The Aviva Community Fund: Aviva Canada
Aviva Canada is the Canadian arm of Aviva PLC, the world’s fifth largest insurance company. In a period of extreme financial stress and with brand development budgets being cut by 50%, Aviva’s marketing challenge was to maintain and build aided and unaided brand awareness for a fledging brand that had only ‘gone public’ in April 2008.
Aviva discovered a key consumer insight: people want the stability of a large insurance company, but would only truly trust them if a connection was made at a local level. In response, Aviva Canada launched the $500,000 Aviva Community Fund (ACF) in 2009, a crowdsourced competition that asked Canadians to submit an idea for positive change in their communities and vote for the winners.
Building upon positive response from the previous year, the ACF experience was re-architected based on user feedback to help communities get more for less effort.
Providing sharable assets that entrants could make their own reinforced the idea of community. Aviva created templates for sharable banner ads, social media, and email and also provided social media tools and guides on how to speak to the press.
Idea creators exceeded expectations, using mediums from paid search, to craigslist ads, to contacting local newspapers, to having a promotional video on MTV Canada.
As a result, there were 447,443 registered program participants (+1,118% goal) and 2,154 ideas submitted (+538% goal). 74.9% of all program web traffic was a result of idea creators and their networks. Eight ideas shared in $500,000.
Judges complimented Aviva for ensuring their large brand felt local to consumers by empowering community members to submit ideas to the campaign. In addition, the toolbox of digital resources provided to entrants ensured a groundswell of participation across the country.
2011 Halo Award
Best Environmental or Animal Campaign
GOLD – Blue Water Project: Royal Bank of Canada and Free The Children, Tides Canada and The National Geographic Society
In 2007 RBC took a leadership role in advancing the cause of water sustainability and created the RBC Blue Water Project – a $50,000,000, multi-year global commitment to protect the world’s most precious natural resource – fresh water, so that people, communities and businesses have clean fresh water today and tomorrow.
After establishing three years of credibility, RBC felt it timely to start talking about their freshwater initiatives by showcasing the work of three grant recipients – Free The Children, Tides Canada (Great Bear Rainforest) and The National Geographic Society. Each grant recipient was featured in 30 second spots as part of a television and online media campaign. Longer documentaries on each recipient were also made available via YouTube.
The campaign’s social media platform was created to build internal employee advocacy for the cause by means of two internal programs taken into the social space.
The first RBC Blue Water Day enabled RBC employees to celebrate grant recipients in their region and encouraged employees to wear blue on the day as a sign of support for the cause. Elsewhere, employees participated in watershed clean-up volunteer and education events.
In addition to brand lift, over 1,000 branches fully embraced RBC Blue Water Day with an employee participation rate of over 80%.
Judges applauded RBC’s results and the magnitude of their long-term investment. The level of employee and client involvement made a powerful splash, undoubtedly enabling RBC to continue to recruit and retain the best talent, of utmost importance to any business.