What Shipped: Issue 14, 2020
Future Super is a superannuation fund that helps people use the power of their money to build a future worth retiring into. We’re building our product and brand in-house and documenting what we learn in the process.
Here’s what we’ve been up to in the past few weeks:
- Socials, Publishing Tools
We’re finally at a place with our brand and socials strategy that it makes sense for us to (finally) start using a tool that will help us make the execution side of our work easier. - Design, Testing type
Shouting less, more meaningful messaging. - Building a brand that moves people from apathy to action
Supercharging the member experience so that we’re building an army of changemakers.
Socials, Publishing Tools
When I (Mariela, hey!) started at Future Super mid-last year, we had a HootSuite account that no one was using but was costing us an eye-watering amount every year. I, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and desperate to prove myself, was adamant that I didn’t need social media software to help me do my job. I wanted to get in there, get my hands dirty, and get to know our communities through each of our social platforms — natively.
As a one-person show for Future Super’s socials, it’s worked pretty well for us so far. Getting straight into the idiosyncrasies of our channels and our audiences helped me get a feel for our community, what resonates with them, and how they use the platforms — without the dilution of seeing it through a third-party software. I felt well equipped to strategise and execute content for our campaigns, to amplify the work and voices of our community, and to even get a bit of rogue creative live every now and then.
Fast forward a lot of growth (for me and for Future Super’s social presence) to now, and something’s changed. After working with an external consultant on our social media strategy, I felt ready and full of momentum to up level our social media game; and I knew a big part of that would rely on me being able to focus my time and attention on the big ideas and the strategy — not trying to remember to on Instagram after 5pm to aim for #primetime.
Enter: the quest to find a social media software that would be most beneficial to me and my needs.
What was I looking for? I knew I didn’t want or need all the bells and whistles that so many third-party platforms come with these days. I didn’t need ‘AI listening’, or want quantified sentiment metrics, I didn’t even really see the need for being able to store up to 2000 drafts in my queue at any one time. I wanted the bare bones: pre-scheduled publishing that would keep the formatting, allow for all kinds of content posting, and a sprinkling of key analytics.
Identifying those parameters made the afternoon I had set aside for research fly by: I knew what I was looking for, and anything that went way above or fell way below that I left by the wayside. I was left with two options to trial: Publer and Buffer.
Having now spent two weeks on each platform, next week I will be presenting back to the team my reflections and recommendation on which platform to proceed with.
(Sneak peek: I’ll be putting forward Buffer. The option for businesses to combine their Publish and Analyze tools is already enticing; the interface is easy to navigate and super intuitive; and also you can post carousels onto Instagram — something you can’t do on Publer — which is pretty important for us.)
— Mariela
Design, Testing type
We have tested a lot of things in the past couple of weeks. Moving quickly means I’m able to try out a lot of things without being too precious. After all, we’re testing things to make the brand better. With that in mind i’ve been thinking a lot about the role of typography in our brand. Being language led means a lot of our brand expression hinges on the things we say. And believe me, we have a lot to say.
As we’ve been testing I’ve noticed a trend emerging. We shout, a lot. It’s something I picked up on quite early in my time here but sort of forgot about as we pushed forward. For some of the things we say it’s perfect. For others it feels too aggressive. Creating a framework for how we apply our typography will help add some much needed pace and rhythm to how we communicate the broad range of things we have to say as a brand. It’s loose as, but maybe something like this will help to guide us.
The broader and more daunting question (cover your eyes rest of the team) is whether the typefaces we have go far enough in communicating our perspective in the clearest possible way.
— Nick
Building a brand that moves people from apathy to action
One of my favourite things about Future Super is that we’re not just building a ‘one and done’ experience for members. Yes, we want as many people to join Future Super as possible. But the better we make the experience, and the more ways we give people to build their own knowledge of the power of their money and their influence in the world, the better off we (and they!) are.
Back at the end of last year we were working on cracking the ‘how to make super interesting’ nut. We’ve made good headway on that, and we’re speaking more and more about collective action based on what’s resonating with users, as we’ve written about before. Our focus now is on — how do we think about building advocates who are informed, powerful changemakers. Some of the tests we’ve run on that front:
- Impact wrapped — showing people the collective impact of the decision they’ve made. People switching their super aren’t acting alone, but it’s tough to feel that way when you’re behind a screen feeling powerless about the state of the world. So far we’ve gotten positive qualitative feedback on this — we’ll see how we go when it’s released into the world next week.
- Breakup letter — One of the most exciting things to come out of last week was results from a test we ran inviting new members to write a ‘breakup letter’ to their old super fund. This helps people make their voice heard and could help drive change in big funds. The more they hear from members leaving, the more likely they are to make changes to how they invest (we’ve seen this happen as a direct result of Future Super members leaving funds before).
We’re talking about meeaaatyyyy issues. Climate change, retirement, investing, collective action — any one of those things would be a challenge to tackle on its own, but all together? Yeehaw.
THE THING IS. There is an OCEAN of difference between tracking your individual carbon footprint, recycling, etc, and banding together and advocating for systems change and driving it with people power.
We want to continue to build awareness that this is about collective action and not just get people to switch their super on their own, but continue to grow their knowledge, their influence, and their impact by become vocal, active changemakers — even after they join Future Super. That has implications for how we design our communications and member experience.
Next week we’ll be spending a little bit of time teasing out the following in our brand strategy, to reflect the journey from apathy to action:
- How do we continue to tell a story of driving systems change, not just hoping for spare / small change? This is one of the more emotive drivers we have — which is important because money and policy can appear to be dry and boring (they’re not!)
- How do we help put tools in people’s hands for leading change? Like the breakup letter, and the‘We’re Out’ letter to the fossil fuel industry, we want to be constantly looking ways for people to increase their impact — even after they become members.
- How do we help people see the state of the future through the lens of now? The future is abstract, and so is carbon counting. How do we help people see the progress that is being made — and spur people on to invite others to join and drive bigger change, faster, together.
Big change, big questions, big fun. Stay tuned for what we learn as we go.
— Amanda
