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about me
I'm William Azaroff. I direct Online Strategy & Community Engagement at Vancity, Canada's largest credit union.

My opinions and views are just that, and don't reflect the views of my employer (or, perhaps, anyone else).

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The last day to vote in The Webbys.

A great article in the local daily 24 Hours today about ChangeEverything.ca (below). Today is the last day to vote for The Webbys. If you haven't already, please take a moment to do so now.

Thanks!

UPDATE: The writer seems to have spelled Kate's name wrong in the article. For the record, it is Kate Dugas.

Labels: banking, changeeverything, credit union, news, vancity, webbys

posted on Wednesday, April 30, 2008

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Vancity is carbon neutral.

There are so many reasons why I love working at Vancity, and now I have another really big one.

We announced today, after having it externally audited and verified, that as of December 31, 2007 Vancity is offically carbon neutral. In fact, we are the first North American financial institution to become carbon neutral.

So what does that mean?

It means we've tracked our footprint to assess the amount of carbon we emit.

Then we focused on reducing our emissions as much as we possibly could.

And finally, whatever carbon emissions we could not reduce, we purchased high quality local offsets to bring us to carbon neutrality.

This is a huge accomplishment and has been a major focus of the company for quite some time. In fact, we achieved our goal a full two years ahead of schedule by getting our employees across the organization involved and engaged in the issue.

A truly great announcement, and I imagine we'll garner quite a bit of press coverage about it.

I especially love our new limited-time carbon neutral logo on the website.

Labels: corporate responsibility, credit union, environment, innovation, news, vancity

posted on Wednesday, April 09, 2008

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ChangeEverything.ca is a 2007 Digital Marketing Award winner.

I am so pleased to learn that ChangeEverything.ca won a Certificate at the 2007 Digital Marketing Awards in the category of Website: Financial services.

The category is described as "Any site designed to promote banks, trusts, co-ops, investment brands, insurance, etc."

The awards as a whole are described this way:

The Digital Marketing Awards represents the best of interactive marketing in Canada. The awards are produced by Marketing magazine, and judged by the industry. The mandate of the DMAs is to inspire many by rewarding few. Those few will be chosen for their innovation and creativity, and for leveraging the interactive environment to it's full potential.

The jury is impressive, and includes my friend Michael Seaton.

It's so nice to see ChangeEverything.ca doing good things in the community, while getting recognized by the industry. Feels good.

Labels: changeeverything, credit union, design, media, news, social media, socialsignal, user experience, vancity, web 2.0

posted on Sunday, October 07, 2007

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