Bank of America – Express Your Thanks

Bank of America has a 90-year tradition of supporting service members and veterans. But recently, due to bad press and negative perceptions this good was being missed.

We needed to find a way to engage consumers, already emotionally connected to this cause, to join the Bank in a massive thank you note to those who serve our country.

When we created the Express Your Thanks experience, we invited people across the country to thank our troops in their own way. For every expression received Bank of America would donate a dollar to nonprofits that support service members and veterans.

Our target audience was made up of people who were already passionate about honoring our troops, and we wanted them to join us in showing their support and generating social awareness for this cause.

We started by raising awareness through TV, online advertising and live events, and then designed an engaging, sharable experience that drove users to social channels to spread the word.

In 2012, the response exceeded our expectations with 323,000 expressions of thanks – and we’re well on our way to one million in 2013.

We reached a virality rate of 170%, outperforming all past Bank of America benchmarks for sharing, uploads, and conversion.

We generated good will among the military community and created a social forum to talk about other ways the bank supports the military. We even received recognition from notable sources like JP Morgan’s top military advisory board member committee: “Bank of America really stepped up military support efforts in 2012.”

The perception of the Bank improved dramatically with our influencer and consumer audiences, achieving a net sentiment score of 240%. We also received comments like: “I really like what you are doing here and it has actually changed my opinion of bank of America for the better.”

Knowing that users engage in social channels across a wide range of devices, we chose to design a responsive experience.

With the amount of potential mobile users, we needed a streamlined submission process, so we started by optimizing the vendor’s 10-step out of the box process down to two simple steps using progressive disclosure design techniques reducing the amount of inputs at every step, resulting in a 136% increase in submissions received.

We wanted to design a page to showcase the outpouring of goodwill that was already being expressed by the community at large and serve as inspiration to others to join this movement. We created the dynamic gallery so that it could aggregate all of the different types of expressions (user-generated videos, images, texts, posts, tweets and more) into a single experience that allows for easy exploration and sharing.