Our Work


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RBC Royal Bank - Next Great Innovator Challenge

How do you plan and build out the next generation of banking products and services for an increasingly empowered yet cynical consumer base of young adults?

RBC Royal Bank’s Innovation team came to Delvinia with a head scratcher: How do you plan and build out the next generation of banking products and services for an increasingly empowered yet cynical consumer base of young adults? This audience, and business students in particular, has specific needs, and RBC needed a new way to meet those needs.

Insight

Delvinia began by conducting stakeholder interviews to flesh out the objectives of the RBC client. We then complemented this learning by drawing on existing Delvinia knowledge of the youth market and higher education garnered through profiling surveys against our proprietary AskingCanadians panel and past engagements with Richard Ivey School of Business.

Strategy

The RBC Next Great Innovator competition was conceived to gain insights into what innovations young adults wanted to see in banking within the next 30 years. Delvinia developed a comprehensive program incorporating social media with a cutting-edge website and content to engage participants throughout the competition’s six-month time frame. Project components included a Virtual Agent (avatar)-hosted key information guide, a competition blog (with RSS), teaser-based video presentation and SMS and Mobile Text Alerts.

Action

Delvinia developed the Next Great Innovator website for RBC and the students flocked to it. Not only did they tell us what they thought would happen tomorrow, they spoke about what they wanted today.
In the first year, the Challenge saw 269 registered and validated teams, representing 538% of the program target of 50 participants. The competition also experienced the following successes:

  • 927 registered students participated in the competition
  • The competition blog had, on average, 200 weekly unique visitors
  • 45 Canadian universities were represented in total registered teams (only 18 universities were actively marketed to), indicating that more than half of the registered teams are the result of viral communications
  • Competition interest was positive as university students outside of business faculties (the key target) registered teams

The Challenge was topic of interest and conversation across international blogs, with positive opinion and discussion, and the entries yielded other online initiatives that RBC has since put into place. The program was so successful that RBC elected to continue running it for several years thereafter.

Recognition

The program has received the following awards and recognition:
Honoured by the Web Marketing Association in the WebAward Competition with a Standard of Excellence Award.