Partnership's Direct Deposit Campaign
Comes to a Close

The Automated Payments Partnership is wrapping up its "Direct Deposit: Your Pay the Easy Way" campaign, the first in a three-phase marketing initiative to promote electronic payments. The campaign kicked off with the placement of billboards, posters and public transportation advertisements throughout the District last fall. In addition, radio news releases were aired on 52 stations and potentially reached an estimated 654,000 consumers.

Financial institutions around the District hosted their own direct deposit promotions by using Partnership marketing materials, placing articles in newsletters, holding lobby promotions and hosting direct deposit seminars. Some financial institutions had creative ideas of their own, including handing direct deposit teller fliers directly to customers cashing their paychecks and offering free, no-minimum balance checking accounts to customers who use direct deposit. One financial institution even obtained sign-up forms from local companies offering direct deposit and held lobby promotions offering $5 incentives to customers signing up for direct deposit.

Local companies also jumped on the marketing bandwagon. Articles in employee newsletters, direct deposit sign-up days, posters by time clocks, quarterly use of paycheck stuffers and a "bank direct deposit fair" were some ways our corporate partners promoted direct deposit.

In total, approximately 600 financial institution and corporate partners participated by marketing direct deposit and distributing Partnership promotional materials, including close to 79,000 teller fliers/ employee statement stuffers, more than 38,000 corporate statement stuffers and 10,000 A Consumer's Guide to Direct Deposit.

We want to extend a special thank you to all those who helped make the Partnership's direct deposit campaign successful. We will report on its results in a future issue of Payments Quarterly.

By the way, we still have some marketing materials available. If you would like to join the Partnership and obtain some of these free materials, call Carrie Andert in St. Louis at (314) 444-8946.