How More Inclusive Communications Builds Customer Buy-In, Reaches Untapped Markets, & Creates Positive Impact Across Your Community
For over a decade, we’ve had the pleasure of collaborating with financial-inclusion focused organizations including community banks, Community Development Financial Institutions (CDFIs), and fintech companies who are serving the consumers, neighborhoods and communities that need it most.
For example, Spanish-speakers in the United States make up the fifth largest economy in the world on their own: so we support our clients through truly inclusive communications: original Spanish brand strategy, messaging, and copywriting.
Why?
We treat social justice as a process and an outcome, rather than a theory or idea. Our human-centered approach to storytelling focuses on the communities most impacted by telling their stories, sharing their experiences, and communicating in their language preferences first. We have an inherently diverse, women-led team that includes people who are actually from the neighborhoods our clients are serving and speak the languages that their customers do, so that we’re never talking down to but rather being in conversation with. And while we love the convenience and ease of new technologies, we don’t use AI to write any of our content because: it generates a LOT of factually incorrect articles; it’s completely unregulated; and it’s inherently exclusionary.
Take a look at how we’ve helped these organizations shake up the financial industry—a space that’s often seen as exclusive and mysterious—by making it more accessible and transparent:
Spring Bank
Spring Bank is truly special: they’re the first bank to headquarter in the South Bronx in 25 years and were the first B Corp Bank in New York State. Spring Bank has been pursuing a double bottom line long before it was trendy by offering transparent, affordable banking products and services in NYC neighborhoods where the use of high-cost fringe financial products like check cashing and money transmitters is more the norm than the exception.
We manage their top-to-bottom organic content strategy with a heavy production schedule: monthly storytelling blog posts inclusive of client and staff storytelling, SEO “micro-blogs,” organic social, email, product branding and campaign development for new products like their unique E-Bike Loan NYC, plus support with any and all emergent communication needs (as we do for all clients). We also manage multi-location branded photo shoots of their staff and clients to support their storytelling and keep their community at the forefront of all their channels.
Ariva
“Ariva is one of the best-kept secrets in NYC that everyone needs to know about. Whether you need help getting your finances in order, understanding how the U.S. financial system works, or need someone who is safe, trustworthy, empathetic, and really has your best interests in mind, Ariva is there for you. When you walk in their doors, you join their community.” – Julie Fahnestock, B Storytelling Founder & Creative Director
Ariva provides free tax preparation and financial counseling to help residents of New York City build financially-empowered and prosperous lives. We’ve helped them build and retain their community through inclusive communications in both English and Spanish across social media, text message, email, campaign planning and blogs. Not only that, but we completed a full website redesign in 2020, alongside a major campaign for the 2020 Census. Then we did it again (this time in Spanish) in 2022, while simultaneously making a huge push for both staff and volunteer recruitment during a moment of big expansion for them.
We also developed a top-to-bottom digital volunteer training program for Ariva so that they could easily pivot from exclusively in-person tax prep services to remote and hybrid offerings at the height of the pandemic—which has since become their standard practice.
Community Capital New York
“We developed an entirely unique vocabulary that gave both our client and our client’s customers the sense of security that they were literally speaking the same language. It took the Hispanic Advisory Board, direct interviews with their customers, and a strong review process to get there. It was beautiful to see a brand with so many Spanish-speaking clients actually share quality content for them to succeed. We’re proud to have given CCNY the tools to approach and retain a market they were missing.” – Marcela Ahumada, our partner for Spanish content creation
Community Capital New York is a nonprofit lender providing capital to small businesses throughout the Hudson Valley and affordable housing developers across New York State, creating pathways to social justice, wealth-building, and resilient neighborhoods, with a special focus on Black and Hispanic-owned businesses, women, veterans, people from rural areas, entrepreneurs with lower incomes, and nonprofit affordable housing developers.
We’re proud to have stewarded them through a complete English and Spanish rebrand, product branding, website redesign in both English and Spanish, inclusive of discovery, creative direction, project management, and CRM solution support and integration, as well as the creation and management of an Hispanic Advisory Board to ensure our bilingual communications aligned with the needs of a Spanish-speaking demographic from multiple countries with diverse financial demands.
We additionally developed and executed on a bilingual, SEO-driven organic content strategy to drive business growth, as well as promoted new product suites and built relationships through partner co-branding opportunities.
Qualitas of Life Foundation
We’re thrilled to announce our latest partnership in the finance space with Qualitas of Life Foundation! Qualitas of Life Foundation is a nonprofit that provides financial education to Hispanic families and entrepreneurs to improve financial security and standard of living.
We’re looking forward to creating core brand Spanish and English messaging and key story anchors which drive toward and achieve their unique business and mission goals. This relationship is extra special because Qualitas of Life Foundation marks their 15th anniversary this year.
Happy Mango
Happy Mango provides an online platform for banks, credit unions, & nonprofit organizations to help them serve the financial needs of individuals and small businesses who need it most—so that we all have a shot at a better financial future. Their front-to-back digitalization is a plug-and-play solution for a huge range of banking products and services, and they provide unique offerings like alternative credit reporting, employer and community partnerships, and financial coaching tips and tools.
We supported Happy Mango’s entry into marketing with a light-touch brand assessment to determine their brand voice, personality, and primary call to action. Next, we developed an organic content strategy and campaign to repurpose all of their fantastic press coverage and help them build—and sustain—an online community across four major social media channels. We also created and maintained their editorial calendar and content management system so that they’d have a full library of images and messages to pull from and execute on.
Because we’re so familiar with the finance space, we’re extremely comfortable with the necessary internal compliance reviews required, and have developed systems to make the editing process as smooth, seamless, and efficient as possible for our clients. (We know you have enough to do building a more equitable world for all of us!)
But we’re most proud of how we work to develop and maintain brands that walk their talk. We root all of our work in social and economic justice, collaborating with our clients’ internal and external stakeholders to build brands and communication strategies that actively shift culture.
B Storytelling is registered as one of Florida’s first Benefit Corporations so that our ethics and principles are literally built into the fabric and foundation of our organization.
We get it. And we’re willing to bet that if you’re here, you do, too.
If you’re ready to fuse your impact and culture goals with your business and bottom-line goals, we’re here to make it happen. Get in touch – we can’t wait to hear from you.