Together: A collaborative response to Covid-19
With the Covid-19 lockdown fast approaching in late March, Nedbank responded with a platform to engage all South Africans in their time of crisis.
Rather than promoting our products, Together.Nedbank.co.za enabled us to keep our brand alive and present in the minds of all South Africans, participating in their journey by publishing relevant, useful guidance based on our collective expertise.
Driven by Ahmed Kajee (Group Marketing), George Ambler (DFL) and Angus Ewing (Nedbank Design), the project relied on support from players and SMEs from Brand, Retail, Small Business Services, GT and NELS.
With a clear definition of MVP and strong guiding principles, the core team from Group Marketing and Design partnered with our vendor agency Flume to build and run a Wordpress site for daily publishing. We went live on 28 March, just two weeks from kick-off, on Day 2 of lockdown.
We quickly onboarded a handful of senior journalists and set up an agile content workflow – publishing 100 articles in the first 90 days, infographics and vlogs (even from our economist Busi Radebe who was under lockdown in Amsterdam at the time).
Core team
Angus Ewing, Head of Product Design
Louise Salemink, Design Lead
Justin Zeeman, Service Design
Sean Deane, Content Strategist
Lisa Mains-Sheard, Content Manager
Nicolene Maree, Editor
The project gave us an opportunity to show what good design looks like and get a website live in record time. Together’s success has inspired the decision to keep the site going post-lockdown by switching our focus to doing good in the community, with Sarah Koopman from Affinities taking over the reins.
Mission statement and approach.
This is not an opportunity to be leveraged. It’s a genuine and sincere contribution by our brand to participate and contribute to a community in crisis by providing support and help to people who need it.It’s not about a platform for Nedbank to showcase its products and services…Its sole purpose is to provide useful guidance, alleviate uncertainty, anxiety and distress through the distribution of important information that can save lives, livelihoods and help protect all South Africans. It's about DOING good, not just looking good.
We created some experience principles.
Helpful & Localised
Actionable content that people can use to solve real problems in the context of South Africa.
Reliable & Fundamental
Fresh, accurate and validated information - reliably
Mobile, Accessible & Inclusive
Be considerate of and inclusive of communities with disabilities and conscious of our language and cultural diversity
Personal, Sincere & Genuine
Authentic content. Avoid being disingenuous and promote business agenda before serving the people who need us.
We created themes.
Moneywise
Times have never been more uncertain. Your bank is going nowhere, so your money's safe and accessible. But what's the best way to manage it now to protect your lifestyle tomorrow?
Lifewise
We're all in the same boat. Every village, township and suburb. How do we support ourselves, our family and each other in staying positive and resilient, and staying together as one nation?
Workwise
Lockdown affects all businesses and all workers. But the impact is unique to each of us. What we do now will determine how strongly we bounce back when business as usual returns.
“A good experience all starts with good design.
Getting the principles, information architecture and structure right set us up for easier implementation and organisation.”
— Nedbank Design Team
Information Architecture and tagging structure.
Social Media Performance: Paid & Organic.
What’s working
Using lifestyle imagery resonates with users, who find the creatives appealing and thumb stopping.
Creative and landing page message/content is aligned.
The messaging on the creative is great, as this is a time for Nedbank to show people that we care and can provide assistance and tips.
What’s not working
Creative have too much text, although we manage to run with the creative we’re not reaching enough users as the text in the creative is limiting our reach.
No pixel is implemented on the landing page, so we can't really measure traffic performance and we won't be able to build audiences of people who landed on the page. We’re currently optimising for link clicks and not landing page views.
Recommendations
We could refresh creative and add more ad units like video carousels, slideshows or images with motions to improve campaign performance and avoid creative fatigue.
Social Media Performance: Snapshots.
Features and Fixes
19 New features since launch
102 Iterations and improvements implemented
3 Donations pages created
New
1 Vlog series capability (scalable to more!)
1 Lockdown Timeline
Iteration on article display
Before
After
Lockdown Timeline.
We created a timeline of all the key events in South Africa since the announcement of COVID-19.
So how are we doing?
We’re not competing with banks. We’re competing with digital content publishers.
Strengths
Agility – speed to market and ability to pivot on a daily basis
Rich collaboration across Marketing, Design, Nels and Agency
SEO resources built into the team (part of our scrums and sprint planning)
Participation from SMEs (vetting and contributing content)
Strong internal controls and processes
Mixed pool of creative, social, meta copy, feature writers and journalists
So many moving parts. So much room for improvement.
Weaknesses
No systemised reporting on metrics
No BU and Marketing calendar integration
Constraints on tech resources for new features and CI
Email subscriptions not possible (we may not collect personal info on the website)
Limited access to SMEs from across the bank
Limited capacity to continually audit the site for running repairs
No Front End access for editors to author
Not enough specialist writers
Key Learnings.
Circumstance gave us an opportunity to publish content focused on people rather than product, opening the door to new audiences, but we can’t sustain those engagements without email subscriptions
Were the blog integrated with the .co.za platform, we’d have real opportunities to convert return visitors into clients
We already have most of the skills required to do content publishing effectively, but it takes dedicated resources to sustain and improve on content and put it to work
Our social channel and SEO strategy are giving us a massive amount of impressions, but improving our CTR requires continually refining the quality and relevance of content for more specific audiences, and getting better at distribution
Realtime publishing is within reach for Nedbank – we’re not there yet, but Together has shown us what’s possible
We won some Awards ;)
Silver - New Generation Awards - Best Corporate Website
Bronze - New Generation Awards - Blogging Excellence by an Agency