Portarlington and Drysdale Community Branches launch innovative video series

Innovation can deliver significant rewards. But in the business world innovation can be tricky. Innovation can be risky and expensive. Innovation can be a hard sell.

In order to innovate, imagination is often required. It needs good planning, a certain amount of luck, a lot of thought and consideration, and often a team effort.

Innovation can take different forms in different businesses and industries. Something that may be standard practice in one industry may be radically forward thinking in another. Some businesses and industries are extremely trend focused and must move with the times. They need to be very quick and nimble or risk irrelevance. Others on the other hand, can be bound by conservatism.

Businesses and industries holding positions of responsibility and/or authority tend to be risk averse and can be overly cautious. Often, this is justified as these industries need to take responsibility for those they represent and the customers with whom they engage. Many times, however, risk averse attitudes and cautious positioning prevent innovation that other industries have embraced.

The Portarlington and Drysdale Community Branches take their responsibility very seriously. Not only are they a financial institution, they are also a community focused organisation bringing a host of benefits to Portarlington, Drysdale and surrounds. Their very existence, however, is innovative. The banking model that allows Portarlington and Drysdale Community Branches to exist brings direct benefits to the community and is anything but conservative in a world of finance and banking; a world that epitomises conservative business. In a new innovative step, Portarlington and Drysdale Community Branches have launched a new campaign to further support the communities that they operate within. The campaign is executed via the creation of upbeat and engaging video which is published via social media. The video features a range of activities, events, and other projects from around Portarlington and Drysdale.

The Community Branches approached The Tribe toward the end of 2019 to provide digital consulting and video production expertise to enable the campaign. The Tribe advised the branches and presented a digital strategy. The strategy was quickly adopted by the board and management, and execution began in late 2019. Under the plan, the branches established a Facebook page and an Instagram account. The Tribe, in conjunction with the social media team at the branches, launched a campaign that saw The Tribe’s crew attend various functions in the community, such as celebrations of key milestones, openings of new playgrounds, launching of the mussel festival and sporting club celebrations, amongst a host of other similar events.

The Tribe now produces video highlights packages from each event. The work is professionally shot and produced, before being quickly turned around via a broadcast styled editing process. This enables the publication via Facebook and Instagram to happen within hours of the event. The social media team at the branches, in conjunction with the advice as delivered and designed by The Tribe Digital Consulting, plans for which events we will attend along with when and how we will publish the video.

The video not only allows the branches to share with the public some of the recent activity, but it also enables the gathering of a professionally shot video library of these events. A library that forms an historic archive of the events as they occurred. It also creates significant value for the partners that the branches support. For example, in the case of a sporting club receiving funds to enable them to extend a club room or repair a sporting field, the video package serves that club by allowing them to share the video packaging via their social media – telling the world of their new facilities, assisting them to consolidate current memberships and potentially grow, via the positive perception gained from the exposure.

This campaign, along with ongoing efforts within the community, serves as evidence that the innovation displayed from the outset that saw the Portarlington and Drysdale Community Branches become a reality continues today.

The success of the Portarlington and Drysdale Community Branches is an example of effective innovation.

At the Tribe, we salute branches efforts and are proud to be involved with their continuing innovation.