This is not just any bank. Banque Populaire Atlantique is a local division of a French bank built on values of cooperation, solidarity and entrepreneurship. From 1990 onwards, it has also been known as the sailing bank, sponsoring skippers such as Armel Le Cléac'h, winner of the 2017 Vendée Globe. The Atlantique division is particularly proud of its association with Le Cléac'h since the Vendée region is included in its territory of operation.
Nevertheless, it can be challenging to raise awareness around many of the bank's projects, simply because of a defiance towards financial establishments, as is the case worldwide following the 2008 economic crisis. Banque Populaire Atlantique have therefore chosen to put forward some of their sponsoring and cooperative actions, notably through its company foundation created in 2010 which supports more than 900 local associations.
As the Social Media Manager at Banque Populaire Atlantique, I was contacted by Stan Thuret, a skipper about to embark on a Mini-Transat (a solitary crossing from La Rochelle, France to Las Palmas, Canaries) who wanted to use the media visibility to raise funds for the charity "Rêve de Cinéma". The whole project made sense and was in line with the bank's strongest values: solidarity and an entrepreneur mindset brought together by the passion of sailing. From then on, it was just a question of: how?
How do you get people to care about this? How do you broadcast Stan's project without seeming opportunistic? How do you make sure this does not come off as a circumvoluted way of financing some guy's hobby?
The solution I chose:
You tell the story through the main protagonist: this is not about the bank, this is about him, his passion for cinema and his project to share it with hospitalized children who, thanks to the charity "Rêve de Cinéma", will be able to watch box-office movies.
The storytelling has to be focused on him and his initiative. The bank is only mentioned once through the course of the presentation video and the logo is showed only at the very end. The video was posted on Facebook on his page, then crossposted on the bank's.
You make the video mechanically viral. 1 share = 1 euro for "Rêve de Cinéma"
Giving people a simple and clear call-to-action and an incentive to take action sets the path for success. At the start, we wanted to encourage people to like Stan's page or Banque Populaire Atlantique's page but that felt like both entities would steal the charity's thunder. It needed to be about his project first and foremost so I decided to focus on a Facebook share.
Added bonus: not a single cent was spent on promoting the post. Organic shares did all of the reach work.
All proceeds go to the charity. Stan took charge of producing the video with his own gear. All budget was to be allocated to funding "Rêves de Cinéma", with a cap at 2000 euros, which is very reasonable for a sponsorship of this kind.
10 days after the launch, Banque Populaire Atlantique's reach has been multiplied by 80. I witnessed a spike in interactions with the page but also in page likes: a proof that the operation had a positive impact on brand awareness, and bear in mind that they are all organic.
Compared to similar local bank Facebook pages, the engagement has been strong...
... but still low compared to some of the best French Facebook pages around! Something to look up to!
Positive engagement: as the main call-to-action was to share the video, there were few comments posted in comparison. However, all of them were positive, mostly encouraging other people to share the video as well.
By the end of the operation, when Stan reached his destination in the Canaries and discovered the results, we had largely surpassed the 2,000 shares we were counting on. We had more than 10,000 shares on the post.
In addition to the direct results in engagement, the use of native Facebook video allowed me to create a personalized audience in the Ad Manager, based on the people who watched at least 25% of the video. By creating similar audiences to that one, I now have a pool of 360,000 relevant people to target in future campaigns.
Thank you for reading me and get in touch for more information!