Mobile Audience
Getting the attention of (Gen Y) residents ages took energy and ingenuity from the staff and partners at the Ada Community Library. The Stash Your Cash mobile app appeals to these tech savvy users in the Boise area. The mobile portal (link-to-link) can be found here. Content includes downloadable books and links to FINRA resources plus several video series, podcasts, blogs and a resource of the week.
Word-of-Mouth Makes A Difference and Prizes Make it Fun
Staff support for Stash Your Cash program played an integral role in marketing campaign. To make it fun and encourage word-of-mouth interactions, staff wearing a mustache and/or mustache buttons could enter a drawing each time they mentioned the program to a member of the public. An incentive raffle at each library location increased interest among staff in promoting the financial literacy programming, web portal and library resources.
A friendly competition ensued. Among the 12 library locations, nearly 2,400 tickets were entered for the word-of-mouth raffle. Project principal Mary DeWalt said, “Stash your Cash branding resonated with the intended users and was recognizable on brochures, bookmarks, stickers and even people.”
Lessons Learned
• “Working with captive audiences leads to more success, said DeWalt. The money story times we offered were so successful in reaching our target demographic that we built additional outreach efforts around the same concept.”
• Explaining financial concepts in creative ways leads to more success. Inviting people to a free “shred day” while informally providing information on identity theft was more successful than offering a standard classroom workshop on the same topic.