Overview:

I was lead strategist for a client tasked with monitoring and reporting banks’ compliance to a major consumer financial services settlement. That’s a lot to wrap the mind around, so I’ll provide a brief summary of what that means.

In 2012, Joseph Smith, Jr. became the independent monitor of the National Mortgage Settlement (NMS), the largest consumer financial protection settlement in U.S. history, which was created to address harms to individuals and governments resulting from foreclosure misconduct by the five largest mortgage servicers. Specifically, the NMS agreement settled state and federal claims against Ally/GMAC, Bank of America, Citi, JP Morgan Chase, and Wells Fargo that they routinely signed foreclosure-related documents without knowing if they were correct―a practice referred to as “Robo-signing.”

The settlement 1) provided over $50 billion in relief to distressed borrowers harmed by wrongful foreclosures, and 2) direct payments to the states and the federal government. The settlement also included relief to servicemembers who were 1) wrongfully foreclosed upon or charged higher interest rates in violation of the Servicemembers Civil Relief Act, or 2) forced to sell their home at loss due to Permanent Change of Station (PSC) orders.

Challenge:

My team and I work with Joseph Smith, the Office of Mortgage Settlement Oversight (OMSO), and Joseph A. Smith, Jr. Monitoring, Ltd. to communicate with target audiences including the Settlement’s parties, elected officials, and opinion leaders.

When I joined the project team, I was told that our ever-present goals were to show that this independent oversight group is the authority on settlement enforcement and mortgage servicing; to release complicated information in easy-to-understand, accessible formats; and to create opportunities for two-way communication. I’ll admit that I did not initially understand the importance of this work. I viewed my role on the team as strictly a facilitator to assist the small, non-technical public affairs team in the event that they experienced a pitfall during the web publishing process. Over time, however, I got to know the team and appreciate the hard work involved in creating these reports. Eventually, I was able to comprehend the pain points of their workflows and offer recommendations to simplify and/or strengthen the launch process. These efforts engendered trust, and I was later given an opportunity to conduct a strategic communications audit and review the digital strategies plan for this client. I also aggregated a list of the obstacles/emergencies we’d encountered over the course of the project.

The lessons learned and opportunities discovered following an audit of our strategic communications and digital strategies unexpectedly led to a website redesign and more.

Strategy:

We analyzed OMSO’s communications activities via audits, in-depth interviews and website analytics, taking note of what has worked and what could be improved upon. Eventually we revamped an online presence that combined all of Smith’s work in one place (JASmithMonitoring.com).

Our content needed to show the work of the Monitor in a simplified, yet compelling way. And it needed to be all in one place. We pushed the envelope to create highly visual, easy-to-understand content that communicated complex settlement data. The new website combined several tactics and recommendations outlined in our communications research.

We created an SEO-optimized website that is fully responsive and intuitively organized. We reimagined what most people in the public sector picture when they hear the word “report.” Where the previous web reports and news articles relied heavily on PDFs and large blocks of text, the new format allows the team to seamlessly integrate various content types—like infographics, videos, and interactive components—all in one place to clearly communicate the Monitor’s findings. We also focused on highly shareable content, allowing reporters and attorneys general to pick and choose the charts and graphs that appealed to them the most.

In addition to managing the production and deployment process, I provided digital strategy and user experience design for this project.