We launched our first Give With Us site today for Verity Credit Union.

Go check it out, leave a comment, let us know what you think. And if you live in the Seattle area, get plugged into an opportunity. Here are a few from Verity’s site:

• The Crisis Clinic is recruiting volunteers to answer calls on the 24-hour crisis line.
• Be a Big Brother or Big Sister for a child, ages 7 – 16, in King, Jefferson, or Pierce Counties.
• Be a Youth Mentor, and help a student reach their academic and personal goals.

Here’s how they’re promoting it on their homepage:

Categories: Givers and Shakers, In the News

Tags: creditunions, givewithus, seattle, trabian, veritycu, washington

Here’s an update that I just sent to a member of the press:

I don’t have a hard date on our launch yet, but here are some starters about the concept:

Give With Us is based on the 2006 Filene i3 My Community Connection project, with a lot of material about the Filene project and reasons for building the tool available for download here and here.

The prototypes we built for the Filene project (at selco.cugive.com and americafirst.cugive.com) will be rebranded as Give With Us sites and will include new functionality, including RSS and comment moderation. We will also provide a live-updating badge for inclusion on a credit union website.

Ideally, we would like to build statewide, regional, or even a national hub sites where non-members could be hooked up with opportunities to serve at participating credit unions.

While it’s been a while since the last post (all my fault), I’ll be picking it back up again. Thanks for all your patience and for all the private emails that have been sent as we get ready to go live. There’s still time to get in on the launch if you’re interested – just let me know!

Categories: About Give With Us

Tags: givewithus, trabian

Our friends at CBC have launched Project Freestar where:

There is one financial 501c3 non-profit that will forever be known as CBC’s Project Freestar client. One. You may be it, or you may help us find that special organization. All you have to do is answer this Call for Nominations.

Get to know Project Freestar – our program to find a financial non-profit brand in need of a little TLC, and a whole lot of innovative thinking. With your help, this one lucky non-profit will be the recipient of $60,000 worth of intense, interactive brand building services, courtesy of CBC.

Help us find this needy non-profit specializing in financial services, like financial education, credit counseling, micro-lending, etc. Click through the site for more info about nominating that special 501c3 organization. But don’t hesitate – we’re only accepting nominations until April 6. (Taken from the original post)

Definitely check it out and nominate a non-profit – good call, Jeff and crew! And check out their blog, The Story, too for some rich content on CU/bank branding.

Categories:

Tags: brand, CBC, nonprofit

Now that we’re semi-settled into our new digs, we’re refocusing on getting Give With Us live. I watched Matt and Brent tweak part of the admin interface yesterday, and Charlie’s been submitting new screens left and right. And we’ve got buy-in from some of the most innovative groups we know.

Here’s the plan. We’re almost ready for the initial group to set up their Give With Us sites. For groups getting in on the launch, inviting local non-profits to get connected will be an early and integral step – and we’re trying to make the admin workflow as simple as possible. We’ll be sharing screens soon.

If you’re on the fence about trying it out with the initial group, get in touch with me at trey at trabian dot com to demo the setup process and get an idea of how much work is involved/how easy we make it.

Thanks for all your patience as we wrap up development.

Categories: Pricing & Signup

Tags: givewithus, trabian

We’re getting a lot of questions about the Give With Us launch, and there’s still time to get in on it. We’re not ready to announce a launch date yet (after all, we’re about to be in the middle of a pretty big office move), but we’ll keep you posted.

If you’d like to read about the market need and get an overview of the Filene i3 My Community Connection project on which Give With Us is based, the report is available here as a PDF (free to Filene members, available for purchase for non-members).

Categories: About Give With Us, Pricing & Signup

Tags: filene, reports

As our launch nears (still no set-in-stone date), we’ve gotten a couple of new reviews, both from folks we tremendously respect.

One review came from Colin Henderson at The Bankwatch

A clear theme has developed here. Credit Unions, supported by efforts of people like Trabian, are leading the Financial Services charge to Web 2.0 (I know we hate that expression now) type services, with small, iterative and creative moves that align nicely with the Credit Union business model. This will cement and further enhance their customer loyalty.

Another came from Jason Knight on the Wesabe blog,

Trey posted a response to Jim’s review today – particularly responding to some of the challenges of making Give With Us a success, but I would have liked him to emphasize a little bit more on the opportunities for credit unions. Challenge: it only works if people at the credit union commit to it – deep down inside commit and make it part of how they understand their job and success at their job. I think that is asking a lot, but I also believe it offers a game changing shift: Give With Us is a way for credit unions to put themselves in the center of their member’s emotional and financial life. Seriously.

I’ll use myself as an example – I have wanted to volunteer for years. I’m really interested in the process of transitioning out of university and into professional life – especially for low income students who don’t have white collar family members to help. People’s desire to give back, engage or contribute to the community is persistent. The ability for credit unions to help realize those powerful emotions is a real opportunity. It connects the dots between the person, credit union and the community.

I love the explanation of the gap GWU can fill and where it puts credit unions in their members’ lives. Jason and Colin both explained it much better than I could’ve :).

If you’d like to see what we’ve said about Wesabe, take a look here. And if you have anything to do with financial services, subscribe to The Bankwatch, too.

Categories: About Give With Us

Tags: bankwatch, credit unions, wesabe

Over at NetBanker 2.0 Jim calls Give With Us a cost-effective way to start a blog AND make a difference.

The review includes recommendations to make the service even better, and we’re most certainly listening. We absolutely agree with his analysis:

The biggest problem will be attention, or rather lack of it. How do you get overworked volunteers and non-profit staffers to take time to post volunteer opportunities? Even harder, how do you get the community to remember to look at your blog when they are in a volunteering mood?

SELCO has a link on its home page, but how do you reach out to the larger community to make this relevant? The SELCO website has 77 volunteer postings, but only 3 comments in the past 6 months. That suggests it’s relatively lightly used by those donating their time.

But any new offering takes time to get rolling. It’s not unrealistic that you could end up being THE place in your market where volunteer opportunities are publicized. But that will take more effort than just posting it on your homepage.

Jim’s right – Give With Us requires a commitment of time and energy to make it work; it’s the same with launching any social media campaign. Without attention, a blog can get stale very quickly.

We’re hoping Give With Us makes life easier for volunteer coordinators. We know of many credit unions, churches and other groups already rounding up volunteers; they’re just relying on email, static websites, or bulletin boards to get the info out there.

In an email I sent a few days ago to a credit union interested in offering the service, I addressed the participation requirements:

You’ll find that launching this product may require a shift in the relationship that you have with other nonprofits in the community (I don’t know how involved your CU is with local groups already). It requires that your credit union is getting out and making (or that you’re willing to make) a difference with groups like Shriners Hospitals, Habitat for Humanity, the American Red Cross, etc. If you’re game, we think it’s a big opportunity to affect change in your community.

Many thanks to Jim for the review! If you’d like to see a higher resolution version of the preview yourself, here it is.

Categories: In the News

Tags: improvements, jim bruene, netbanker 2.0, reviews

Since we jumped into credit unions in 2004, we’ve been looking for new product ideas. Don’t get us wrong – building credit union websites is fun, but creating web apps gets us all giddy in a way that old fashioned website-making just can’t.

We’re happy to announce the launch of Give With Us.

Give With Us is based on a 2006 Filene Research Institute i3 project called My Community Connection.

The concept is pretty simple in that each Give With Us partner receives a branded website where volunteer opportunities in their community are posted. Take a look at selco.cugive.com for a prototype used by a Filene i3 project team.

Each Give With Us site can be fully controlled, moderated, and edited by non-technical staff at each participating credit union or non-profit. If you’ve got a volunteer coordinator or public relations manager, they’d probably make a good Give With Us administrator. (The tools are web-based and very simple, and we’ll be posting demos here soon.)

Here’s how Give With Us works:

Folks who find your Give With Us site (we’ll be providing badges for you to use on your website, by the way) will be able to register for volunteer opportunities in their communities. They can ask questions directly about volunteer events, report back about the event after it’s done, and even donate directly to local organizations with donation pages set up on their own websites.

Give With Us presents each opportunity in blog format. Opportunities are posted in first-person and comments are allowed after a moderation process.

Notifications of new opportunities get delivered via RSS, which integrates with modern browsers such as Firefox, Safari, Opera, Internet Explorer 7, etc., some operating systems such as Mac OSX and Windows Vista, and feed readers such as Google Reader, My Yahoo!, NetNewsWire, and others (if I didn’t list your favorite tool here by name, sorry). GWU (we’re already using acronyms) also integrates with Flickr.

Why we think you’ll love Give With Us:

Credit unions are built around community, and we believe there is no better way to create a community than to give together. We’ve built Give With Us to enable just that.

We believe Give With Us can work for any non-profit that needs a way to connect with volunteers. We hope Give With Us can help churches, schools, service groups and any organization through which people volunteer. Through Give With Us we believe we can increase volunteer responses within your community and ultimately on a larger scale (there’s nothing wrong with setting BHAGs, right?).

We’ll be highlighting stories of change throughout Give With Us sites, features we’ll be adding, and even other like-minded groups along the way. That’s what this site’s for.

Categories: About Give With Us

Tags: creditunion, givewithus, nonprofit