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02
CommunityAmerica
Life Plans Pilot
CommunityAmerica · 2023
- Problem
- The mission here is bigger than banking. It’s helping people actually get somewhere better with their money, and feel some peace about it. Life Plans is the vehicle for that. The thing that turns a mission into something you can build and measure. What we didn’t have yet was proof it worked. Nobody had tested whether a personalized nudge actually moved a member toward that, or just felt nice in an inbox. This was the evidence phase. Move from we think this helps to here’s what happened.
- Constraints
- It ran on email, which sounds simple and isn’t. Coordinating data science, the marketing platform, design, and compliance, each on its own clock. And the questions we were asking were too particular for off-the-shelf analytics. Did this exact nudge change this exact behavior? You can’t buy a dashboard for that. So we built the measurement by hand, one use case at a time.
- Process
- A standing panel of members helped narrow a long list of candidate nudges down to the few worth testing. Then we sent them, to specific segments, and measured against a control. Late 2023, wrapped in a written recap that laid out the strategy, the method, and what each case actually did.
- Outcome
- Most of the cases moved real behavior. Things like qualifying for rewards, switching to eStatements, moving money into higher-interest savings. Not opinions about the emails. Actions. The specific numbers live inside the company, but the answer to the question was yes.
- Lessons
- This was the hinge. For years the personalization work had been foundation. Data, content, plumbing you couldn’t point to. The pilot was the first time I could show it changed what people did, not just what we knew about them. That evidence is what earned the bigger build that came next.