Soon after the the breakout session we conducted a breakout session with Social Signal with those from the session who had indicated a desire to participate in further discussions.

A recap of this session is here http://vancitymarcom.blogspot.com/2006/03/interactive-services-online-community.html on our very own internal marketing blog.

William Azaroff and Simon Crowther (from Wise Buddha http://www.wisebuddha.com/) a consultant our marketing team had engaged for our Youth Program had a great idea to set up this internal blog which would a) share info about what was happening in the web 2.0 space and b) subtlly introduce the medium to those who had not used it before.  

3. Show me the money- how to move from concept to action

From the breakout session we generated a multitude of fantastic ideas. 

We proceeded to rank these ideas on an axis in terms of perceived value and complexity and aligning the top ideas from our list to our organizational strategies and highlighted risks and mitigating factors for each idea.

Our team then started to shop the ideas around learning each time from our meetings and presentations and continuing to educate the organization about what might be possible.

We were successful in finding a sponsor in marketing as they already had a bucket of money earmarked for the 'Change campaign' https://www.vancity.com/MyMoney/AboutUs/OurChangeProducts/  and this seemed to be a perfect fit.   I'm sure there were a lot of conversations internally debating this but in the end I'm happy that our marketing team elected to take the chance and proceed with the project.

From here as you probably know William Azaroff working with Social Signal, our marketing group and our agency TBWA delivered a fantastic website called www.changeeverything.ca which continues to receive accolades today as a beacon of what Credit Unions have done using social media to engage members and extend our brand. 

I often think about what might have happend had we not had the good fortune to find an internal sponsor.  My feeling is that we would have stuck with smaller 'sandbox' trials and continued to educate the organization around what was happening out in the web. 

Now only a year later I feel that we most likely would have been pulled into the fray regardless as the social web is now a phenomenon and not a fringe play.  

Overall I feel that the internal pendulum with regard to receptiveness to change has been positively influenced towards embracing more new ideas and this shift has created a new energizing and contageous spark within the organization. 

There is no hard and fast rule for how to drive innovation that I have seen so far other than it needs to be a group effort, its much easier to make something happen when everyone is talking about it.