To break through to consumers, we couldn’t just talk about the power of Membership. We had to demonstrate it. We created tools and a forum for Cardmembers to share their interests and passions. But it wasn’t enough to just start another online community, we empowered Cardmembers and prospects to achieve something tangible. Social awareness and “doing good” were core affinities for both existing Cardmembers and our target. Therein was a provocative idea: enable Cardmembers to dream up, and ultimately unite behind, incredible ideas. Something good for the world. American Express would bring the ideas to life with $2.5 Million.

The social & promotional elements of the communications strategy increased organic visitation to MembersProject.com over 500% from previous years. Expanding participation beyond the previous ‘Cardmember only’ stipulation in ’07 to non-Cardmembers proved extremely successful and set new standards for engagement with over half of all visitors performing high-value actions (views,nominations,votes,clicks-to-apply) on MembersProject.com.

Syndicated “buzz” research showed Members Project outpaced all other American Express media activity for digital PR for 2008. Participants were more than 5x as likely to socially promote the program compared to previous American Express efforts that did not contain an appeal to the collective power of Membership.