Spendster Marketing and Communications Team National Endowment for Financial Education, Ignite Agency Greenwood Village, Colorado, U.S.

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1 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 year-olds and 86 percent of year-olds had Internet access in 2006, and 27 percent of those in the U.S. read blogs in 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

2 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

3 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 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

4 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 s 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

5 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