factory by Raiffeisen Bank

In 2018, Raiffeisen Bank launched the pilot edition of “factory by Raiffeisen Bank”, the company`s first online financing competition, dedicated to start-ups. In 2019, Raiffeisen Bank wanted to develop the program in order to make it more attractive to the entrepreneurial community, thus positioning the brand as one that supports the start-up community. However, communicating this program came with several challenges, such as low awareness among Romanian entrepreneurs, the fact that Romania was going through a period of political turmoil and fiscal changes, plus the general perception that it would be difficult to obtain financing for one`s business idea. 

Our objectives were to both raise the program`s awareness and to increase the number of registered projects by 50%.  Therefore, the first step was to conduct a national research about „Romanian Entrepreneurship”, to find out what kind of businessess would people invest in, as well as what keeps them from starting their own business. Right after this study offered us an overview upon the way entrepreneurship is perceived by Romanians, we established the creative concept: „Stories from the factory”, which allowed us to emphasize the fact that factory by Raiffeisen Bank is a program that finances dreams.

The communication campaign started with a visual representation of the key findings from the research, which was sent along with a 2D animated video that detailed the program. Afterwards, our strategy was to focus on explaining the concept of the program and on creating occasions to interact with previous program winners. Therefore, for social media we used the “show-and-tell” strategy, letting former participants become Ambassadors for the program and sharing their insights and knowledge on how the program helped them develop their business. But as we felt that talking solely to the general public was not enough, we figured out a way of having a more targeted comunication tactic. 50 successful businessmen and journalists received a #DeliveryFromTheFactory: a box with products from emergent businesses, previous winners in the first edition of the program.

The last phase of the campaign comprised of organizing factory Gala, the event dedicated to the winners. We wanted innovate the concept of Gala, so we gave it a twist: we turned it into a Pitch Day. This would not only make the event more dynamic, but it would help participants receive ”on the spot” mentorship and guidance from experts they could not otherwise reach. Nevertheless, we continued to “show and tell” the benefits of the program by organizing a Factory Fair, where the entrepreneurs had the chance to display their products.

The communication strategy helped increase the number of submitted projects by 400%, have with 300% more financed projects and with 300% more accounts created in the platform. Moreover, our digital strategy reached 832k people.