A bank for everyone

Describe your idea and concept of your work in relation to the festival outlines:

Over the summer of 2016 we were engaged by two national unions of postal workers to produce a member-mobilization campaign in support of establishing a postal bank in Canada. The idea, while common in many parts of the world, was foreign to the Canadian context and the mandate was to introduce Canadians to the idea. Using a series of original whiteboard videos and memes as content, we deployed a national, bilingual social campaign which reached over 1.4 million Canadians and forced the concept of postal banking into mainstream media discussion of how to reform our post office.

What kind of communication approach do you use?

We used a three tier approach to member mobilization. Working with our partners at the unions we compiled a list of influential VIPs whose social followings could be leveraged to spread content to new networks once or twice, we contacted parter organizations (including other unions, NGOs, advocacy groups, etc.) and compiled a distribution list of organizations with similar mandates and aims who were willing to share our campaign on their social channels on an occasional basis, and finally we recruited over 300 ambassadors who were willing to shadow our campaign and share new content as it was published (twice weekly). By engaging our ambassadors as each piece of content was released, and our allies and influencers for key pieces of content, we were able to provide a major real-time lift for each publication, successfully convincing Facebook's algorithm that these pieces of content had major initial traction, and allowing the content to spread widely across Facebook, Twitter and other social networks. Our series of short videos were watched by over 200,000 people on Facebook alone, with hundreds of thousands more reached by our memes. All together, our content reached over 1.4 million people through social networks. Those are both exceedingly high numbers for Canada, which has a population of only 35 million.

What are in your opinion concrete benefits to the society because of your communication?

In a nutshell, postal banking would be good for everyone but the big banks, and their shareholders. Lower bank fees, wider access to banking, and public profits which can be reinvested in communities. Nevertheless, the concept was as foreign to Canadians as offering tire alignment at our hospitals.

So our challenge was to popularize a concept that no one had ever heard of, as an alternative to Canada Post management's desire to eliminate door-to-door delivery and privatize parts of the mail service.

Up to the launch of our campaign there had been much public debate over the future of Canada Post, and it even became an election issue in our last federal campaign, but no one was talking about postal banking.

During the campaign there was wide mainstream media pickup of the idea, it was attacked by a series of prominent right-wing columnists and pundits, and ever since postal banking has been mentioned in almost all news stories discussing the future of Canada Post.

This fall, a government review panel composed of corporate CEOs produced a report on Canada Post's options. They devoted significant space to discrediting the idea of postal banking, and debate and coverage of their report has most often discussed postal banking. A public consultation has been opened, and early reports are that many Canadians are making submissions calling for postal banking.

We amy not end up with postal banking in this country, but our campaign indisputably achieved its goal of popularizing the concept and sparking a broad public debate.

What did you personally learn from creating your submitted work?

I learned a lot about the power of networked strategies, and leveraging individuals and organizations with similar goals as not simply passive recipients of content, but also active promoters of a set of ideas. By offering our ambassadors ownership over the campaign, they became more engaged with the idea and many spent hours of their personal time sharing our content.

We had experimented with many of these strategies in smaller contexts, but the budget offered by the postal workers allowed us to road test our engagement strategies on a national level, and in both of Canada's official languages.

We found that a small budget allocated to the development of networks of engaged ambassadors significantly outperformed traditional advertising strategies and yielded a secondary benefit of higher levels of engagement and ownership amongst those reached.

As a result of this campaign, we have been rehired by the postal workers as consultants on digital mobilization, and are now also working with a major American NGO on an anti-Trump campaign they're running. We hope to keep testing and refining this process, and learning more about how to move people to support good causes, in the years to come.

Why is your work, GOOD communication WORK?

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Where and how do you intent do implement your work?

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Did your intervention had an effect on other Media. If yes, describe the effect? (Has other media reported on it- how? Were you able to change other media with your work- how?)

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