THE 14TH ANNUAL SHORTY AWARDS

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From the 3rd Annual Shorty Social Good Awards

National Bank of Arizona - A Community Bank

Entered in Financial Services

Objectives

National Bank of Arizona is a local community bank that since its inception in 1984 has only one mission, building local relationships and providing exceptional customer service to businesses and consumers. We started out as a business bank but shortly after expanded to a fully-service financial institution. We want to be there for our customers and the community at every stage of life with local expertise and specially tailored solutions. Honesty, loyalty, the ability to be true partners with a "can do attitude" helped us throughout the years to build valuable, unique relationships. We approach every opportunity with creative, forward-thinking strategies to help our clients stay ahead of the curve. To showcase these efforts, we use different mediums to tell our clients stories, employees, partners and the impact they had in our neighborhoods with our help.

Strategy and Execution

Our projects emphasize people over brand by leveraging our customers' success stories, positioning our bankers as financial experts and highlight NB|AZ's involvement within the community. We deployed several campaigns, and within those we created social sharable short stories and photos to drive engagement and brand awareness.

We noticed that native storytelling content engages and grows our audience better than promoted ads. The Meet your Banker campaign and the Taste of the Biltmore event places the "spotlight" on the customer and the community even if it's a business advice or an invitation to an event. As a financial institution, we realized that connecting with people, giving advice and being ready to act is more powerful than treating customers and partners as numbers.

We try to build campaigns that are genuine and useful for everyone. Money Month is good example of "how to" events about businesses management for women-owned businesses. Also, every year we participate in JA Day and teach children about our jobs and the impact we have as financial company in Arizona.

We learned from the competition ("The Big Banks") the do's and don'ts and reconfigured the way we do business. Our campaigns concepts are adapted to the audience's specific pain points. We simplify our processes and take decisions based on the person, not just the numbers put out there by an algorithm. With that in mind, our Facebook and Instagram's organic reach increased without engaging in paid advertising. Social Media enabled us to boost brand awareness and showcase who we are better than any other communication channel. We manage to engage the prospects and customers with the brand at a personal level through the simple act of storytelling. NB|AZ becomes a memorable brand easily once you've seen and engaged in our high-quality content.

Meet Your Banker: The purpose of creating our Meet Your Banker (MYB) campaign was to humanize the National Bank of Arizona brand; to break through on a personal level and to express the immense value we place on growing our relationships with our clients. Being part of the community and building a solid foundation with our clients are two of the most important factors of our success as a bank. This campaign gave us the opportunity to connect with our audience and visibly demonstrate approachable, warm and special interactions with our bankers. We highlight our bankers and emphasize their activities within the community, not just as bankers, but as residents of our National Bank of Arizona family.

Meet Your Banker has been growing organic reach and leads with each post. We promote MYT on the NB|AZ Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube and Twitter through photography and video. The videos are posted on the Facebook cover to immediately tap into the user's attention. The photos come with a decently sized caption that presents the banker and highlights the main points of conversation had in the video.

Banking on Community:

Fiesta Bowl

In December 2017, NB|AZ was the title sponsor of the 47th annual Fiesta Bowl Parade organized by our local nonprofit, The Fiesta Bowl. "Banking on Future" was the theme of the float. We strongly believe that the future of Arizona belongs to our children, and an investment in our children is an investment in all of us. Last year's float depicted the importance of S.T.E.A.M. The focus on science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics to provide the tools required to lead, transform and innovate in our community as well as in the 21st century. We promoted the Fiesta Bowl parade 30 days before the event through a series of videos of "the making of" the STEAM float on Facebook and YouTube. After the event, we released a video of the event that highlights all the amazing moments during the parade.

ElevateAZ,

Elevate AZ is the quarterly magazine published by National Bank of Arizona that highlights local businesses and nonprofits in process of shaping the community through innovation and entrepreneurship.

Our main goal is to uplift the people and the communities from Arizona. We talk about Arizonans that share the same vision of the future of our state, the place we call home. They are the face of today's and tomorrow's Arizona and we are proud to support them.

Money Month

Money Month is an initiative for growing entrepreneurs held by Empowered PhXX and powered by National Bank of Arizona, and it is open for every community partner to participate. Empowered PhXX is a community collaborative committed to strengthening the future of Phoenix by advancing women in entrepreneurship and is 100% community-owned and self-organized, meaning no one person or organization runs it—everyone contributes through action.

JA Day

Living up to our brand values means strategically aligning and uniting our efforts in events that demonstrate true partnership and giving back to the community. Junior Achievement Day and the Heart Walk organized by the American Heart Association are part of NB|AZ in Action, which our charity and volunteering program.

We were excited to share on Facebook and Instagram our experience and thoughts about Junior Achievement Day. The post gained immediate reactions, comments and shares simply because it was a snapshot of our employees during the JA activities.

Taste of the Biltmore: Cuisine. Culture. Community. Taste of the Biltmore is an upscaled tasting event to give back to charities in Arizona, and to kick off the AZ charity season. This event is hosted by us at National Bank of Arizona. TOB is a customer appreciation event that invites guests from the entire Valley to meet local restaurants and bars for an incredible night filled with food and drink sampling.

The strategy behind TOB Social Media was to tell a short authentic story to capture our audience's attention and to display how unique and memorable experiencing Taste of the Biltmore really is. Part of the success is the cause, the desire to give back and help each other. To raise the funds and to grab people's attention, we deployed content on the Taste of the Biltmore Facebook page, 30 days prior to the event. We wanted to ramp up the buzz among the community, helping them get excited for one of the biggest events in the Phoenix area. We used Facebook and Instagram to give the audience up-to-dates about the new participants. Both accounts engage audience easily with food photography and captions that have a unique tone of voice. The page views, likes and followers usually increase 30 to 60 days before the event. Our video series for OSHO Brewery and Distillery brought record time in our books and phenomenal reach and engagement. Surprisingly, the post was shared by other tourist-oriented companies.

On the other hand, the Instagram account is growing at fast pace with incredible engagement. Our hashtag combo with the photography attracts followers and comments which helps achieve our goals.

Results

We exceeded all expectations! Along with humanizing our bankers, we were able to turn this entire style guide into a lead generation tool – which we didn't anticipate. Sharing each banker's story and personalizing their posts turned into boosted interactions and new clients and customers walking through our doors generating hundreds of thousands of dollars that impact our balance sheet every quarter. One of our most recent MYB posts went live on June 8th and reached 1,436 people with a growing engagement of 208 clicks and 128 reactions, followed by the June 21st post that shows approximately a 65% increase in reach.

Money Month

The Money Month promo video exceeded our expectations with 4,607 people reached, 1245 views, 102 reactions, 217 clicks and shares by Maricopa Small Business Development Center and KM Leadership Solutions.

JA Day & Fiesta Bowl Parade

NB|AZ has been volunteering for Junior Achievement for many years. We sponsor numerous employees to volunteer for the in-class instruction, JA Day at Arrowhead, JA Stock Market Challenge, JA Bowl-a-Thon, and JA Your Hired. One of our executives is on the JA Board of Directors. This year, we had 34 volunteers that taught 17 classrooms, taking over the whole school. The purpose of JA day is to teach students in the classroom about the importance of money management, work readiness and entrepreneurial thinking. More than 80,000 students across the state receive JA lessons in class each year, at no cost to them or the schools.

As a title sponsor of the Fiesta Bowl, we had 36 volunteers walking with along the STEAM float on December 30th, 2017.

Elevate AZ

With an average of 15,000 copies per edition distributed throughout the state, the summer edition highlighted the latest developments in Arizona.

Liberty Wildlife is a nonprofit organization that was featured in the 2018 summer edition. Based in Phoenix, the organization rescues and rehabilitates wild birds such as bald eagles, kestrels and other desert animals. In the same edition, we talked about the growth in one of the smallest and oldest counties called La Paz. These are a couple stories that we like to publish because it attests that NB|AZ is a bank that deeply cares about community and its relationships. Elevate AZ inspires, motivates and fortifies the process of building relationships.

Taste of the Biltmore

The goal for last year's Taste of the Biltmore was 1,000 guests and 20 participating restaurants but we overdelivered with over 1,200 guests and more than $20,000 in charity donations, in only three hours. Since 2007, the TOB event raised more than $95,617 for Valley charities. One of the most successful post was a Facebook video about 24 Carrots a local vegan restaurant. The post reached 9,081 people and had 43,167 total video views. Alongside of that, the video accumulated a total of 270 reactions - 155 likes, 124 shares, 51 loves, and 934 post clicks – surpassing anything we had planned it to be. The experience of 24 Carrots at Taste of the Biltmore was a delight to everyone who was able to join, and the online video was able to prove the success of the restaurant, along with what Taste of the Biltmore stands for in our community.


Media

Entrant Company / Organization Name

National Bank of Arizona

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Entry Credits