January 28th, 2009, 3 Comments »
Late last week, I got an email from BCIT about a new site that they launched: WhatWouldYouChange.ca. From their About page:
Change starts with one person, one idea. Change happens when one person acts on their idea helping it take root and grow into something greater. What is your idea for change?
That’s what this site is all about.
It’s a place to share your thoughts on what you’d like to change about pretty much anything, and have some fun along the way. Maybe you’d like to change something about the world or perhaps it’s personal change you’re after. Whatever, we’d like to hear about it!
As far as I can figure, it’s kind of a soft-sell recruiting effort, that combines various roll-your-own social media angles on a Drupal platform. You can talk about what you’d change on video, make a kind of photo collage about it or devise short, Tweet-esque messages of change.
I traded emails with Janeen Alliston, one of the project managers on the project. I asked her why they opted for these three particular flavours of social media. Here’s her reply:
The three pronged approach was the result of a user experience document created to guide the project. We thought about what would initially engage our target demo (16-25 years olds) and what would open the door to deeper engagement with other site members as well as BCIT faculty, students and alumni. Our goal was to provide opportunities for people to interact with the site in ways that are comfortable for them. Some are happy to view videos and perhaps share them online, others may be visually inclined but not good with the written word or vice versa.
With a little help on the Drupal and Flash fronts, they conceived, designed and built the whole thing in-house–quite an achievement. I think it’s got a pretty fun aesthetic, and I think I recognize that coffee stain in the upper right-hand corner from a familiar Photoshop brush.
What Would You Change? Everything
Locals may recognize a striking similarity between the concept of WhatWouldYouChange.ca and VanCity’s ChangeEverything.ca (here’s what I wrote about that project back in 2006). I asked Janeen about this:
We became aware of ChangeEverything.ca well into the development of whatwouldyouchange. We are targeting a much younger demographic with a more whimsical take on the notion of change.
I’m not sure what to say about that. I believe that they weren’t aware of ChangeEverything.ca at the outset of the project. But I would have been given serious pause whenever I learned about ChangeEverything.ca, and might have changed the new site’s focus (or at least its brand). The lesson, I guess, is to ask around when you kick off a project like this, and really do a thorough survey to understand what else, in terms of “competition”, is out there.
With my marketer’s hat on, I’m always a bit skeptical when organizations build their own social network. This isn’t quite that, but there are already existing places–YouTube, Facebook, Twitter–where this behaviour is taking place. In our experience, it’s really difficult to drag users out of those spaces and onto your own nascent site. You’re often better off working with your customers where they are, instead of where you want them to be.
But, then, I’m very frequently wrong. And this might be precisely the kind of site that’s attractive to young British Columbians (besides, you know, the fact that they’re asexually reproducing on Facebook). Best of luck to BCIT and the project team.
3 Comments »
June 22nd, 2007, 4 Comments »
I just read on Facebook (grrr…) about Vancity’s worthy new community program–a community bike share. There’s even a pancake breakfast:
We are launching the Vancity Bike Share experiment at BEST’s (Better Environmentally Sound Transportation) Pancake Breakfast where Bike Month is wrapped up with free pancakes, fair-trade coffee, juice, and organic oranges for all who commute by biking, walking, carpooling or transit. It’s also when the winners of the Commuter Challenge will be announced.
Coincidentally, not a month ago I wrote about a similar bank-sponsored program in Austria: “I could see the likes of VanCity or Telus launching a similar program in Vancouver”.
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May 30th, 2007, 4 Comments »
For no particular reason, I’ve been reading and thinking a lot about online communities lately. I recently encountered a phenomenon on ChangeEverything.ca which initially struck me as unusual. Upon further reflection I think it’s quite common: there’s very little disagreement and debate in their community.
I discovered this because I wrote what I thought was a fairly contradictory comment in response to a post about gas prices. To my surprise, nobody wanted to take me up on the debate (I eventually goaded Rob into it offline).
I love debate, so I tend to seek it out in online communities, whether it’s something old school like alt.sports.hockey.nhl.vanc-canucks or more recent projects the always hotly-contested DeSmogBlog. So I was kind of bummed when nobody–not even the blogger herself–took on my challenge.
Then I started looking around the site. I browsed through a month of posts (this was a couple of weeks ago), and despite there being numerous hot button topics (local politics, global warming and so forth) and plenty of comments, I couldn’t find a single example of disagreement. That just struck me as weird.
A Positive Sense of Belonging and Encouragement
I asked the ChangeEverything.ca folks and here’s some of what they said. Community Manager (I hope that’s her title) Kate writes:
the first two months ChangeEverything.ca was live it was in ’soft launch’ mode meaning that we were introducing people slowly and intentionally into the community to foster a positive sense of belonging and encouragement. I think of it kind of like introducing new fish into an aquarium. Because of this careful and deliberate building of the environment, the disagreements that do show up on the site (and there are several) tend to be civil and short lived. We were not aiming to create a place here people do not contradict one another, but rather that when they do they are respectful about it so that something truly progressive may be generated.
And Rob, who helped create the site, says:
Another reason speaks to the site’s purpose. For the most part, this is less a debate/argumentation site than a news/resource-sharing/collaboration site, and the culture of dialogue reflects that. Discussions tend to focus on “how” instead of “rather”, and where people weigh in, it’s usually to reinforce someone’s goals and cheer them on.
Finally, whether you’d call it groupthink or broad values alignment, the people who come to a Vancity-sponsored community-change site are different from those who come to a site that dives into the fray and takes on partisans in a highly-contested space, as DeSmogBlog does.
Broad Values Alignment
Indeed, my theory was that many community sites draw like-minded people, and the kind of folks who would join ChangeEverything.ca would have, as Rob puts it, ‘broad values alignment’. Kate says that they don’t market to VanCity members exclusively, but I’d imagine that’s where they drew most of their early adopters (and therefore conversation tone setters) from. Obviously, people who bank with VanCity have some values and ideals in common.
There seems to be some division here between communities that group around a lifestyle (green, goth, whatever) and those that group around a hobby or common love (skydiving, Lindsay Lohan, whatever). The former are, I’d guess, less likely to experience the diversity of opinions which drive debate.
Too much debate is a problem we experience on DeSmogBlog sometimes, but I think too little debate is an issue too. Debate enlivens a community, identifies its core values and sharpens its ideas. I suppose each group needs to find its own ideal level for this kind of discourse, but I was frustrated by ChangeEverything’s lack of cut-and-thrust. Happily, there are plenty of Interwebbians elsewhere who are happy to vehemently disagree with me.
On a vaguely related point, I recently learn about Change.org, which was launched this spring. It appears to be a sort of globalized version of ChangeEverything.
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March 22nd, 2007, 47 Comments »
You know, Vancity does a lot of great things. ChangeEverything is cool, as is their new climate change mortgage, and they have a ton of admirable local initiatives.
It was because of that good reputation, both as a bank and a community member, that we switched our business accounts from the Royal Bank to Vancity last year. The Royal Bank had given us incompetent, impersonal service, so it was a pleasure to take our money elsewhere (they likewise continue to treat us poorly for our personal accounts).
You know what? Vancity is no better. They’re possibly even worse.
I already described the serious error they made last August, as well as their confusing mail piece (a trivial complaint, but reflective of their customer service).
Since then, Vancity has made two more mistakes on basic activities within our account. I’m not manufacturing imaginary missteps. I have emails from my account manager admitting they made errors in issuing incorrect cheques and cashing cheques from the wrong account.
I don’t care how frickin’ green or community-oriented this credit union is. I don’t pay banking fees for ineptitude.
I’m out of patience and goodwill. That’s three errors in six months, in our first year with a new bank. If we performed like this at Capulet, all of our clients would fire us.
If I wasn’t leaving the country in four weeks, I’d put the immediate boot to Vancity. Instead, I’ll leave that onerous task for our return.
On a related matter, why aren’t these community-minded people monitoring the Web? This is my third post dissing their organization, and nobody from Vancity has responded, publicly or privately.
UPDATE: Over on the nicely-designed Open Source Credit Union, Trey has written a post about my customer experience.
UPDATE #2: Another post about my Vancity angst over at Bankwatch.
47 Comments »
