Blogs

I'll get a detailed screenshot tour together for the CU Web Hunt page, but in the meantime jump over to The Financial Brand.com to see their coverage of our big success story with Belvoir FCU.  Click here to read the articlc about the Belvoir Federal Credit Union Web Hunt.

My almost coherent rambling is featured on the CU Times 'guest blog' spot this week! Check it out here:  www.cutimes.com/Exclusives/2010/4/Pages/Engage-Your-Members.aspx  Many thanks to Sarah Snell Cooke for the opportunity, and for her editorial magic!

Next to doing the right thing, the most important thing is to let people know you are doing the right thing.
-John D. Rockefeller

No matter what your goals, increasing member awareness and engagement should be a priority.  Here are a few fundamental ideas to  help drive your success:

Focus on awareness across multiple channels
We have more marketing and communications channels available to reach out to members now than ever before, from traditional media, to electronic channels, to more recent opportunities like social networking.   Different members will respond to different marketing channels, so it is important to identify what are the most effective channels for your members and then deliver a consistent, coordinated message across them.  Coordinated multi-channel marketing with a clear call to action can really make a big difference in the success of your promotions.

Engage them, direct them, and interact with them
Once you’ve drawn the members in, engage them.  How many members come to your website, log in to home banking, and then leave?  When Atlantic Financial FCU used an interactive CU Web Hunt on their website, members were rewarded for exploring around the deeper pages of the site, incidentally discovering all those great rates and services.  The result?  Just through that increased awareness and interaction with the existing material in their website, AFFCU increased new memberships by 68% and new loan dollars by 66% during the campaign.  It is definitely important to give the members reasons to get to know you, clear paths to relevant information, and clear calls to action.

Enable self actualization and hands-on learning
Rather than sell to your members, give them the means to teach themselves.   This can be a very powerful tool for both education and marketing.  Here’s one example: Many credit unions offer members tens of thousands of surcharge-free ATMs and shared branches, and have literally 2 or 3 times as many ATMs available as the big mega banks, but the members just don’t seem to get it.  You are lucky if they even know what a shared branch is!  You can tell them you are convenient until you are blue in the face, with no real impact.  On the other hand, if you put all those locations from all those networks into one easy interactive tool inside your branded page, and the member can easily look at their own house or office, see the cars in the parking lot, and see the neighborhood just covered with locations, that changes the perception of your convenience at a gut level. 

It’s that self-actualized, hands-on, interactive approach that lets people learn about your virtues for themselves.  This same approach can be powerfully applied to your rates, your lending products, your financial literacy program, and more.

Encourage members to be your advocates and then reward them
More than just educating and engaging members, you need to win them over as advocates.  There is no other form of marketing more powerful than word of mouth.  You already offer the best rates and services around.  Now you have to get that message through to your members, and make them proud and excited about your credit union to the point that they want to crow about it to their friends and family members.  Many marketers are confused about what to do with Facebook, twitter and the like.  The power of these social networking tools is not necessarily for you to sell yourself, but for your members to spread the word on your behalf.  In a certain sense, this represents the ultimate goal of really engaging the member – win them over, give them easy ways to tell your story to the world, and then track and reward their advocacy.

Great recognition for Web Hunt from the National Association of Federal Credit Unions: Read More at NAFCU's site.

• Creativity of promotional campaign
• Appropriate design and copy based on the goals and objectives
• Effectiveness/measurability of results

• CUNA Diamond Award
• CUES Golden Mirror Award
• CU Journal Best Practices Award
• NAFCU Best Promotional Campaign Award

Atlantic Financial FCU (one of my favorite clients (who also happens to do Email Marketing, BranchMap Web Edition, BranchMap Mobile Edition, American Debt Relief Challenge, occasional interactive banner ads, and now the CU Web Hunt with us despite being a relatively small institution) delivered some really great results from their recent CU Web Hunt campaign!

I get so excited when my credit unions have the ability to really measure and understand the boost that our marketing tech products can bring to the table.  AFFCU was able to measure and compare real site traffic numbers, loan numbers, loan dollars, and new member numbers that resulted from the Web Hunt, and frankly I was floored.  You should read the press release for more details, but here are a few highlights:

• 921% increase in pageviews on their Youth Page
• 66% Increase in New Loans - - > that worked out to over $2.78 million in new loans for the credit union!!
• 68% increase in New Members during the campaign. This means that friends and family and community members were really drawn into the CU website and were motivated to explore deeply in the site and were impressed with what they learned about the great rates, service, and convenience of AFFCU!

As far as I'm concerned, thats the goal of just about everything you do online - new members, new money, increased awareness, increased traffic.

By the way, typical cost of a Web Hunt campaign is only $3 or $4K, so for AFFCU that was something like 1000x ROI from the new loans alone!  Not to mention the new members who are sure to grow their relationship overtime.

Also, the CU Times picked up the story today! Here is an online version - CU Times Article About CU Web Hunt and AFFCU

Congratulations to AFFCU, looking forward to doing it again in 2010.

I'm off to beautiful Wilmington, NC to give a double session presentation (Yes folks, that's THREE HOURS) at the East Coast Credit Union Marketing Conference.  (Here is the event flyer) The North Carolina Credit Union League has focused the conference exclusively on Gen-Y marketing this year, so it should be a really good show.  I'm going to be presenting "Gen-Y: Reaching out to the next generation of members on their terms"... which will cover a wide range of topics from convenience services to ATM networks and shared branch locations to financial literacy to all kinds of outreach channels, web and mobile marketing technologies, social networking, and more!  Gonna run through a ton of live demonstrations too.  

Hope to see you there!

PS: If you are interested in booking me as a speaker, I'd love to talk to you! Check out my speaking page.

Well, it took us long enough, but we finally have product information on the site for CG Knowledge Base .  This is a service that has been successfully deployed in Energy Federal Credit Union's newly redesigned site for months and months!!  There are just too many cool things going on and not enough time to get them up on the codegreen site I guess. :)

Check it out:

If you have a second, take a look at the details...  The system is a feature of your site that gives you full Content Management System (CMS) control of your Frequently Asked Questions - or for any critical information that is needed on your site.  You write questions and corresponding answers in the form of articles, and you can then organize them by category, allow powerful keyword searching, suggest related articles, and even allow visitors to ask you new questions not covered yet!

Just another way we can use technology to provide better convenience to Members while reducing calls to the call center!  That's what the web is for, right?!

Please give us a call or drop us a line if you'd like to know more, or if you think it might be a good fit for your site.

Heather Anderson from the Credit Union Times interviewed Jamie Chase(Credit Union Strategic Planning) , Earlene Fantz (CEO of American Lake Credit Union) and Jason Green (yours, truly) and wrote a great article about the American Debt Relief Challenge ...

Check it out - in the CU Times cool interactive online edition:
http://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/sbm/cut_20090415/index.php?startpage=10#/10
Or in the traditional website format: http://www.cutimes.com/Issues/2009/April%2015%202009/Pages/American-Debt...

By the way, the MSRs at American Lake CU are now entering their balance transfers as they come in!  Those savings get updated and broadcast out to the world on an hourly basis - on our website savings ticker, and on the individual savings tickers all over the web!  I love it.

Thanks to the great work of my partners in crime - Jamie Chase and Melina Young at Credit Union Strategic Planning, as well as Scott Butterfield at The Paragon Consulting Group, the word is beginning to spread about The American Debt Relief Challenge! 

Here are a few great examples from Credit Union movement journals, blogs, service providers, and partners:

• CU Soapbox - great ADR interview with Melina Young
• CU Insight Coverage of ADR
• CU Journal Article about ADR
• CU Times Article About Professor Manning's Responsible Debt Relief Algorithm and his great contributions to ADR
• Open Source CU interview with Jamie Chase
• Responsible Debt Relief's coverage of the issues and their support of the American Debt Relief Challenge
• Member Access Pacifc's involvement   and  MAP Network Announcement
  

The CU Journal has stepped up in support of the American Debt Relief Challenge in a big way!  They are helping us get the word out to the Credit Union movement about the ADR mission - to save American consumers $300 Million while increasing net revenue to credit unions.  CUJ has put up our live savings ticker widget right up on their highest visibility spot!  Gotta love it.

If you are part of a credit union, please let your CEO, your board, your Marketing Director, Lending Manager, (or anyone else who will listen) about ADR!  It is a great way to help a lot of people who are in real financial trouble, while letting people all over the country know about great credit union rates and service.