Publicizing Your Smart Certification Congratulations on receiving your Smart Certification! We understand that this achievement represents the fruits of your efforts over many months. It is the result of your extensive dedication in time, energy and financial resources to ensuring that your clients are protected and well treated as they engage with their lender. We understand you are very eager to share your achievement with your stakeholders and this document will help you explore new ways to gain maximum publicity. Ultimately, every Smart Certified institution is different. As such, you and your colleagues will know best how to speak about your certification and which stakeholders to communicate with first. What follows are some suggestions, collected from Smart Certified financial institutions around the world, that have served our partner institutions well. Please feel free to modify or adopt them to your local context. If you encounter a new strategy that delivers results, please don’t hesitate to share it with us. We would love to learn from your experience!
Bayport Botswana Wears Certification In March 2015, Bayport Botswana became the first sub-Saharan African financial institution to secure certification. To celebrate this achievement, Bayport launched a publicity campaign to ensure clients heard about their certification and knew why it matters. In addition to developing brochures, pamphlets and launching a direct outreach campaign, Bayport created vests for its loan officers featuring the Smart Campaign logo. The vest instructed clients to ask their loan officer about Smart Certification. As a result, Bayport created a wearable tool that encouraged conversations about its own achievement. Bayport loan officers noticed a massive rise in conversations about certification, allowing the organization’s representatives to boast to clients directly about what it was doing for them.
Microinvest Moldova Reaches Out Microinvest Moldova secured its Smart Certification in September 2015, becoming the first financial institution in country to do so. At the time, clients were not intimately familiar with the Smart Campaign’s brand and what it signified. Moreover, the Moldovan market was saturated with financial service providers, offering limited opportunity to compete on price. Microinvest launched an outreach campaign tailored for clients to distinguish the organization from competitors based on its product quality. Pamphlets were dsiplayed in Microinvest branches and loan officers were instructed to speak about certification. A description of Smart Certification was added prominently to the "About Us" and “Business Loans” sections of the financial institution's website. Loan officers were instructed on how to speak about Smart Certification. The result: some clients have begun to ask about the Smart Certification. Said a Microinvest representative, “Our certification is used as an argument in discussion with the client. Every institution tries to distinguish oneself based on quality in Moldovan market. In discussion with clients, we leverage our certification. We say that we have certain criteria we need to respect. It’s another argument to separate us from other organizations that merely claim they care about clients.” 1