SaveTogether

A Look Back at 2009

noreply@blogger.com (SaveTogether) — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 05:22:00 +0000

I admit I'm a new year's resolution guy. It usually takes me a few weeks to put them together, but I enjoy the process. My favorite part is reviewing last year's resolutions and seeing how well I did or how well I didn't. It was with great pride that I reviewed my 2009 resolutions recently and was happy to check one off - "Launch SaveTogether."

In January 2009, SaveTogether was a twinkle in our collective eyes. We knew there was demand for this model, but we were still finalizing a business model, forming the partnerships and raising the funds we needed to build SaveTogether 1.0. By the spring, funding was in hand. By early summer, partnerships were finalized and web development was underway. In October 2009, we launched the platform and have been building momentum ever since. It has been quite a ride.

To help measure our work, we've been working on an Impact Dashboard. The dashboard represents a way to depict our theory of change in action. We've set out on this journey to provide opportunities for all Americans to save and invest in their future (and others too but for now one step at a time). To do so, we've built this platform to introduce the general public to the power of matched savings. We hope the platform inspires a broad community of supporters to take action to participate in the field. In so doing, we can expand the opportunity to more low-income savers and magnify their success. Ultimately, our aim is to catalyze our community to drive change at a policy level and demand that these opportunities are available to all.

The dashboard below is an overview of our progress in 2009. We'll be continuing to work on this in the months ahead (Special thanks to Troy Ruemping for his help). After you've had a chance to review, we are looking forward to your feedback. Please feel free to email me at dylan@savetogether.org

Our Challenge in 2010 - Converting a Country into Good Savers

noreply@blogger.com (SaveTogether) — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 17:13:00 +0000

I'm preparing to publish a set of metrics soon after the new year. These metrics will give you, our community, a sense of how far we've come since launching our beta this summer and our public site this October. I'm overwhelmed by our early success. Stay tuned.

One metric that you'll be hearing a lot about starting in 2010 will be our conversion rate. Roughly speaking in the internet context, conversion measures the number of casual visitors who take an intended action. In our case the most obvious action would be an online donation. We are working on a process where we can quantify this real-time and will be trying to publish this number to our community as we set this up.

But, I wanted to write a bit about conversion from a more strategic perspective. The underlying premise of SaveTogether is a strong belief in the power of saving and investing or, perhaps better termed, the importance of setting responsible savings goals and making responsible investments. Over the past several decades, Americans have been drifting away from a focus on this underlying frugal ethos. Recently, of course, in the face of the worst economic climate in the past 80 years, we have seen our savings rate creep back up. But, it remains to be seen rather our new found belief in savings will stick.

That's where SaveTogether comes in. We believe that the dedication, sacrifice, and hard-work profiled in the stories of our savers can be an inspiration for us all. We hope that each donation made on our site is a recognition of the responsibility represented through our saver's story, but also a reminder to our donors of the need to be responsible financial citizens themselves.

And that's where I loop back around to conversion. As an organization, we can only be successful if we inspire thousands of Americans to participate in this experiment. We have to find a way to make savings fun. And, as a corollary, we have to inspire people with their limited time and resources to take specific action to encourage savings in low-wage workers. It's a uphill battle. We don't have a strong history of savings in this country. But, things are changing. And, we are going to do our best to make it stick.

But, I need to ask each of you - what can we do to making savings fun?

The New Internet Browser for Good!

noreply@blogger.com (SaveTogether) — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 05:07:00 +0000

We have some exciting news for our supporters. Global Mojo, a new browser, is now available for download. This innovative new browser is based on Mozilla Firefox open-source technology. You can either download the standalone Global Mojo browser or you can download a Firefox Add-on.

The great news - whenever you use the browser to search or purchase items online, SaveTogether will receive 50% of the referral fees that are disbursed to Global Mojo. And, in the month of December, 100% of the referral fees will be passed to SaveTogether.

So, follow this link, download the FREE browser and make sure SaveTogether is your selected cause. Check your account every few days and watch the contributions grow day by day!

You keep doing the things you love to do on the internet, but now you are giving back to an organization like SaveTogether while you browse. As Global Mojo likes to say, that's changing the rules of the internet, for good.

Interview Request from AARP

noreply@blogger.com (SaveTogether) — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 20:38:00 +0000

Friends of SaveTogether,

We have an exciting opportunity to be profiled in the AARP Bulletin. This monthly publication is circulated to over 20 million readers. The reporter is interested in doing a quick interview with one of our donors to find out why they support our mission and our savers.

If you are interested in helping us, please email me: dylan@savetogether.org.

Thanks,
Dylan

What's the word? Reflections on a month of word-of-mouth marketing from BzzAgent

noreply@blogger.com (SaveTogether) — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 04:21:00 +0000

One of the challenges of a young organization like ours is finding the right way to spread the word about our work. And, as an organization whose success is dependent on spreading the word effectively and efficiently, this is especially true. That's why when we were given the opportunity to be a profiled non-profit with BzzAgent, a successful word-of-mouth marketing firm, we jumped on it.

After a month with BzzAgent, we received over 1900 unique visitors who completed surveys about their experience, provided specific comments, and spread the word about SaveTogether by referring us to others.

As we begin to parse through the feedback, some obvious trends are appearing that are not only relevant for us an organization, but I hope are relevant for others in the industry.

Lesson #1 - Welcome to the Save and Invest World

We've decided to use the quote from President Obama on our website because no matter where you are on the political spectrum, this moment in our history requires us all to consider how to move from a borrow and spend culture to a save and invest one. Many of the BzzAgents embraced our message of responsible saving and investing and remarked that they themselves are also reconsidering the importance of savings in their own lives. Going forward, we will be looking for new ways to create a dialogue with all of our community - savers, donors, organizations - around financial responsibility.

Lesson #2 - I'm Trying to Save Too

When you are lucky enough to have a focus group of 1900+ people, you can get a fairly strong pulse of the economy. And, while this is not news to any of you, the economy stinks. Many of the BzzAgents reported that while they typically are in a position to give, this year they are holding back and watching their budgets. We, of course, welcome the budgeting process, but we also want to find ways to encourage those who are fiscally responsible to spread the word. We've responded by dropping the minimum donation to $5 and are looking into dropping it to $1 going forward. In addition, we want to find ways that people can give beyond a donation - including adding their names to petitions and volunteering at one of our partner organizations.

Lesson #3 - Location, Location, Location

Currently, we are only working with partner organizations and their savers in California, Washington and Massachusetts. While many users wanted to give, they wanted to give to someone in their local community. To meet this demand, we are actively identifying new organizations throughout the U.S. who can post savers onto our site, but will do so judiciously in order to avoid flooding the site with too many savers.

Lesson #4 - Who Can you Trust These Days

While BzzAgents embraced the SaveTogether concept, they also want to verify the savers are real people. We address this credibility issue in our "How it Works" page and our FAQ page, but we need to improve our messaging here. We are working on informing users about our growing list of supporters and partners and also providing better content on our partner and saver selection process.

Perhaps, the biggest lesson from all of this feedback, however, is the power of user-generated suggestions. I'm very interested in creating a forum on our platform where we can continue to harness the power of feedback from our users on an ongoing basis. We believe that the best ideas will come from those of you who are engaging with this field for the first time and we're looking forward to hearing from you, wherever you are.

SaveTogether Has Gone Public

noreply@blogger.com (SaveTogether) — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 15:25:00 +0000

The beta stamp has been peeled off, the press release is ready, the bubbly is flowing...well, the first two are accurate.

After releasing our Beta platform in mid-July, we collected some incredible feedback from our donors and our founding partners. In early August, we formed a Product Development Committee with members of our working group and prioritized a series of updates to the site. We deployed the latest code last night and now it's available for you to enjoy.

You'll notice:

1) A revamped home page aimed at improving the message of SaveTogether. We heard from you that we need to emphasize why SaveTogether exists and why it's important to give here.

2) An updated How It Works page that more accurately describes our model

3) A "Take-Action" page that allows you to learn about matched savings legislation and become even more involved in making opportunities like this available to millions.

4) An updated set of success stories

5) And, most importantly, a new group of savers whose stories we hope inspire you to take part in our journey.

We couldn't have traveled so far without the help of our founding partners CFED, EARN, Juma Ventures, and Opportunity Fund and the incredible dedication of a group of volunteers who are always making themselves available just when we need them the most.

Thank you to each of them and thank you to all of our supporters who have already agreed to join us on this journey.

Please spread the word by inviting more of your friends...

Mixing Politics with Business?

noreply@blogger.com (SaveTogether) — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 19:47:00 +0000

Several months ago, President Obama made a speech where he used the following line:

"We cannot rebuild the economy on the same pile of sand. We must build our house upon a rock. We must lay a new foundation for growth and prosperity - a foundation that will move us from an era of borrow and spend to one where we save and invest."

This quote does an incredible job at setting the context for our larger mission at SaveTogether and we've decided to add it to our re-designed home page that will be released next week (stay tuned!).

But, there is some debate on whether the quote will scare some of our users off. While the sentiment in this quote is widely held by both Republicans and Democrats, there is undoubtedly a percentage of the population (and our user base) who are not particularly fond of our president.

We want to know from you, our supporters, will the message-bearer dilute from the message?

Balancing Tactics vs Strategy

noreply@blogger.com (SaveTogether) — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 16:00:00 +0000

A couple of weeks ago, I had the good fortune of getting a sponsorship to attend SOCAP09 (Thanks you Jones Day!). The conference was held down in San Francisco and not unexpectedly was packed with social enterprise gurus, venture capitalists, and technology executives. Each day was full of informative panels and discussions and my morning commute to the conference was spent flipping through the guide trying to find the best panel. In between sessions, I ducked out and competed with the sound of seagulls to catch up with our development team on the progress of our re-designed website.

After three days of jostling back and forth between what SaveTogether could be and what SaveTogether is today, I was exhausted.

One of the constant struggles for me as we continue to bring SaveTogether up to full speed is finding the balance between tactical and strategic pursuits. While we are still young as an organization, it is imperative that we continue to execute every step of the way. But, I find that sometimes we are so focused on our steps, that we don't look up to see where we could be going.

While many of the participants at SOCAP were at a more mature stage than SaveTogether, this conference was a good reminder of the world of possibilities still out there for us. Exciting, yes. Exhausting, yes. But, wow, does is feel good to do good.

Week 5 - A short vacation, but the good work continues

noreply@blogger.com (SaveTogether) — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 21:28:00 +0000

Since I first started putting the team together in June 2008, I have only stepped away from SaveTogether, in a virtual sense, for three days. And since we launched in July, I have been virtually connected it seems like 24 hours a day. Last week, I stepped aside for a couple of days for a sea kayaking trip and I realized how far we have progressed as an organization.

While I checked out for a bit of R&R the machine kept humming. Our development team finalized another release (1.0.6) that includes improved search functionality, improved email invitations and some Paypal administrative enhancements. Meanwhile, Blair has been finalizing a Partner strategy document that will allow us to continue to expand our partner portfolio and reach more areas of the country. On the marketing front, Kate stepped up to offer help across the board from marketing assistance, to social media strategy, to event planning and, in a testament to the power of a strong, collaborative model, Shaolee Sen, a SaveTogether board member and Director of Marketing at our partner organization, Opportunity Fund, developed a marketing plan to support our full market launch in late September/October. She is also working with a creative agency, BigThink Studios, to improve the messaging on the website.

Now, that I'm back online, I'm not only well-rested and ready to make the next big push to our full market launch, but also happy to be charging ahead with the support of an incredible team.

Week 4 - U Talking to Me?

noreply@blogger.com (SaveTogether) — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 04:55:00 +0000

Does our home page talk to you? That's what we are struggling to find out. While our conversion rate of unique visitors to donors would be one key metric to answer this question, most of our donors to-date are close friends and family who either already buy into the matched savings concept or buy into us to avoid the uncomfortable holiday dinner conversation about whether they've donated to SaveTogether yet. If you're wondering, our conversion rate is about %20 today. So, yes, maybe I still need to track down those relatives.

Or, perhaps, they have something they need to tell me. We are receiving feedback that our home page lacks a value proposition, fails to offer a value pitch, doesn't explain the "what." And, while it hurts to admit, I hear their point. I think we've done a good job explaining the how it works with our existing graphic and I think we allow our donors to get started quickly with our featured saver functionality.

But, if I land on the home page out of the blue, I need to be inspired to want to know how it works. We don't have that now.

Over the next couple of weeks, we're going to continue to roll out new features on the home page and beyond that we hope inspires our visitors to be converted into donors. Until then, we continue to be open to your ideas.

Thanks

Week 3 - SEO 101 and Social Media 101

noreply@blogger.com (SaveTogether) — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 17:37:00 +0000

After two weeks of encouraging our closest supporters to visit the site and provide feedback, this week we took the first steps to start rolling out SaveTogether to the general public. First, we had to deal with our search engine results. Our pre-launch site was built in Drupal and the site had some built in optimization features. Since we've been building SaveTogether using Ruby-on-Rails and creating our own custom code, we lost these features when we rolled out the new site a couple of weeks ago. Thanks to the hard work of Doug Scott and Dan Pirone on our development team, we identified several quickwins that we have rolled out throughout the week. Some of them are as simple as submitting a sitemap to Google while other involved creating a series of redirects from old URLs to new URLs. It will be fun to watch as our PageRank moves up. Of course, you can help us by clicking on the link back to SaveTogether after you read this post.

In addition to search engine optimization, we have also started putting together a strategy for unleashing SaveTogether into the biggest social media channels - Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. By next week, we'll have "launched" in these channels and we'll be looking forward to the results.

Apart from the continued focus on rolling out features, we are also starting a small project to focus on honing our branding / messaging on the website. We want the site to scream out to our users to take action. We'd love to hear your input on this.

Finally, Blair is continuing to identify best-of-breed partners throughout the U.S. who would be good programs to add to the site. If you run a matched savings program and are interested in joining, please email us at info@savetogether.org

Week 2

noreply@blogger.com (SaveTogether) — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 23:32:00 +0000

With the initial release out the door, we quickly fixed some low-hanging fruit and add the "must-have" features this week in mini-release 1.0.1. It's exciting to have a hosting infrastructure in place where we can deploy so easily to our production environment. We are currently hosting the site at the leading Ruby-on-Rails host, EngineYard. EngineYard hosts several transaction-heavy Rails sites and as we continue to scale up it will be nice to have a robust solution.

Speaking of transactions, we are getting some great feedback from our visitors at this point and continue to consolidate, organize, and prioritize the comments into our project management tool (Redmine if you want to know). Our goal is to have another mini-release 1.0.2 ready and deployed again this weekend. We are tackling the number one request in this release - identifying the saver's goal more conspicously on the saver profile. Several of our users have commented that they would like to see the goal up front (education, business, home) before they consider giving. Well you asked, and you shall receive.

It also been a pleasure to see two of our matched savings programs receive accolades this week. EARN, one of our biggest supporters out of the Bay Area, received a grant from the Marin Community Foundation to expand its footprint in the Marin County area. Likewise, Neighborhood Assets, our Spokane partner, was highlighted as a Featured Grantee by the Assets for Independence program of the Federal government.

It's great to have these successful partners on board. Hats off!

Beta Launch - Week 1

noreply@blogger.com (SaveTogether) — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 16:51:00 +0000

After a year of planning and hard work, we are one week into our beta launch. We've come a long way from a seven page powerpoint deck to a multi-page website profiling working people who are saving to achieve their dreams.

We couldn't have made it here without a passionate group of supporters from around the country. We were especially lucky to have a working group out of the San Francisco Bay Area that includes the leading organizations in this field CFED, EARN, Opportunity Fund, and Juma Ventures.

This support network, including our new matched savings partners, the Midas Collaborative and Neighborhood Assets, have provided us a mechanism to elicit further feedback for our beta platform.

We have asked each of them to reach out to their closest supporters who have responded by visiting our site and providing insightful feedback on what works and what doesn't work. We are now actively prioritizing that feedback and planning to make bi-weekly releases that incorporate these features (and bug fixes).

In addition, we are marshalling resources to rollout a formal marketing plan to support our market launch.

Please visit the site, find a saver to match and follow, or just sign up and learn more about our organization as we continue to grow.

Welcome to the SaveTogether Blog!

noreply@blogger.com (SaveTogether) — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 04:09:00 +0000

Thank you for visiting the SaveTogether Blog and thank you for helping transform lives by helping working families save to invest in their own future. We'll be using this blog as a place for our community to learn more about our work and how to get involved in making this opportunity available to others. Feel free to send an email to info@savetogether.org if you have any suggestions or just have a question.