Bank of America Partners With Susan G. Komen
Bank of America has launched a microsite in partnership with Susan G. Komen for the Cure to raise money for Komen and to enable participants to honor their loved ones.
Bank of America has launched a microsite in partnership with Susan G. Komen for the Cure to raise money for Komen and to enable participants to honor their loved ones.
Bank of America has launched a microsite, Everyday Portraits, in partnership with Susan G. Komen for the Cure to raise money for Komen and to enable participants to honor their loved ones.
According to a Bank of America representative, Everyday Portraits is a nationwide campaign promoted primarily through the bank’s website.
BankofAmerica.com says the bank serves approximately 56 million consumers and small businesses and has 30 million active online banking users, so the campaign has a potentially huge audience. However, after launching in August, the Everyday Portraits Gallery has only about 580 portraits.
The Bank of America representative said, “The campaign on this just launched, but I can tell you we’re pleased with the initial response.”
Everyday Portraits asks users to submit pictures and stories to create portraits to honor anyone who has fought or is fighting breast cancer. After submitting a face-only image that is under 3 MB and text – such as a letter, description, or story – in 500 characters or less, the site replaces the image’s pixels with pink words from the submitted text to create a tribute.
The portraits are featured in a gallery on the microsite and can also be shared via Facebook, Twitter, and email. A different portrait is also featured each day on the Everyday Portraits home page.
According to the microsite, Bank of America will contribute $5 to Susan G. Komen for every portrait created up to $25,000 or through November 11. Some site messaging also encourages users to create portraits through the month of October, which is Breast Cancer Awareness Month.
At $5 a portrait, the $25,000 cap would kick in after 5,000 portraits, or 4,400 additional submissions in the next three weeks, or about 1,467 per week. Bank of America put out a press release announcing the site’s launch on August 21, meaning Everyday Portraits has averaged about 73 submissions a week to date.
Ian Schafer, CEO of digital agency Deep Focus, says part of the reason the campaign has not been more widely embraced by BankofAmerica.com customers could be because it asks too much of participants – particularly because it asks users to manually upload images.
“It’s never a good idea to do something [participants] aren’t already doing in digital. If you do, you’re not doing it for scale, you’re doing it for quality,” Schafer says. “In this case, [users] have to find a photo to upload, which doesn’t sound like much, but, to people, time is incredibly valuable…”
Instead, Schafer says it might be easier to encourage participation if users were asked to pick a photo from a Facebook album.
“You could show Facebook photos, ask which one [they want] and upload it and it can do the work for you,” Schafer says. “But to write a soliloquy and upload a photo is, frankly, too much.”
In addition to Everyday Portraits, Bank of America is a National Survivor Recognition Program sponsor for the Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure and is the presenting sponsor for the Susan G. Komen 3-Day series.
Susan G. Komen did not respond to a request for comment.