The element of surprise isn’t dead. It just requires more work than ever to pull off.

One Canadian banking chain recently proved this point with an elaborate marketing trick involving specialized ATMs across the country. More than 1,000 of TD Bank Canada’s branches gave $20 bills to its customers as part of a #TDThanksYou event July 25.

Free $20 bills are pretty awesome, but nothing compared to what 16 of the chain’s best customers got, shown in this clip below:

One Toronto Blue Jays fan got to meet one of the team’s biggest stars—and throw out the first pitch at a game. A young mom got tickets for her two young boys to visit Disney World. And in perhaps the most gripping moment, an older woman got a plane ticket to Trinidad to visit her daughter, who has cancer.

The approach is definitely one associations could borrow from—even if they can’t randomly hand out $20 bills or arrange personal introductions to baseball stars. As our own Samantha Whitehorne recently noted, a sense of delight can leave a lasting effect on members and conference attendees.

Read more about what happened on BuzzFeed.

Online Tool of the Day

Here’s a common issue you probably run into: You need a screenshot of an app for an event or a PowerPoint slide, but it needs to show up in a phone, an iMac, something like that. This is generally kind of a pain to do in Photoshop because it requires a lot of manual resizing and such. Fortunately, a new online tool, MockUphone, makes it easy. The screenshot above, of the ASAE Events iOS app, was made with it, and it only took a few clicks. Cool, huh?

Other Good reads

Sick of your mobile provider? Good news—it’s now easier to unlock your phone and take it to a new provider, thanks to a bill signed by President Obama last week.

“Success breeds success is more than a cliché. People want to belong to winning organizations.” Steve Drake talks up the value of having a winning record.

Members are a great resource for generating fresh content. Over at Frank Kenny’s blog, Christina Green explains why.

A Creative Commons license encourages sharing of creative works, but it doesn’t mean you can do whatever you want with that content. LifeHacker highlights a chart breaking down the various licenses and how you can use the licensed content yourself.

One of the many lucky customers of TD Bank's "Automated Thanking Machine." (YouTube screenshot)