Building Trust with Data

Desjardins Group

The Desjardins Group is North America’s largest financial service cooperative, with more than $470 billion in total assets, serving personal and business services, wealth management, life and health insurance, and property and casualty insurance. Desjardins returned $557 million to members and the community in 2024.

Expertise

Reputation Management

Challenge

While Desjardins Group is a household name in Quebec, it is not as well-known in the rest of Canada. To elevate its profile as a financial services thought leader outside of Quebec, Desjardins expanded its team of economists to provide regular, consistent reporting and insights on macroeconomic trends. Our challenge was to ensure this expertise would resonate with Canadians, connect with their everyday needs and concerns, and strengthen the Desjardins brand.

Insight

Macroeconomics and microeconomics are inextricably linked; Canadians looking to better understand and manage their personal finances benefit greatly from understanding the bigger picture. Amid a shrinking media landscape, there is a thirst for thoughtful, data-driven economic content. Providing relevant, real-world insights and local data, delivered by trusted financial experts can help Canadians feel more informed, more confident and more hopeful.

Approach

Our strategy was three-fold: to leverage Desjardins’ unique dataset – provided by its newly-instated team of economists focused on Ontario, Atlantic and Western Canada (OAW) – to tell stories about Canada’s economy from coast to coast (with a particular focus on provincial-level data); to demonstrate the impact of macroeconomics in Canadians’ everyday lives; and to engage proactively with journalists for relationship-building and enhanced coverage.

Through our collaboration, we expanded our audience by blending traditional media (e.g., BNN) with new media (e.g., The Peak), leveraging relationships held by both our team and the economists. We also hosted in-person events and worked together to amplify reports on key themes like youth, housing affordability, and climate.

Results

By deliberately driving earned media coverage for Desjardins’ newly created economist team dedicated to OAW, we saw an initial 1933% year-over-year increase in ChangeMakers-secured economist media coverage. Additionally, we contributed to doubling the economists’ share-of-voice in markets outside of Quebec compared to the benchmark for Desjardins’ other business divisions (6% vs. 3%).

Since 2022, our focus has been on building new relationships for the economists to leverage directly, which has resulted in new sign-ups for their newsletter, regular commentary in top-tier media outlets across Canada and joint team efficiencies.

Our work has been critical to building the Desjardins brand as a trusted financial services provider in the rest of Canada.