Community Connect is an annual tradition at NetSpend. More than 300 employees spend a day walking in our customers’ shoes, experiencing for one day some of the tough choices our cardholders make about how to spend their scarcest resources, time and money. Part scavenger hunt, part product immersion and part community engagement, Community Connect is more of an experience than event and is a uniquely NetSpend way of connecting with the company’s mission, customers, product, and colleagues. This year, NetSpend brought more than $20,000 back into the community through teams of employees who spent the funds by completing challenges that benefit others -– paying a bill or buying a month’s worth of diapers for a new parent – and the day culminated with teams using their points to allocate more than $5,000 in donations to local charities.This entry deserves to win the Best Use of Social Media for Financial Services because multiple social platforms were integrated into this event making it completely inclusive in achieving a shared goal. Facebook was used to house a promotion page, hashtags were used in order to promote and include Twitter, and Google+ platform users, and Storify was used to pull it all together to tell the day’s story. 40 teams received funds on a NetSpend card and the a list of 30+ challenges that involved helping people. Each challenge was worth 40, 30, 20 or 10 points. Teams decided how they would spend money to maximize the good their team did and the points their team earned. All along the way, teams sent out tweets when they accomplished goals, added pictures to Facebook of completed challenges or fun moments, and shared their most artsy photo of the day through Instagram. Customers, partners, and the charities were also involved in capturing and sharing the goodwill as well as themselves paying it forward.
https://storify.com/NetSpend/community-connect https://www.facebook.com/netspend/app_146258552227734
