Bendigo Bank Communities

The opportunity: To re-imagine a community-focused, crowdfunding platform, backed by an Australian bank.

The challenge: Bendigo Bank’s core differentiator is its community banking model, which allocates a portion of the bank’s profits to community-based projects. The bank has a history of funding or sponsoring community projects offline, through it’s branches. Bendigo Bank asked us to bring its community banking model to the digital world, and promote this key point of difference online.

The approach:

1. We started with an in-depth competitor review of the crowdfunding space.
2. We conducted discovery workshops and user interviews to understand the users’ needs, motivations and pain points.
3. We created a new information architecture, content strategy and new content to ensure we had relevant language and key messaging.
4. We then conducted ideation sketching sessions with the broader multidisciplinary team.
5. We designed the user interface with meticulous detail, using a simple, flat design with a modern take on Bendigo Bank’s brand.
6. We concept tested key features with the bank’s current and prospective customers and users of other crowdfunding platforms.
7. Moderated usability testing allowed for final validation and refinement of the layouts, information architecture and proposed functionality.

Features based on user research:

• Authentic community-focused story through video.
• Categorised projects with clear details and status, using a custom-designed, colour-coded progress bar.
• An intuitive pledging and project creation flow was designed with the inclusion of multi-step progress functionality, clean form fields and subtle micro-animations.
• Users have the ability to ask for funding, resources or volunteers for their projects.
• Users have the ability to share their projects with various social channels.
• Users have the ability to add interests to their profile and identify others with the same interests.
• A dashboard allowing users to message other communities’ members and review diagrams on how their project is performing.

The outcome:

• Digital transformation of Bendigo Bank’s core differentiator of its community banking model.
• Increased transactions and new customers for Bendigo Bank with users opening bank accounts to receive project funds.
• Over 100 projects created and successfully funded since it’s launch in late 2016.

“This kind of thing, you take your hat off to it. It gives lots of credibility, trustworthiness. It motivates me to see that someone went to the trouble of looking at animal welfare, health, etc. - it’s a satisfying experience.” - Communities user

“I really do think it's great. Mainly for me because it's simple, straightforward and easy to read.” - Communities user