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When member and volunteer engagement are treated as separate experiences, the value of belonging gets lost in the gap. Here's how we fixed that at SAE International — and what it did for acquisition and retention. The Problem Hiding in Plain Sight When an organization struggles with member acquisition or renewal, the instinct is usually to look at the marketing. Are we reaching the right people? Is the messaging landing? Do we need a better offer? Those are legitimate questio

The Problem With Brainstorming Most ideation sessions follow the same pattern. A room (or Zoom) full of smart people, a whiteboard, and a prompt that's vague enough to generate lots of ideas but not focused enough to generate useful ones. You walk out with a long list, a few sticky notes that made everyone laugh, and a nagging sense that none of it quite connects to what your customer actually needs. At M&T Bank, we'd done the research to understand our small business custome

The Temptation to Skip the Research When leadership gives you a growth mandate, the pressure to move is immediate. Build the campaign. Launch the product. Fix the funnel. The instinct is to start doing — and figure out the details as you go. At M&T Bank, we had that pressure. Customer growth was lagging behind competitors. Attrition was climbing. There was executive appetite to build a new engagement model for the small-to-medium business vertical, and there was no shortage o

The Promise vs. The Reality If you've ever sat in a room where someone says "we just need better attribution," you know the feeling. There's a collective nod. Everyone agrees. And then six months later, you have a new dashboard, a pile of channel data, and roughly the same amount of uncertainty about what's actually driving results. Multi-touch attribution is genuinely useful. But it's also one of the most misunderstood tools in marketing — especially for teams that are newer

When I joined M&T Bank's small business marketing team, we had a growth problem — and not the fun kind. New checking account acquisition was lagging behind competitors. The content we were putting out was mostly white-labeled, recycled across business lines, and not tied to any real understanding of what our customers actually needed. Executive leadership wanted a new engagement model for the small-to-medium business vertical. We had appetite and runway. What we needed was a

There's a crowded list of brands in the financial services industry, and little differentiation other than "Wall Street Bank" and "Community Bank." We set out to explore how our middle-sized bank can compete with the big guys in the eyes of aspiring business owners – who, turns out, are regular folks like you & me. Problem As the pandemic continued , our bank saw lower-than-expected customer growth compared to competitors and a growing concern over attrition. There was an app

Thank's 90 day cross sell strategy encompasses the research and platforms outlined in other posts and was my final project with the team.

Now that we have a defined value prop, we need to better understand our segments' lures and hurdles. We wanted to identify which stages...

Problem As the pandemic struck, our bank was behind the times with no digital account opening option. Seeing record-breaking new business...

At the bank, we knew our content strategy needed some attention. Existing material was mostly white labeled, shared by different business...

Simplifying Home Management As a consultant coming onto the HiredHome team mid-launch, the Founder/CEO and board of directors had already...