Download Spendster Marketing and Communications Team National

Social Media
Spendster
Marketing and Communications Team
National Endowment for Financial Education, Ignite Agency
Greenwood Village, Colorado, U.S.
Need/Opportunity / For many in the U.S., learning about money management is a dreaded activity.
It often does not engage or excite them and, with its confusing terminology, the topic can be incomprehensible. In addition, the idea that a person needs to be an extreme saver and sacrifice all fun to be
financially fit does not help the cause. Almost everyone has made spending mistakes in their lives. In
fact, an eBay survey conducted by Nielsen Customized Research in 2007 revealed that the average U.S.
household spent over US$3,100 on 50 unused items in their house. People are surrounded by useless
stuff, but do not have a fun way to own up to their mistakes and learn from them. When this recent
economic downturn came along, thriftiness and ways to tighten budgets were on people’s minds. However, it was still hard to find personal finance information to interact with in a fun and engaging way.
Intended Audience(s) / The target audience is young people (high school age to mid-thirties) and the
tech-savvy crowd. Young people rarely receive financial education in schools—only 15 states in the U.S.
have a financial education requirement for high school graduation, and many colleges do not require a financial education course to graduate. Not surprisingly, when young adults get their first job, many do not
understand or practice intelligent money management. They do not think about saving for an emergency
or a larger goal, such as further education or a first home, until the goal or crisis is upon them.
The secondary audience is bloggers and reporters as a conduit to reach the primary audience. According to the Pew Internet Project, 89 percent of 18–28-year-olds and 86 percent of 29–40-year-olds had
Internet access in 2006, and 27 percent of those in the U.S. read blogs in 2005. To reach tech-savvy
young people, the communication team used various resources on the Internet.
Goals and Objectives / The goal was to get people interested in learning personal finance basics,
such as understanding personal needs and wants, and spending better. The National Endowment for
Financial Education’s® (NEFE®) overall mission of working to improve the financial education of all
U.S. citizens relates to this goal of making financial education engaging and relevant to young people.
If the financial information comes off as dry or as something that cannot be integrated into someone’s
life, it will not be used.
The NEFE team had three objectives for this project:
1. Help consumers better understand their personal needs and wants.
2. Encourage consumers to think before they buy and to spend wisely.
3. Test the social media waters.
The objectives were not commercial in nature and required mainly qualitative measurements.
_ 420
GQ_2010B.indd 420
4/28/10 6:30:35 PM
Social Media
Solution Overview / NEFE recognized there was a need for a fun way to talk about personal
finance basics. On a trip to Los Angeles, the CEO, Ted Beck, thought of getting people talking about
how much useless stuff they have in their house and how they could have put that money to better
use. At the same time, NEFE’s marketing and communications department wanted to experiment
with social media and saw Ted’s idea as a good one to take to that medium.
By putting those two goals together, the team came up with the Spendster microsite and social media
campaign. The idea was to have a site where people could confess their bad spending habits through
videos, photos and message boards, and see how those habits could deter them from reaching larger,
more important financial goals. The team wanted to make sure that users know it is okay to spend,
but it is better to spend wisely and save to reach a larger goal.
The NEFE nonprofit foundation is small, with little more than 20 people on staff and only four in
the marketing and communications department. Therefore, they rely on outside vendors and freelancers to help create and maintain many programs and materials. This project was no exception.
The team first created a marketing strategy plan based on their goals and objectives, and included a
flexible menu of tactics, depending on changing circumstances and what they discovered worked well
for this campaign. Since this was the first time NEFE tried social media (as well as a humor-based approach to financial education), the team had to make sure the CEO and board of trustees were behind
what they wanted to do. Before presenting to them, they prepared themselves by attending a social
media workshop and reading many articles and blogs on the subject. The CEO and board enthusiastically supported and approved the idea.
Once they had the buy-in of the CEO and board, the team hired an agency, Ignite Social Media, and
worked with a consultant to determine potential names for the site, which were then tested among
members of the target audience. With “Spendster” as the top choice, Ignite began the design and
functionality of the microsite, Spendster.org. Meanwhile, the NEFE worked on revamping the web
sites’ legal documents to limit liability issues that could arise with the new sharing capabilities and
monitoring on Spendster.
To reach people who might be searching for or interested in related topics, the team began a pay-per-click
component to the campaign with Google AdWords and Facebook social advertisements after the site launch.
They also wanted to give users ways to promote the site to friends, so they added a badge widget, a “send to
a friend” feature and sharing tools to the site. Ignite created an interactive calculator to show how much users spent on stuff that they should not have bought to give visitors a reality check on their spending.
Implementation and Challenges / The budget was US$50,000. A large part of that budget went
to Ignite to design and program the web site, the interactive calculator, the tally, and the badge widget,
and to research reach out to personal finance bloggers and YouTube video creators. Ignite also developed
the press release and social media press release page. NEFE distributed the press release to traditional
media contacts and offered a pre-launch pitch to a contact at the Associated Press. That reporter ran a
story on Spendster, which was carried by multiple newspapers nationwide (online and print).
_ 421
GQ_2010B.indd 421
4/28/10 6:30:35 PM
Social Media
One of the challenges the team faced at the beginning of the project was that video applications can
be very expensive to create from scratch. Together with Ignite, they found the SplashCast application
and hired its company to develop a branded video application. SplashCast also posted the application
on several social networking sites, including Facebook and MySpace, for users to put on their profiles.
The team was able to use a nonprofit grant from Google for the AdWords campaign, and they hired a
consultant to research keywords and create the advertisements. A freelance writer helped develop the initial content for the site’s articles, keeping in mind that it should be fun to read and show people actions
they can take to start spending better immediately. The team also communicated the site, its purpose,
and ways to promote it to partners and stakeholders through various NEFE departments, especially
teachers who use the NEFE High School Financial Planning Program® (HSFPP). The web site launched
in mid-October 2008 and remains active. The team continues to test various social media outreach and
adjusts their social media tactics to fit what works best for the site’s messages, objectives, and audience.
Outreach to bloggers occurred in the first two weeks after the launch of the site and through that outreach, NEFE offered an exchange to bloggers—NEFE QUOTE would link to them from the “Featured Bloggers” page of the site if they wrote about Spendster. As a result, there was a great deal of blog
coverage at the end of October and November 2008. For example, on 31 October, Lifehacker saw the
Spendster site mentioned on a blog Ignite had reached out to and wrote a post about Spendster. Traffic on Spendster.org shot up, and the tally of money people estimated they had wasted climbed from
US$12,700 the week before the post to more than US$194,000 the week after the post. Many bloggers
used the Lifehacker article on their sites, thus extending the reach of that one post tremendously.
From the start, NEFE faced several challenges in creating this type of site and campaign. The team knew
they had a limited budget, and the site would not be able to cover every topic that could be useful to the
target audience. The subjects would have been endless given how diverse the audience was; therefore, the
team decided to concentrate on two important topics—spending better and personal needs and wants.
As with any experiment, they discovered some tactics that worked and others that did not. One tactic
that did not work was using Facebook social advertisements to promote the site. After two months of
advertisements, the team stopped them because of the low click-through rate. Based on their experience and reading about others’ advertisement trials with Facebook, they understood that many Facebook users now simply do not see the advertisements because they focus almost primarily on their
friends’ activities. The team also tried pitching radio DJs, but did not get much interest from them.
With this and a few other tactics, they made sure to keep the tactic isolated from other outreach so that
they could more accurately judge its potential cause-and-effect relationship with visits to the web site.
Last, the team developed a monitoring policy for the comments sections of Spendster.org: Comments had
to be appropriate for a general audience (no obscenities) and relevant to Spendster. The site had to be appropriate for a general audience because the site had been promoted to HSFPP teachers, and many of them
had enthusiastically integrated Spendster into their financial education lessons for high school students.
About a month after the site was launched, that policy was tested several times. A few high school
_ 422
GQ_2010B.indd 422
4/28/10 6:30:35 PM
Social Media
students abused the message board with irrelevant and obscene comments. Unfortunately, their comments had to be removed because they made the site less relevant to those who actually cared about
the topic. Because NEFE monitors the site in-house, they were not able to monitor the site 24 hours
a day to ensure it was appropriate for a general audience, so they had to change the message board to
an approval-based system.
Measurement/Evaluation / The NEFE team keeps various measurements so they can observe
how well their objectives and goals are being met. They review the types of comments on Spendster
daily to see if people are engaging with and understanding the purpose of the site. Three types of
comments appeared on the site:
1. Comments from people that show their self-awareness of spending mistakes.
2. Comments by people offering their advice to others because they have already learned from
their own mistakes.
3. Comments from people’s “send to a friend” e-mails showing what they were saying to their
friends about the site.
The majority of the comments on the site have shown that people reviewed some of their past or present purchases and realized they need to make changes to their spending habits.
The team also examines analytics for quantitative web measurements through an analytics dashboard
that looks at several metrics, including activity on the SplashCast video application across channels,
the badge widget, interactive tally, web site statistics, comments on the site; Facebook and YouTube
activity, and other coverage in the social media and traditional media realms.
Since October 2008, the team has kept metrics on the site and seen a great deal of success. More than
28,000 visitors have come to the site and viewed more than 58,800 pages with an average site visit lasting
one minute, 38 seconds. The interactive tally, which shows how much time visitors to the site wasted
on unnecessary stuff, is currently above US$400,000. In addition, more than 90 blog, radio, television,
and news articles, including articles in MSN Money, Get Rich Slowly, NPR Marketplace, Washington Post
Online, and CNBC, covered Spendster. The video application has been installed 4,394 times on social network pages or web sites, showing that people are promoting the site enthusiastically. The Spendster badge
widget has also been installed by many people and viewed more than 190,000 times.
The team measured the last objective of testing the social media waters in several different ways, based
on the tactics they use. They monitored blogs they reached out to and looked at how their posts affect visits. They used data from the video and photo application and widget to understand how many
people are promoting the site. Additionally, they looked at comments and ratings on social media
sites, such as Twitter, Del.icio.us and StumbleUpon.
Conclusion
NEFE believes that the Spendster site and its social media outreach has helped and will continue to
help people interact and absorb financial messages without feeling as though it is too complicated or
_ 423
GQ_2010B.indd 423
4/28/10 6:30:35 PM
Social Media
unrelated to their lives. Through the comments and total tally of the amount of money people have
wasted on stuff, they can see they are not alone and be motivated to make changes to their spending
and saving habits. This project opened up the conversation between NEFE and an audience group
that NEFE otherwise might not have been able to reach. The team is proud of what Spendster has
achieved thus far and looks forward to continuing the site and the campaign.
_ 424
GQ_2010B.indd 424
4/28/10 6:30:35 PM