Launching Means of Exchange

When we started work on Means of Exchange back in March, we pulled together a basic website and some temporary branding to help garner early interest (we gave our first full interview to the BBC a couple of months later. You can read that here if you’re outside the UK, or download a PDF here). Since then plenty of work has been going on in the background, and interest continues to build, particularly around our inaugural initiative, Cash Mobbers.

To coincide with our first public talk at Pop!Tech earlier this month, we relaunched the website with a new look and feel, and new branding, courtesy of our good friends at Jepson+Rae. Over the next few weeks we’ll be rolling out additional functionality including forums, integrated news and a tools section. If you want us to keep you posted on everything happening with the project then be among the first to join our growing community.

As well as building tools to help people better connect with local resources, local businesses and each other, we’re also developing new approaches to how we inform, engage and inspire people to reconnect locally. A large part of the recent Pop!Tech talk looked at our default relationship with money, how most of us understand so little about it, and how we might use new approaches to encourage a more healthy mix of time sharing, swapping, bartering and purchasing between one another.

We were also extremely fortunate to have had the support of an incredible team at Wieden+Kennedy in Portland, who helped pull together an edgy campaign around the announcement encouraging people to “rethink money”. Badges and stickers of the world’s top four currencies – with a strike-through – were handed out before and after the talk. We’re going to see how we can make wider use of these as we ramp up on public speaking in the coming months.

If we’re to succeed in sparking a major rethink in how we talk about, and promote, local economic sustainability then engaging some of the world’s leading brand and marketing thinkers will be key.

You can watch the full eleven minute talk here.