Voters in the Township of Langley might care about taxes, development, urban/rural tension, transportation or amalgamation but in the end the election in The Township of Langley was about one very stupid thing: eight councillors and one mayor who couldn’t even try to work together. The result? Voters chose to keep the councillors and dump the mayor.

Please Don’t Try To Make Me Care About Something That Doesn’t Matter

For three years citizens of Langley have had to endure a pointless adolescent drama in which veteran councillors couldn’t hide their resentment of an abrasive interloping mayor and a mayor who couldn’t hide his low opinion of clubby, comfortable councillors. Despite countless headlines, criminal investigations, petty punishments, bitchy soundbites and – sigh – lawyers I have yet to see a satisfactory explanation about (a) why any of this occurred, and (b) why any citizen should care. Slap fights about nothing have made Langley politics momentarily interesting for bored media types, but it still couldn’t push voter turnout past 25%.

Incredibly the Mayor seemed to focus his entire campaign on a dispute that mattered to only the fragile egos on council and the most hopelessly partisan voter. Even more incredibly he persuaded seven otherwise intelligent individuals to fight his fight with him by forming the dumbest oxymoron in BC civic politics, the “slate of independents”. They were the only slate of candidates in the Township and they all lost.

I can’t emphasize how quixotic the whole thing was: instead of racing away from the one thing that made him a symbol for all things unpleasant he forced voters to support him based on an irrelevant, incoherent argument that mattered not one whit to any citizen not related to him by blood. Oh, and it was also an argument that he had been losing for three years.*

Seriously, BC Politicians: Just Stay Away From Brown Envelopes

The coup de grace may have occurred right smack-dab in the middle of the campaign: after some weird Nixonan shenangigans involving an envelope supposedly swiped right from the mayor’s office the mayor earned himself a whole lot of very bad press, predictably declining to take the high road in response. Councillors, smelling blood, gleefully poked at him with a sharp stick instead of sitting back like adults and letting voters decide the thing a mere four weeks later.

This Is Going To Get Ugly

Of course, voters did decide the thing, and now we have a shiny new mayor, a couple of new councillors, and the same host of issues: taxes, development, urban/rural tension, transportation and amalgamation. In the next ten years Langley’s going to get hit by a bus: intense pressure for development and growth as the region starts to bulge eastward (in a town with 80% of its land in the ALR), a tricky regional transportation situation** in a high-commuting community, increasing demand for sophisticated city services, a once-sure policing contract that’s starting to look a little wobbly and a potentially effective, long-overdue grassroots initiaitve to merge the Township with the City.

Council probably needs a few more energetic, urban-oriented technocrats with well-informed ideas as it completes the transition from commuting exurb to fully-integrated suburb. @michellesparrow might be an interesting start: strong social media tendencies with a slight earth-motherish bent (but slow-loading, all-Flash sites suck, Michelle).

Three Minor Notes

• After this fiasco two short years ago the good citizens of Langley have decided that, for the most part, their Board of Education is doing just fine. Huh.
• The good folks running the Twitter feed and website at the Township offices are trying hard. I don’t think they’ve quite mastered the whole two-way conversational thing (seriously, it’s supposed to be social, guys)  and the “watch the webstream for results” probably sounded cooler in theory than it worked in practice (try this elegant approach next time, Township friends), but they’re trying, and that’s good. It’s a start.
• I got much quicker results from on-the-spot citizens on the ol’ Twitter stream today than I did from any of the major news outlets. Hooray for Twitter.

* It’s simple, really: when a group of councillors get in a fight the headlines say “Councillors get in fight”; when the mayor gets in a fight it says “Mayor <name> gets in fight”. After two years in Langley I had no idea who the incumbent councillors were – the ballot didn’t indicate who was an incumbent so I may even have voted for a few of them by accident – but I sure as heck know which mayoralty candidate seems to be a basket of bad news.

** A question for the incumbent councillors: when you punished the Mayor for his various transgressions by removing him from a bunch of regional committees you justified this as being good for the citizens of Langley how exactly?

Willowbrook attracts the maximum amount of traffic because it’s not only one of the largest shopping areas in the province but also because it is the major north/south thoroughfare through Langley for commuting traffic. And – this is what really makes this area special – it is intersected by a high-frequency at-grade rail line along which travel kilometre-long coal trains. Daily. During rush hour.

I’ve tried to identify some sort of overall vehicular vision for Willowbrook and I can’t do it. Its road systems put the maximum number of vehicles in the smallest stretch of road, like some sort of perverse ongoing Guinness Book of World Records stunt. Its traffic lights are coordinated perfectly to tease drivers into the middle of busy intersections and then leave them there. Escape routes for the more strategic (and irresponsible) drivers lead through kid-saturated, elementary-school-laden residential neighbourhoods.

There is no good method or route or time to travel to, from or through Willowbrook that doesn’t involve, at minimum, teleportation. If urban planners knock suburban living because it creates an existence around the automobile they’ll realize that some suburbs weren’t even designed for automobiles when they try to get from North Langley to Brookswood during a rush hour.

Willowbrook isn’t just charmless, it’s anti-charm. The big box stores look like big boxes, except with less pleasant faades. The landscaping that breaks up the acres and acres of empty concrete includes plant species bred especially for their resilience to exhaust, potato chip wrappers and beauty. Road systems within the parking lots are disorienting.

There are sidewalks. Quite a few, actually. And they’re empty. Public transit is effectively non-existent in Willowbrook so if you’re walking it’s because you’ve decided to park at one strip mall and walk to the next one. That makes sense right up until you realize that the intersections are huge and treacherous and the distances are daunting. As you walk you breathe the exhaust of all those cars idling next to you. One significant shopping stretch – the Bypass – doesn’t have sidewalks between malls. Most retail businesses are oriented inwards, away from the roads and sidewalks and towards the acres of mostly empty concrete.

The “pedestrian” isn’t just an abstraction in the Township’s major shopping area: he’s an enemy.

Look, I like the suburbs. It’s why I live here. But there has to be a better way to design a shopping area and urban centre than what’s occured in Willowbrook. The Wife and I drive longer distances to South Surrey to shop – that’s tax revenue leaving the Township, by the way – just to avoid aging twenty years trying to get to and from Willowbrook.

I wonder whether the Township traded a properly designed shopping area and urban centre for a near-instant commercial tax base. At best the Township started something and it just kind of got away from them.

At least they can’t avoid the problem: City Hall is located smack-dab in the middle of this mess.

I did not leave Costco empty handed, however: not only did I buy a Griswoldian six boxes of Christmas lights but I experienced two things while I wandered that made me wonder whether a trip to Costco can help you see into the future.

Future experience one: as I strolled past the 6 pallets of sets of 25 pre-dulled kitchen knives I heard stilted dialogue coming from tinny, cheap speakers. I looked down to see a little boy, about three years old, sitting in the cargo area of a Costco shopping cart watching an animated movie on a small handheld device while his mother inspected a small deep freeze ($899). My reaction was as follows:

1. A mother is in a store with a conucopia of visual and intellectual stimuli and yet has deliberately created a situation where e attention of her child is dominated by an electronic device.
2. The mother does not seem interested in competing for the attention of her child.
3. The child does not seem interested in anything except what is projecting from the 2.5 inch screen in front of him.
4. If The Wife saw this she would comment loudly and critically about the parenting aptitude of the mother, the bleak intellectual future awaiting the child, and the decline in society’s child-rearing standards generally. We would then agree with each other that we would never raise a child that way, in the vehement manner of all couples who do not have children.
5. Why does speaker sound quality lag so far behind picture quality on hand-held devices?
6. The exotic, graceful curves of feline facial bone structure is one of the things that make them… cats. Why, then, do animators insist on drawing round faces for cats?

What didn’t occur to me until the next aisle is how ho-hum it seems that a child can watch a full-length, commercially produced movie – in better resolution than we would have experienced at the turn of the century on our TVs, by the way – on a device he can hold comfortably in his hand in the middle of a store. And nobody – except The Wife – finds this strange at all.

This started a train of thought that lasted until I spotted that 9000 Watt gas generator two aisles over: why is it that even though we are clearly living in the future it doesn’t seem very futuristic?

Obviously the future creeps up on gradually: we’re the frog in the slow-boiling pot of water. But futurists like to present a future world where everything progressed at the same rate, and that’s not what happens. That kid was watching his computer generated movie on a neato Jetsony thingamabob while he sat in a piece of technology – the shopping cart – that hasn’t seen a single important advancement in 50 years, in an environment that would be both absolutely foreign and completely familiar to ancient Greek philosophers. We get some of the future now and some of it later, and sometimes we don’t get it at all.

Aside: This is one of the reasons why I think Minority Report is the current go-to movie about the future. The famous overhead tracking shot in the apartment building shows a future world with a particularly honest combination of current world realities (basic architectural forms and household items, earthy human relationships) and powerful future technology (creepy spidery eyeball-scanning things). For all their power the future things must still compromise with a world that isn’t nearly as advanced as they are.

Future experience two: Costco might be one of the great canary-in-the-coalmine type places to identify items that are on their way to pure commoditization. I had this thought when I stumbled upon four pallets of pre-designed, pre-packaged tile backsplash. The Wife and I are habitual renovators who have done our share of kitchen and bathroom renovations, and we know about backsplashes in more profound ways than Kardashians know about professional athletes.

It used to be that when you wanted to create a tile backsplash you bought a bunch of tile and then painstakingly spaced them out on the wall, using plenty of mortar to get them to stick and spacing them evenly with little plastic pegs. At my house this meant a backsplash that looked like the your kitchen was listing to the left and melting in the middle.

Awhile back a very smart person took a bunch of tiles of different shapes, colours and sizes and pre-spaced them in a pattern on a 9-inch square piece of mesh. As a renovator all you had to do was pick your pattern and match the patterns in the squares of mesh together, then mortar them together on the wall. Voila: a pretty slick looking backsplash.

This change didn’t immediately change the backsplash business in the sense that you still went to a tile place or the tile section of a hardware store to buy, (originally) your individual backsplash tiles and (later) your mesh squares of backsplash tiles.

You can see where this is going. Costco now sells a variety of pre-designed, pre-packaged, easy-to-install mesh squares of backsplash tile. Their selection isn’t wide (yet) but the ones they have look pretty good. Someone, somewhere has realized that you can not only mass produce mesh squares of backsplash tile, but you can also mass-package and mass-distribute them. Until today I had no idea that Costco would even be an option when The Wife inevitably decides to redo the kitchen.

This wouldn’t have worked as well when you had to design and build your own patterned backsplash. Back then you had to go to a place that could carry and display a wide variety of different types of tile. But once someone began pre-designing backsplash patterns based on House and Home and Martha Stewart display homes, and those patterns could be pre-built on mesh, the commoditization of tiled backsplashes picked up a lot of speed.

My encounter with the pre-built backsplashes altered the rest of my visit at Costco. I spent the next 20 minutes assessing the long-term viability of whole service industries and distribution channels just by seeing what Costco had on sale. It doesn’t apply to everything – I don’t think many people buy hot tubs at Costco ($2999.00) – but, gosh, it sure applied to a lot of things I had never considered before.

If I’m in the tile business I’m beginning to get a little worried. I’m beginning to ask myself what I can do to differentiate myself so that when someone needs to renovate their kitchen they’ll come to me, even though my prices are a little higher and my hours kinda suck and most consumers don’t really have the skill or time or inclination to design their own backsplash. Sure, I’ll keep the high-end types – and goodness knows they’re profitable – but my market share gets smaller and smaller while I figure out how to rewrite my vision statement to keep me in business for another 20 years.

As a banker all of these questions sound vaguely familiar. Costco doesn’t do banking now but for the life of me I don’t know why: it’s not like membership-based businesses can’t do banking.

The Money Belt was created because (according to the Government of Canada)… Many people — particularly young Canadians — lack good money skills. The Money Belt was specially created to give them the opportunity to:

• increase their financial knowledge, make informed decisions and avoid high levels of debt
• be aware of the choices that exist when choosing financial services or products, such as credit cards, loans or bank accounts
• discover the many benefits of being money savvy, such as developing good savings habits and taking steps to avoid being a victim of fraud
• learn how to avoid financial problems in the future by taking action now, and find out where to go for help

While I was trying to find the Money Belt online via Google (which wasn’t easy, which is not a good sign) I ran across another Government of Canada resource at youth.gc.ca, which is supposed to be a one-stop shop for all things “youth”, again defined awfully broadly at 15 to 30 years old. It includes a “Money” section in which there was no reference to the Money Belt initiative but contains some other useful information. But, hey, the Government of Canada is a pretty big enterprise, and the respective sites are run by different ministries, and I don’t really expect everybody there to know everybody else.

The Youth.gc.ca site includes a “locate a bank or credit union” section, which does no such thing, instead linking to some extremely boring profile sheets regarding the banking sector.

The credit union doesn’t exist any more (merger), and I’m assuming that Dandy Doodle was downsized or reassigned or works for the collections department now.

I was never entirely clear on the purpose of the Dandy Doodle program: it felt like this weird mix of a savings incentive program, and half-hearted education program, and ill-defined marketing program (Dandy Doodle would hand out candy at local parades, Dandy Doodle would make an appearance at branch openings, etc.). Kids seemed to like Dandy Doodle, and some parents would take the wooden coin-for-deposits exchange very seriously. But I doubt very much that anyone outside of the Doodle family is mourning for Dandy now.

Hide & Seek
I’ve been thinking of Dandy Doodle because a colleague and I were discussing FI youth programs yesterday, and particularly the sense that FIs think they need something for kids but that they’re not sure what. To get some background I looked around a bit online to see what other FIs were doing for kids.

Let me tell you, it’s an exercise in perseverance, imagination and luck just to find kids and youth programs or accounts on a big five website in Canada:

• CIBC puts a link to Kids and Students right on their homepage, and has additional resources for kids (including games) in a kids and students section. Good for them. They’re the only one of the big banks in Canada to have a full section for kids! I liked their allowance calculator, which lets kids calculate how many weeks of allowance they’re going to need to buy things (like a bicycle). The interface maybe needs a wee bit o’work, but the concept works.
• For RBC, ScotiaBank and TD Canada Trust I had to go to the Accounts section to find their Student and Youth accounts. RBC and ScotiaBank have precious names for their youth accounts but with no evidence of brand follow-through; TD Canada Trust calls their youth account the… wait for it… “Youth Account” (and they bury the eligibility requirements in a footnote).
• At BMO I had to… well, this was a complete washout. They have a full student microsite, and a youth “discount” plan for their accounts, which you’ll find when reading about the adult accounts. As far as I can tell, that’s it. I don’t think BMO likes kids very much.

The general tone seems to be that whoever’s looking for kids programs is really looking for accounts (first) and kids (second).

Credit Unions, Don’t Be Smug
I fully admit that my CU doesn’t look especially good in this respect. We have, until recently, run something called the “Youth In Action” program, with some information online. We placed it tellingly within the “community” section of the website, which means there was virtually no cross-over with any youth products and services or accounts we might have.  The program was centered around quarterly contests so we’d add information to our homepage and newsletters as necessary, and that’s about it. We’re retooling the program right now (which is why it’s top o’mind). We also don’t have a kids account per se, and bury youth account info on adult account pages. That’s a mistake that we’ll need to fix.

Other CUs have youth accounts (for the most part), but don’t really run kids programs (or if they do, they don’t put anything about ‘em online). Vancity, in their Vancity-ish way, runs a well-respected kids education program that looks like a component of their community initiatives.

One exception (there might be more): Nelson and District has a full microsite for their ZippityDoDog kids program, which looks like an updated equivalent to the lamented Dandy Doodle program.

Miscellania and Questions

• Most FIs offer youth accounts, of course, usually for 18 and unders, and generally service charge-free (or capped). It’s interesting that little distinction is made between a six year old and a sixteen year old on a product level.
• It’s also interesting that FIs have settled on the term “youth” to describe their programs for people under 18. That word always reminds me of earnest community activists (“we need more facilities for youth!”) and government reports (“youth crime is in decline”). It sounds too… clinical, but I have no clever alternatives to suggest, so I think we’re stuck with “youth”.
• Since we’re talking about words, I’m also surprised by the narrow understanding of the word “student” on FI websites.  When I was in high school I thought of myself as a student (so, uh, did my parents and teachers). But when I click on “student” I find it’s for university and college students. I’m not saying it’s wrong, but at the same time I’m not convinced it’s the right word.
• Some FIs seem a little confused between their “student accounts” and their “youth accounts”, and navigationally lump ‘em all together. If I was still a student (in the FI sense of the word) that would piss me off a bit.
• It appears that Canadian kids are presumed not to be doing their banking online, because there appears to be little or no resources for kids online. No calculators, games, or anything. In the States there appears to be a joint effort between some CUs to develop youth content through CUNA. The Googolplex initiative has finanical literacy sites for kids, pre-teens, and teens. I wonder if there’s an opportunity for Canadian CUs to cooperate in the same sort of way?
• The “Dandy Doodle” type of program seems dated to me, but it isn’t completely dead. It probably doesn’t cost much, doesn’t take up much time, and what’s the harm in keeping it around, right?
• It’s possible that the presence of kids programs is everywhere but online. Fair enough, I’m not walking into every FI branch to do this survey. But, man, basically nothing online? That seems strange to me.
• Kids are presumed to need savings accounts. And that’s it.
• How important is it to satisfy kids, and how important is it to satisfy parents? One minor example: should a “youth” section on a website include information regarding RESPs, which kids won’t care about at all but parents will? Both kids and parents might click on a link that says “kids and teens”, say, but they’ll be looking for two different things.
• When we talk about kids programs, we might be talking about FI-run education-centered initiatives, community-centered initiatives (probably also education focused), savings programs or full-on branding-marketing programs for kids and teen demographics. Is a successful kids program focused on one of those things, or all of those things?
• What would a kid-centered branding initiative look like? I know targeting kids for products or services is… well, maybe not unethical (I think the cereal companies clear-cut that ethical forest a couple of decades ago), but it still makes me a little queasy. Do we want kids to have the same relationship with their FI as their parents do?
• I’ve heard it suggested that the right people to target for kids accounts is grandparents when their grand-kids are aged 12. I’ve not seen any data around that, but that’s what I’ve heard.
• It’s been done to death, I know, but combining kids products with savings plans and savings calculators and “how to save tips” still seems like a good idea to me. As a citizen, I’m concerned about high debt levels. As an FI employee, I know we can help people save. I’m concerned that we may be directly responsible for not only creating a culture of credit but also for killing a culture of saving. I’d like us to get into the “we’ll help you save” business, which is why I like nifty little savings tools like ScotiaBank’s Bank The Rest savings program.
• One of the interesting differences between US and Canadian FIs when it comes to kids and youth: “saving for college” is an entire sub-set of the FI marketing and messaging in the US. Canadian students whine about their tuition (and everything else), but, gosh, it could be much worse.
• For programs to be successful they need to be managed. Day in, day out. Momentum needs to be maintained. Standards need to be enforced. Ideas and options need to be cultivated. My guess is that kids programs die because, once the creative is complete, they’re allowed to float. They get periodically rejuvenated when some young keener decides to overhaul the program and really make it work this time, and then that young keener gets promoted or frustrated and the program just sort of putters into the ground again. Kids programs, like all programs, need to be owned and managed to succeed, and that means attaching its success to someones review and bonus, I think.
• A successful program probably needs some ROI metric, and I doubt very much that anyone wants to attach an ROI metric to a kids program. Not only are we looking at a looooong time horizon, but what will we consider a success? Higher deposit balances into kids accounts? The next thing you know, we’ll be lobbying parents on behalf of kids for cost-of-living increases for allowances and to implement a “living-allowance” minimum for lawn-cutting and bedroom-cleaning.

Update August 29, 2008
Two things that I’ve seen just in the last day about this topic:

• Citizens Bank has launched their HockeyStars program, with a nice looking microsite. It’s not clear to me that this specifically targets kids, although when I poke around a bit it seems to. Still, a nice “value-add” to regular kids stuff from FIs, and I was especially impressed with the built-in incentives to open Citizens Bank accounts (hat tip Currency’s CU Brand Blog)
• CUNA runs a full kids education program in schools (similar, it looks like, to the Vancity program mentioned above).

I voted for them, not only because I’m a sucker for David (and Facebook, one of the other nominees, surely qualifies as a Goliath), but because it’s what social networking can do in the hands of normal people when they have a little time on their hands and a hankerin’ to do some good: help people.

Take a couple of minutes and register to vote.

For instance, because of our size I’m a specialist in terms of the banking organization (I’m the “web guy”!), but I’m a generalist in the web space – and that’s a big space. I manage (with one other able employee) our content (which is a full-time job), our design, our Online Banking service, our business online banking service, our web strategy, our corporate Intranet (which is its own little universe) and a myriad of other systems and projects.  I’m not complaining at all; I like the variety and experience. But it does force us to be very organized and to priortize ruthlessly.

The key for us is focus: do your homework, create a strategy, and stick to it. Build into the strategy the ability to incorporate unexpected developments and events, but don’t take your eye off the end goal. Always maintain momentum somewhere (stasis is our enemy, because it’s self-perpetuating). And recognize -and don’t spend a lot of time lamenting – the sacrifices we have to make.

For us, our strategy has meant sacrificing innovation.  The pressure to innovate is almost overwhelming but we’re maintaining our focus on doing the best we have with what we have right now.  Innovation will come from necessity: we’ll be forced to innovate when we’ve maxed out our existing tools (which has already begun). So, strange as it may sound, we’re concentrating – strategically – on maxing out our existing tools.

That’s because built into our strategy (it’s a three year strategy) is the knowledge that we have to build our skill sets internally.  So the idea is not only to create a solid foundation of features and processes for our members, but also to spend the time it takes doing that learning. By the end of the three years (which theoretically will be at the end of 2008, and we are on target) we’ll be in a good place systems-wise, we’ll be at the front of the train in terms of the features we offer our members, and, most importantly, we’ll be frustrated by our current limitations. Literally frustrated. And when that happens, we’ll start pushing for change. My goal – strange as it may seem – is to wake up one morning and say “we can’t do what we want with what we have; we have to change.”

In the meantime we still have to address innovation on some level, and so, strategically, we “outsource” our innovation to Credit Union Central of BC and our peer group. That’s the beauty of a co-operative model. We watch carefully to make sure that they’re doing innovative things, and then we make sure we get near the front of the line to implement them.

It’s not rocket-science, but it seems to be working. (And I’m not a rocket-scientist, anyway.)

We’re proud to use the services of Credit Union Central of BC to host and create our website and Online Banking platforms: they provide Canadian credit unions of any size a credible and substantial base platform for offering web services to members.

But then it’s up to credit unions to maximize the considerable opportunity CUCBC provides to them. How this manifests itself changes, I think, from FI-to-FI but specialization, skill-sets and staffing are two key signals.  And these cost money.

Westminster Savings demonstrated its move across the threshold by hiring me to work almost exclusively in the web space. It didn’t have to be me – it could’ve been anyone – but by setting aside a piece of the credit union to look after just the web space they signalled their commitment to start moving in the Ecommerce area.

I spoke to the manager of another BC credit union at Net.Finance who is struggling with exactly this issue. When does the commitment to the web channel make sense for a small FI? Is it a product of strategy or a product of size, or a combination of those things? I had no answers for her, but it deepened my sense that, no matter how clever the distributed tools, WYSIWYG apps and outsourcing are, internally an organization still has to cross a threshold to be effective in the web space.

They need to be active and deliberate.

This isn’t directly applicable to us as from a public website standpoint, but we’re in the middle of an Intranet re-org and this makes good sense. For us, it would be less about highlighting a problem – we already know that we have one in terms of how our intranet is organized – and more about trying to figure out how our users think about content: what relates to what, what’s a child of what, etc. It’s a low tech but effective way to get a handle on how to set up navigation.

On the same day that I signed up I was alerted through the service to a blog post made the previous day by one of our members commenting on a frustration he had at one of our ATMs. The same freakin’ day. It gave me chance to respond to the concern on the member’s blog, and to begin a discussion internally about some of our processes.

The obvious reason for not using Google Alerts is that if you can’t hear what they’re saying about you then you can say that everything is OK. I know, I know, this is a bad idea from start to finish, but it’s also a strangely powerful one.

So, thanks to Shari we’re now doing what we should’ve done all along: we’re monitoring the web.