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.
 

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.

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.

With the Abacus Industry Campaign only two months from launch, IMCU decided it would be a good idea to refresh their brand.

Of course, we could have updated the logo on their existing site but we saw this as a fantastic opportunity to refresh their website. Given the time constraints we were limited with what we could do but in a short space of time we redesigned the home page and upgraded them to the latest version of our CMS.

The next step is to undertake a complete content overhaul and put to work all of the great tools we offer as part of the service and the new functionality contained within the system.

This is the kind of feedback we like to hear, and thankfully hear quite often. So what had we done to make this client so happy?

Orange Credit Union approached us very concerned that a key part of their Internet Banking upgrade, the design and design coding, would not be provided by the software supplier. They asked us to liasie with the supplier to create a design that would work for their system. When asked when they needed this work completed we were told "yesterday".

Understanding that Intenet Banking is one of the most visited areas of a financial website, our response was to create a design which not only reflected their brand but also provided plenty of opportunity for product and service promotion.

In addition, by adjusting the code slightly we were able to ensure that Orange Credit Union (rather than the software supplier) maintained complete control over the promotional areas so that they could be updated regularly at little cost… whilst of course maintaining the highest levels of security.

All this was turned around incredibly quickly and we are extremely pleased that we were able to help Orange Credit Union in a difficult situation.

Australia faired relatively well during the financially-turbulent 2009. So, rather than send out Christmas cards, Brighton Consulting decided to help out someone less-advantaged and support the CUFA Village Entrepreneur Initiative.

The Village Entrepreneur Initiative is operated by Credit Union Foundation Australia (CUFA), and provides budding micro-entrepreneurs from less-developed countries with the opportunity to expand or start their own small business. From this basis, they can enhance their well-being and their family’s living standards.

Therefore, we’re very proud to be supporting Ernesto Pereira from East Timor. Ernesto hopes to establish a small business making and selling tradition handicrafts. While buying necessities such as food and medicine are highly important for Ernesto, it is the education for his younger brothers and sisters which has encouraged his business development.

CUFA has said that… “We will soon be conducting field support and funds distribution for supported Timor Leste Village Entrepreneurs mid-way through February… We look forward to providing you with updates on Ernesto’s progress towards financial independence and a more secure future.

Hopefully, in deciding to support Ernesto, we can, as CUFA says, “make an impact”.

Today we launched the new Select Credit Union website: (www.selectcu.com.au).

An ebusiness client for four years, Select Credit Union’s new website project included an upgrade of its Content Management System, a redesign, a complete content restructure and the addition of several new features.

New centralised interest rate publication system

Select Credit Union operates in a very price-competitive market and was keen to ensure that visitors to the site could clearly compare interest rates. We used a ‘centralised content’ functionality to publicise interest rates in multiple places across the site whilst requiring editing in only one place.

The site is therefore efficient to maintain yet highly usable.

We are pleased to announce the launch of the new website for MemberFirst Credit Union (www.memberfirst.com.au).

MemberFirst is a community-based credit union in Western Sydney.

Its very strong community focus requires a website that is clean, clear, open and easy to use. The new site is just that.

The home page uses a new banner rotator system which allows the credit union to have dedicated homepages targeted to its different member groups.

For MemberFirst, this means we have been able to build separate home pages, each with their own unique navigation, for personal, business and community members.

We’re very pleased to be working with MemberFirst and looking forward to ongoing projects.