Transparency award: Bank of Portugal

The Bank of Portugal has substantially boosted its communications on different fronts. It overhauled its website for the first time in seven years, launched economic and financial literacy campaigns on various social media platforms and produced engaging videos to bolster internal communications with staff. These efforts have notably improved the bank’s visibility to the public and are a testament to its commitment to adapt to a fast-changing media landscape.

Modernised website

As early as 2022, the central bank’s communication and museum department saw an increasing need to update Bank of Portugal’s website to better meet users’ changing expectations as the digital landscape evolved. The team also felt it could better use the website to improve people’s economic and financial literacy and understanding of the bank’s work.

To understand the needs of website users, the comms team conducted an online survey asking them what changes they would like to see on the site. It also carried out one-on-one interviews with journalists, economists and researchers to learn about website experiences, as well as tests to evaluate its usability.

Coupled with day-to-day web analytics, these exercises provided valuable feedback and data for the communication and information technology departments to come up with a new design of the website in 2023. With the additional support from other departments and a contractor, the bank officially launched its revamped website in January 2024.

A key finding was that users often had difficulty looking for information on the old website, says Luís de Carvalho Campos, head of content, design and digital channels division at the Bank of Portugal. The new site now has a modern-looking homepage, at the top of which a slider displays a couple of high-quality images featuring the bank’s recent activity. With this new design, users can immediately see the highlights of the Bank of Portugal’s recent work once they land on the site. They can also easily get to the actual content – be it a press release or an article – by clicking on the ‘see more’ button on the images.

Other improvements included streamlining the site’s navigation structure and upgrading its search tool to make it easier for users to look for specific information. The bank also converted some of its key publications, such as its economic bulletins and financial stability reports, from PDF formats into HTML to make them more easily accessible and readable.

Another goal was to enhance the site’s capability to showcase audio and visual content from the bank’s social media platforms, as part of efforts to enliven its communications. The new site is now able to embed a great variety of social media content, such as an Instagram reel, a YouTube video or a podcast. Campos says the upgrade has made the bank’s website and social media channels “more interconnected” and has helped website users to become aware of the bank’s broader communications on other platforms.

The overhaul also involved an upgrade of the site’s content management system, which gives the comms teams’ greater flexibility and autonomy over content curation. In the past, for example, IT support was needed to upload a video or podcast to the site, but the comms team now does this directly. “In our old website we had predefined templates, that’s why we couldn’t all of a sudden upload a podcast in a convenient way,” Campos says. “Now we can do this.”

The bank also boosted the site’s resilience to cyber attacks and breakdowns. The new site uses a cloud-based service to store website data, which allows users to still be able to access the website even if it is under maintenance. The use of the technology brought the number of website breakdowns to zero last year, compared to a few times annually before the upgrade.

Efforts to improve the website’s appeal, content, usability and interoperability with the bank’s social media appear to have worked. According to data provided by the bank, the total number of page views rose to 26 million in 2024, marking a nearly 13% increase compared to 23 million in 2023 – when the website had not been upgraded. The total number of website users saw a 32% increase, up from 4.06 million in 2023 to 5.37 million people in 2024.

Website traffic aside, Campos says the project has brought about a positive “cultural shift” within the Bank of Portugal. “We suddenly got a lot of interest from business departments and that could be from statistical, economic research or banking supervision departments, because now they could see we could provide a lot [more opportunities to publicise their work],” he says.

Bolstering financial education

Against a backdrop of high inflation, the digital channels team under the comms department launched a digital campaign between March and December in 2023 aimed at boosting people’s understanding of the inflation situation and European monetary policy. Under the campaign ‘Simple as that’, the digital channels unit worked closely with the bank’s economic research department to launch a ‘carousel’ post on Instagram after each European Central Bank monetary policy decision. These posts containing multiple images did not seek to explain the ECB decisions. Instead, they used simple language and graphics to explain key economic issues of the day to the public, such as why prices had risen so much and when the ECB might stop raising interest rates. On one occasion, the team made a two-minute video, in which it used motion graphics to explain how rising interest rates could ease inflation.

In early 2024, the digital channels unit launched its ‘top tips’ campaign, a financial literacy campaign of a larger scale, in collaboration with the banking conduct supervision department. Every two weeks, the team would publish a 30-second educational video offering quick tips on a specific financial topic – such as credit cards, inflation and online banking security. These short videos were posted on the bank’s various online channels, including Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, X and the new website. To drive the message home, the team would also produce a one- to two-minute podcast and an additional Instagram post – both on the same topic as the short videos – during the two-week period. Drawing on its expertise in audiovisual production and graphic design, the five-member digital channels unit managed to produce a constant stream of videos and podcasts during its six-month campaign period, without the support of any external provider.

The two campaigns achieved notable reach and contributed to bolstering the bank’s visibility. The ‘Simple as that’ campaign, with just seven posts, contributed to a total of 157,000 impressions and 18,000 interactions on Instagram, LinkedIn and YouTube combined. The top tips campaign, involving 61 posts and 15 podcasts, led to 556,000 impressions and 10,000 interactions on the three channels.

The campaigns and new website launch in 2024 seem to have played a role in bolstering the bank’s social media presence. Impressions of the Bank of Portugal’s LinkedIn posts in 2024 rose to 13.9 million, 292% more than 3.56 million in 2023. YouTube views hit 662,000 in 2024, up 429% from around 125,000 in 2023. Instagram impressions also saw a 32% growth in 2024 compared to the previous year.

As of January 29, the bank had more than 161,000 followers on LinkedIn, the second highest out of the 20 national central banks within the Eurosystem using the social media platform – behind Banque de France. The central bank had 34,700 Instagram followers as of January 29, by far the highest among all the national central banks in the eurozone.

Engaging central bank staff

Apart from stepping up external communications, the digital channels team also made efforts to improve communications with the bank’s staff last year. In October, the team ran a month-long campaign named ‘it could happen to you’ to explain the bank’s business continuity plans to staff.

In collaboration with the business continuity unit, the team produced a series of four short, animated videos, in which it used engaging storytelling techniques and motion graphics to explain what a staffer should do when an emergency occurs. Each video covered a specific emergency, such as when all the bank’s IT systems break down, or when a fire alarm goes off. The team published a new video and a small leaflet containing the relevant instructions for the emergency once a week on the bank’s intranet in October. In the fifth week of that month, the team published a videotaped podcast in which the bank’s head of business continuity wrapped up the campaign and gave further insights.

“The internal feedback we got from the staff was that they were quite happily surprised with the campaign because business continuity plans were usually communicated in a dull, very strict way,” Campos says. “I think people enjoyed the freshness of this communication,” he adds.

The Central Banking Awards 2025 were written by Christopher Jeffery, Daniel Hinge, Daniel Blackburn, Joasia Popowicz, Riley Steward, Jimmy Choi, Levente Koroes, Thomas Chow and Blake Evans-Pritchard.