee engagement
• Profile for CSR activities
The group emphasized opportunities that crossed over between
themes; enthusiasm seemed to peak around discussions of how to
increase member interaction at the local level in order to increase
brand visibility and value.
2. Participants perceived virtually all identified opportunities as high-
value, reflecting their belief that new online tools can help Vancity
and Citizens Bank achieve significant growth.
3. Six high-value opportunities were identified as “easy wins” requiring
relatively limited investments of resources and facing few obstacles:
• Incorporating training in new online tools into orientation for new
employees, providing an easy opportunity to increase internal capacity
• Setting up a system for monitoring public blog posts to track perceptions of
Vancity’s CSR and other activities
• Set up branch web sites to aggregate and republish locally-relevant
content
• Setting up an internal blog to provide feedback on interactive services
and/or answers to frequently asked employee questiosn
• Setting up an online bookmarking system to replace individual employees’
collections of favourite web sites, creating valuable collections of resources
to share within or between departments
• Encouraging grassroots viral marketing with contests that offer members
prizes for blogging on topics like “what Vancity means to my community”