bc blog

Members of the Brighton Consulting team were pleased to attend the City of Sydney Credit Union Industry Chapter Meeting on the 18th August.

Social Media was the topic of the night with a fantastic presentation from Anders Sorman-Nilsson, Creative Director at Thinque.

Anders told us that in his opinion Social Media isn’t a fad.  The statistics are startling.  If ‘FaceBook’ was a country it would be the 3rd largest in the world.  96% of Gen Y have joined a social media site – social media shapes their thought processes.  Yet, social media isn’t limited to Gen Y, the fastest growing segment is 55-65 year old women.  And social media is not limited to the PC or MAC, 80% of twitter usage is on mobile phones.

During the night we had many conversations with credit union staff who were fired up by Anders’s presentation but just didn’t know where to start.

Below are some simple things to consider when developing a social media strategy.

Before you begin, ask yourself what you are trying to achieve.  It’s tempting to jump into implementing Social Media tools like a FaceBook page, but doing  this without an appropriate strategy won’t do much for your brand. Social media tools should be used to support existing business objectives.  For example, are you trying to understand and resolve customers’ service issues or create a sense of community?

Listen before you engage.  Identify the communication preferences of your target market, i.e. do they prefer weekly emails or to read a blog.  What are their information needs? Recognise that not everybody will want the same information or will be using the same tools.

Develop a communications plan.  Social media is fairly straight-forward to implement but more difficult to maintain.  Think about what messages you are trying to communicate, what individuals and/or groups should be responsible for regular content creation, which social media tools you wish to use and how often these tools should be updated.  Keep your communication strategy simple and manageable.

What gets measured gets managed. In order to keep improving your social media efforts, you need to get organisation buy-in.  This is best achieved by measurement, reporting and the assigning of KPIs.  Measurement can be as simple as increased site traffic to customer retention or increased profits.

In summary, if you are willing to experiment, social media is a great way to engage with customers’ in an open, honest way.  It just has to be properly co-ordinated in line with your other marketing activities.

If you would like to learn more, please contact us.
 

I’m sure it must be a coincidence, but…

Following my post earlier today concerning great work done by Zanna Corby, I’ve now received another commendation about a second member of our team, Dan Whitmarsh, which, if anything, is even more glowing than Zanna’s! I wonder if this sets a precendent.

Here’s the commendation in full:

Hi Anthony

I would like to take a moment to thank you and your team for the work that has recently been completed for Orange Credit Union. The project of converting from Rubik to My Viewpoint Internet Banking was a job that would not have been successful without the help of yourself and especially Dan Whitmarsh. The work involved to get the project completed within the tight timeframe, and a moving feast of technical data, was very much appreciated by the credit union.

What I especially liked (and appreciated the most as a client), on go live night, was the fact the Dan hadn’t ‘clocked off’ the job. It was Dan’s attention to the detail and persistence that meant our members didn’t lose Internet Banking functionality for an extended period of time.

Dan’s patience and knowledge won out with the end result being fantastic. We are vey happy with our new Internet Banking site. The elements under Brighton’s control - layout, colours and functionality - have been a hit. I look forward to working with Dan and yourself on the UDA mobile banking platform project.

Gavin Cook
Corporate Services Manager
Orange Credit Union

Every day at Brighton we get dozens of tasks and change requests from our clients (hundreds on a busy day).

While no company can ever be 100% perfect, we’re pretty obsessive about our service and take a lot of pride in our work.

So it was particularly gratifying the other day to receive this commendation from Joanna Vella of SCU concerning the work of one of our team, Zanna Corby.

I’m pretty impressd by it… and I think Zanna is too (just quietly). So I thought I’d publicise it…

I would like to commend Zanna Corby for the excellent service that she provided to SCU during the setup and implementation of the 2010 appraisal process at SCU. Zanna’s assistance was invaluable.

I was on a tight timeframe to get the system ready and I called on Zanna’s expertise on numerous occasions. Problems were quickly resolved; either ‘on the spot’, that night or by early the next day. Zanna followed up on every issue to ensure that we were comfortable with the process … even arriving for an on site visit to provide last minute instructions to the HR Team.

I hope your company is able to acknowledge Zanna’s great service and attention to detail - we really have appreciated it at SCU.

Joanna Vella
Member & Staff Relations Manager
SCU

Joanna - thanks for taking the time to let us know about this. It means a lot.

Beyond the Orphanage (BTO) was formed in 2007 by a group of dedicated volunteers who saw first-hand in Addis Ababa the plight of Ethiopian orphans. Since then, the team has made it their life’s mission to make a difference.

The team at Brighton have been delighted to work with BTO, designing their website in 2009 and currently hard at work developing exciting new features. In fact, I was so moved by the BTO story that I have recently started helping out, sending enewsletters, updating the BTO facebook page and generally spreading the word.

It’s a very exciting time for BTO, with the team heading to Ethiopia on the 21st November to open the BTO drop in centre and computer lab. It is amazing to see the fruits of so much labour finally coming together.

The team will be spending time with the amazing children, hearing their stories first hand, seeing where they live, visiting them at school and seeing the BTO program in action.

Can you help with book or computer equipment donations?

The BTO kids desperately need fiction, picture, dictionaries, poetry and encyclopaedia books. If you can help please send the books to: Beyond the Orphanage, PO Box 30350, Addis Adada, Ethiopia. If you can help with computer equipment, please email Roger at: This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it .

Can you help with other forms of donation?

Of course BTO always desperately need cash donations to keep on sponsoring our kids. Did you know you can donate securely via our website?

Learn more via the BTO website or follow us on Facebook.

Brighton Consulting launches our new integrated CMS/mobile web interface designed for Credit Unions and Building Societies.

The mobile website, as it is commonly referred to, has been specifically designed to operate on the small screens of modern mobile phones. The mobile website works in conjunction with an organisation’s main public website and ensures essential information is easily accessible on a range of internet connected devices.

Our first mobile website, piloted by Horizon Credit Union, went live in June and has performed very well. When somebody using an iPhone or Android phone searches for www.horizoncreditunion.com.au they are now automatically redirected to the mobile site and enjoy a far smoother browsing experience.

The mobile website provides members with secure, convenient access to key online functionality and information through their mobile phone. Moreover, Horizon is able to easily update and expand the mobile website as all of its content is driven by the same Content Management System behind its main public website.

Developing a mobile website helps to accommodate for the growing number of people who use their mobile phones to access a range of services over the internet. The mobile site also ensures that your brand is technologically up-to date, and enhances your online customer service channel.

I recently attended, with almost 50 other Australia Credit Union representatives, the 1 Credit Union Conference, held in the glittering city of Las Vegas from July 11-14.

The conference was a combined effort of the World Council of Credit Unions and CUNA and so incorporated a large emphasis on the US credit union industry.

One of the reccurring themes I observed through the four days of the conference was the remarkable degree to which the American population has lost trust in the banking industry as a result of the GFC (or the ‘great recession’ as it was called by a number of speakers). As a result, the US credit union industry is experiencing an increase in interest and membership - credit unions are being seen as serious, viable alternatives.

I was also pleased to be shown a variety of new social media case studies that could easily be applied to the Australian market.

Lastly, listening to, and speaking with, Americans representatives, it became clear that the Australian Credit Union industry is in no way lagging behind its American counterparts. In fact, in many respects the Australia Credit Union industry is a world leader.

I’ll be posting more on the conference in the weeks to come.

Looking for an easy, professional and entertaining way of engaging footy fans. Try CUtips, the aggregated online football tipping competition that is free for members and non-members to play.

Footy tipping is a big part of football. It provides conversation at the water cooler, something to look forward to on Monday, hope in winning prizes and most importantly, connects fans and their game.

Our online footy tipping comp removes all of the hard work, no more bits of paper or complex calculations. You can easily set up an office competition and invite your colleagues to play. Each week tippers can track their progress within your competition without you having to do a thing!

This year’s comp offers

• a $20,000 prize pool
• no charge for tippers
• Super 14, NRL and AFL comp
• weekly, end-of-season, lucky dip and wooden spoon prizes
• an easy-to-use tipping engine

Try it out, visit one of our client CUtips sites and follow the link on the homepage. Feel free to join a comp to try it out and let us know if you would like to discuss next year’s comp.

Every quarter through our Aggregated Campaign Service we use our knowledge of the retail banking industry to develop a campaign package designed to promote a financial services product. Our latest Aggregated Campaign is ‘Making It Personal’, a campaign targeted at the younger demographic that promotes credit union personal loans.

‘Making it Personal’ is designed to provide all of the information necessary for a young adult to make an informed decision regarding personal loans via an interactive mini-site. The site takes the user through three simple steps: 1) calculating how much they can borrow based on how much they can afford to pay using a flash-based calculator; 2) comparing the financial institution loan rates against selected competitors; and 3) online application.

The objective of this campaign is to increase personal loan applications, generate interest in the financial institution from young adults and educate young adults on what to consider when making a borrowing decision.

An example of a live campaign can be seen here awacu.makingitpersonal.com.au.

Do you manage multiple financial brands? Maintaining a professional and manageable web presence for multiple financial brands can be challenging, time consuming and expensive.

Maritime Mining & Power Credit Union (MMPCU) tasked us with the challenge of developing a new ‘master’ website that was capable of managing multiple financial brands. This challenge was required to support the merger of MMPCU and Gosford City Credit Union (GCCU).

Aside from the obvious design challenges, the new website needed to be managed from a single CMS installation. Our latest CMS – byond3 – manages multiple templates with ease. You can manage promotional pages, landing pages, minisites from a central management console. On top this, byond 3 provides front-end editing, flexible user management, publishing alerts, integrated blogs, forums and enewsletter modules – all with financial grade security.

Check it out how we manage two integrated financial brands through the one CMS.

After a rigorous selection process between six interactive agencies, IMB Building Society has confirmed the appointment of Brighton Consulting as their ebusiness partner effective immediately.

We are, of course, delighted to have this opportunity to work with Australia’s Building Society of the year (for the second consecutive time) and look forward to a long and successful relationship.

We understand that the key factors that influenced this decision included:
• Brighton’s thorough understanding of retail banking and the mutual finance sector;
• the quality of our security, hosting and monitoring solution: and
• our developed range of online systems and financial tools.

This win provides a great boost to the team and is particularly pleasing as it reaffirms the benefits of the considerable investment we have made in website security, hosting infrastructure and CMS development over recent years.