Cooperative advocate Carol Schillios is living on a roof until she raises $1 million!

In Edmonds, Washington, there is a really nice credit union and cooperative advocate living on a roof with a simple dream: raise $1 million to support women and their families in developing countries. And she won't come down until she makes it. Her name is Carol Schillios and here is her campaign website.

Carol is asking everyone to donate $1 each to her Fabric of Life Foundation in conjunction with a small act of kindness. Read some of the amazing things that her foundation has accomplished to date.

Since going up on the roof on July 31, Carol has raised about $7,000, so she definitely needs everyone's help if she plans to get down anytime soon! Here's what you can do:

1. Donate a dollar (or more) and perform a small act of kindness
2. Tweet your one small act, along with this link to Carol’s site http://bit.ly/qQaec and the hashtag #imupontheroof. For example: “Brought coffee and donuts to the office today for my coworkers. http://bit.ly/qQaec #imupontheroof”

Carol is online and will see your tweets if you use the hashtag #imupontheroof. This will remind her that there are a bunch of people with her in spirit. Also, please encourage everyone you can to do the same by e-mailing, tweeting, blogging, Facebook(ing), etc.

Let's get Carol off that roof pronto!

Thanks,

Tim

Currency pies a Mayor!

Nala

We helped Vancity change everything about ChangeEverything

I am thrilled to be able to talk about the redesign and relaunch of Vancity's hugely successful social network, ChangeEverything.ca! The new verson launched today. Currency was hired to redesign the user interface and was part of a fantastic team including Affinity Bridge for Drupal development and Ballistic Arts for video production.

Kate and William from Vancity are passionate about Vancity's online community and brought plenty of insight to the project. The key challenges were to increase usability, clarify navigation and, most importantly, to reveal the wonderful dialogue and participation going on within this vibrant online community.

The community member videos are terrific and immediately tell visitors why ChangeEverything.ca exists and why people should care and get involved.

This was a dream project to work on and we are honoured to be part of such a great team.

Tim

Shout out: Hockey Stars microsite by Citizens Bank looks like a winner!

Citizens Bank of Canada, the virtual bank division of Vancity, has just taken its Hockey Stars website out of private beta. The site is gorgeous and I can tell that Citizens Bank is doing a lot of things right with this site and initiative. Here is a link to a description of the initiative on its site.

Earlier this week I published a pretty exhaustive post on what I think credit unions need to be doing to be successful with their social media efforts. Let's put Hockey Stars to the test.

Talent: looks like there will be a dedicated blogger and most of the content will be user generated.

Purpose: Connecting the real stars of the game. It's right there, front and centre and it's very compelling.

Point of view: A little hard to say at this point, but I get the sense that the content will be encouraging and extremely positive. This is the type of site that doesn't need opinionated editorial commentary to encourage dialogue and participation.

Content: The content will be compelling to a highly engaged niche group. Hockey and Canada go hand in hand and as long as there is a high level of participation, compelling content should not be a problem.

Frequency: The site is brand new, but I imagine there will be a lot of activity taking place here.

Promotion: Right out of the gate, there is an interesting Season Opener contest with more than 100 prizes that is sure to encourage people to register on the site and take part. I am unaware of the supporting on and offline marketing strategy for Hockey Stars, but knowing Vancity, they will back it with appropriate marketing support.

Well done and congratulations to the Citizens Bank team.

Tim

Shout out: State Employees' Credit Union from North Carolina is a catalyst of signficant change!

My friend Jeff Hardin, the CU Communicator, posted a video interview with SECU's CEO Jim Blaine.

The SECU Foundation received the 2008 Wegner Award from the National Credit Union Foundation.

At $15 billion in assets under management, more than 1.4 million members and 214 branches, this is one huge credit union! A number of years ago, they switched the $1.00 per month maintenance charge on their 700,000 chequing accounts to a $1.00 per month donation to their charitable foundation.

This change in accounting generates more than $8 million dollars annually. These funds are contributed back into the communities SECU serves. Wow!

Think about how powerful and simple this idea is. Just imagine if all 172 million credit unions members world-wide donated $1.00 per month to credit union foundations in their own communities. $1.00 is like a quarter of a specialty coffee! Imagine the collective good that the credit union movement could do with this money.

Kudos to the SECU Foundation and kudos to Jeff for sharing the story.

Tim