ChangeEverything.ca (social site for VanCity Credit Union) are doing a great job at motivating people into community spirit. The organic growth is amazing, and its local … you can feel Vancouver spirit.
Other members of the ChangeEverything.ca community have branched out with initiatives of their own. Grassmonkeyz is collecting items for the homeless to give away on Christmas day. While LocaMichelle is doing a drive for supplies to donate to local animal shelters.
I am excited to be a part of ChangeEverything.ca, it felt so good to have the site as a tool to make Got Hats happen. I hope that you feel empowered to use the site to turn your inspiration into action, too. There is a powerful community growing here. We can make things happen, we already have.
Source: Got Hats? ChangeEverything.ca success story | ChangeEverything.ca
When you go through the posts on their blog, there is much philanthropy, but there is an equal amount of appreciation for the scenery, lifestyle, and family/ homestyle. Its in interesting mix of people just talking like good neighbors.
From a purely technical point of view it has evolved nicely, with digg, del.icio.us, ma.gnolia, Flickr, and Technorati.
They have a decent Technorati ranking, with an extraordinarily high ration of links to blog number. This rating is despite Technorati displaying last update 57 days ago, which is not true. I had that issue myself before, and I wrote to Technorati, and they fixed it:
are you ready to change everything? | ChangeEverything.ca
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All in all, a nice feel, and well done!
Relevance to Bankwatch:
I think the key with this is that it has just grown organically, its doing lots of good (charity, family ideals, change bad habits, dieting) and the moderators are just running with it. Good stuff, and good neighbors!
Bankwatch 
Great idea by VanCity for motivating members into the community spirit. I wonder how this experiemnt will be picked up by other financial institutions? Likely a few will do really well and laggards will pick up on tail end after the few trly capitalize on concept (as usual…). I believe a number of true “community” financial institutions could find exceptional value in bringing the community together with financial institution as the focal point in assisting philanthrophy, lifestyle, schools, community events, etc.
Great pro-active experiment by VanCity Credit Union!
The ‘got hats’ story is one we’re really proud of. It was completely organic (we didn’t brainstrom this one, it just happened) and the website helped provide substantial amounts of warm clothing to Vancouverites in need during a snowstorm. Online and offline met up, and lots of good came out of it.
Plus it pushed a substantial amount of good press (TV and newspaper) and drove up traffic with a much higher than normal conversion rate (readers who register). Many of these new users participated in the site and got involved with the got hats clothing drive and started their own changes as well.
It may well have been the tipping point we needed.