In May 2023, the bank committed SGD 1 billion, alongside mobilising the bank’s employees to contribute 1.5 million volunteering hours, over the next decade to empower vulnerable segments to be more socially and financially resilient.
With ageing populations on the rise across our six core markets in Asia (Singapore, Indonesia, India, China, Hong Kong and Taiwan), the bank zoomed in on efforts that tackle pressing ageing challenges, particularly among vulnerable segments. This includes working with DBS Foundation to launch programmes that provide essential needs and foster digital and financial inclusion as well as supporting purpose-driven businesses to catalyse impact in our focus areas.
DBS’ multigenerational workforce plays a key role in contributing their time or/and skills to support our social impact programmes. Known as DBS People of Purpose, employees embody our purpose-driven DNA when they volunteer after work hours to create impact beyond banking.
We conceptualised the DBS After Hours content series to highlight stories of purpose-driven employees who support the bank’s mission to create impact, especially in addressing ageing-related needs in our markets.
Below are the goals we set out to achieve through DBS After Hours:
When we launched DBS After Hours, our key strategy was to tap on the unique selling points of our content series to engage internal and external stakeholders, by:
Strategy Execution
Departing from conventional communication approaches to social impact programmes – which often involves publishing ‘matter of fact’ announcement posts on employees’ participation and what the programmes entail – we focused on crafting a brand and narrative style that incorporates ethnographic storytelling methods in our multi-photo posts and videos.
Each multi-photo post within the series was written in third-person narration to provide a voice to both volunteer and beneficiary profiles while immersing readers in the location where programmes are held. We developed a common story arc that highlights an ageing/social issue faced by a vulnerable segment, how our programmes help catalyse impact and how our employees contribute their time or/and skills to support our cause.
For our cinematic video series, we employed a first-person narrative style as we found that empathetic storytelling – such as relating the employees’ personal stories to their motivation to volunteer – are more relatable to audiences who enjoy watching content on the ‘hero journey’.
Our content pieces were adapted to strategically engage the consumption behaviour of target audiences in each platform. For instance, on LinkedIn, catering to a more career-focused audience, we incorporated employees’ corporate headshots to showcase the impact our employees make during and after office hours.
To better engage employees on our internal platforms, we built a repository of profiles from different departments to build departmental pride and foster healthy competition to drive volunteer sign-ups.
As our stories are adapted across different platforms, the visual style in our content series follows a strict branding guideline to ensure consistency, intentionally building recall and brand association with internal and external audiences.
We closely monitored each post’s performance, leveraging insights to enhance the performance of subsequent stories. This ensured that our content was attuned to the evolving sentiments on the ground and were grounded in empathy to build strong connections with our customers.
Through data insights, we experimented with different storytelling formats. In 2025, we launched a new, short-form video series called ‘Debunking volunteering myths’ to drive video views instead. Unlike its cinematic video storytelling predecessor, the ‘vox-pop’ format is easy-to-consume and more current to the watching trends of young audiences, especially those on TikTok.
[Additional confidential statistics on how we met our goals are provided in our supporting document]
DBS After Hours, launched in August 2023, aimed to achieve three key objectives. The initiative has successfully positioned DBS as a trusted and purpose-driven organisation, evidenced by increased public engagement and positive feedback on social media content. Furthermore, it has fostered a stronger sense of pride among employees and significantly boosted volunteering efforts within the company.
