More than a year ago, Leonard Koningswijk wrote on Frankwatching that banks are not using the possibilities of crowdsourcing . However, there are Dutch banks that are experimenting with it, for example by developing services together with their target group. ASN Bank goes one step further: they even develop their policy together with their community. Out of personal interest, I spoke to Simone Lopulisa, online marketer at ASN Bank.
ASN Bank is a sustainable bank with a missio
Through the online community ‘ Voordewereldvanmorgen.nl ‘ more than 52,000 members were able to participate in latvia phone number list two crowdsourcing projects. From July to September 201’1 the human rights policy was crowdsourced, the climate policy from August to October 2012. In September 2013 the new issue paper ‘Climate of the ASN Bank’ will be presented: it contains the climate criteria that the ASN Bank uses for its investments.
Why did ASN Bank choose crowdsourcing to create its policy? “We believe that policy is more solid if it is created together: no ivory towers, but working together for better policy,” says Simone. “That is why we chose a different approach when reviewing the human rights policy and the climate policy: crowdsourcing.”
It was important for the bank to start crowdsourcing with the aim of actually being able to work with the results. Simone: “Each message received a response from the responsible sustainability policy advisor. We provided frameworks in advance to actually be able to work with the responses. So we are not going to crowdsource clean email for the sake of crowdsourcing: responses are taken seriously and we are going to work with them. We believe that together we can make better policy.”
How did you approach crowdsourcing human rights policy?
“Through our community, we broke down the human rights policy into 4 sustainable themes that our clients belga news agency and online newspapers chose: fair trade, against child labor, against arms trade, and sustainable energy,” says Simone. “These topics were discussed through comments on the blogs. There were 115 substantive comments in total.”