Monday 18 June 2012

Facebook Makes Organ Donors

"In April, influenced in part by conversations over dinner with his med-student girlfriend (now his wife), Zuckerberg decided that he should use social influence within Facebook to increase organ donor registrations. Users were given an opportunity to click a box on their Timeline pages to signal that they were registered donors, which triggered a notification to their friends. The new feature started a cascade of social pressure, and organ donor enrollment increased by a factor of 23 across 44 states."


Source: http://www.technologyreview.com/featured-story/428150/what-facebook-knows/?a=f

Thursday 14 June 2012

7-Eleven's Vcom self-service banking


7-Eleven have Vcom ('virtual commerce') self service machines in thousands of stores in the US. These offer cash, paying in cheques and transferring money for many banks, cheques cashing, etc.

7-Eleven first began exploring the idea of expanding its financial services in 1994. It already offered some financial services, including ATMs and money orders. Its original effort, involving manned centers, generated positive results, with an incremental lift in sales at the 25 Texas locations where it was offered. However, it was too expensive to staff the centers.

7-Eleven began working with NCR in 1998 and created a kiosk that offered money orders and money transfers as well as standard ATM transactions. The original kiosks, which were an unwieldy 9 feet long, were installed in 37 stores in Austin, Texas. The two companies refined the kiosks, shrinking them to 5 feet, before adding them to another 57 locations in Texas and Florida. In July of 2001, check cashing was added.

Offered through 7-Eleven partner Certegy, check cashing has become Vcom's "killer app". By 2002, approximately 12,000 checks were cashed each month at the first 94 locations.

The key business drivers are the ATM surcharge and check cashing. The others are opportunities for incremental revenue.

Not clear what the full current range of services are - could investigate further.

Image source: http://www.atmmarketplace.com/article/136346/7-Eleven-s-Vcom-wins-raves-at-RD
Info: Richard Watson's article in Fast Company, here
Interview in article on ATM Market place, here

Monday 11 June 2012

Stanford's Behaviour Grid and Wizard

BJ Fogg, Director of the Persuasive Tech Lab at Stanford University, has an interesting grid to help analyse behaviour changes you might want:

They also have an online 'Behaviour Wizard' web site to select the behaviour change you want and advise on appropriate strategies:
http://www.behaviorwizard.org