As 2011 comes to a close, we can safely say that social media has become the norm rather than the exception, since Facebook has more than 10% of the world’s population (800 million out of 7 billion) using its site. Even broadcast TV puts twitter hashtags in their show’s title overlays. Because there are nearly as many social media outlets as there are social media users, implementing an effective strategy can be overwhelming. However, a few fundamental principles can help you keep your aim squarely on your marketing and business goals. Join me for this 101-level webinar on how to encourage people to go where you want to take them…back to your CU’s web site.
Attend this webinar and learn:
One of the most important and fundamental techniques to increase social media success
The place to start all social media campaigns that most people overlook
A step-by-step checklist to make sure you have your social media bases covered
The different characteristics of the major social media channels
Two common social media beliefs that are false and what to do instead
Thank you, Bank of America, for implementing new and uncomfortable fees for your members. That is the impetus behind Bank Transfer Day, which has garnered national media attention for credit unions. This in turn has led to a large surge in inquiries about EverythingCU’s pioneering Online Switch Kit, which helps new members transfer their accounts from a bank to a credit union.
Wow, all the publicity over Bank Transfer Day is so fantastic for all EverythingCU’ers! We’re also thrilled to be getting a flood of new inquiries about our Online Switch Kit lately… including being mentioned on CUESnet. We’ve been helping people switch from a bank to a credit union for 8 years, so it’s fun to see this getting such great attention from mainstream media.
I just spotted this ABC News clip being shared by a CU on Facebook:
The CU shown towards the end of the clip, where the young man makes the switch, is Charlotte Metro CU. They use a set of static PDFs to help people make the switch. ABC News reports this takes 12 minutes. Imagine how much faster it would be if they used EverythingCU’s Online Switch Kit!
Props to the more than 100 CUs who are already making it easier for their members! If you already have our Switch Kit, today is a great day to take another look at it and make sure everything is working perfectly with it.
Online Switch Kits continue to get excellent media coverage. Today, I received an email newsletter from the Northwest Credit Union Association (serving credit unions in Oregon and Washington), and was tickled to see an article on Switch Kits featured. The article is titled Can Switch Kits Increase New Member Satisfaction?
It was particularly happy for me to see this article appear in that trade publication since EverythingCU’s Online Switch Kit was born out of a session I attended at a 2002 CUES conference held in Seattle. There was a breakout session called Switch Kits presented by a credit union marketer from Pinellas County FCU. This breakout session was packed to standing room only. At that time, not many people were thinking about the online world, so it just seemed natural to me to create an online version of what they were writing out by hand, and thus the EverythingCU Online Switch Kit was born.
One point of pride for us with our Online Switch Kit: Since EverythingCU.com serves only credit unions, we have only credit unions as clients of this product. Therefore, the EverythingCU.com Online Switch Kit will NEVER help a person make the switch from a credit union to a bank…. only the “correct” direction, and that is from a bank to a credit union. We do have competitors, but as far as I know, none of them can make this claim.
If you aren’t one of the 112 credit unions already using the Online Switch Kit, what are you waiting for? If you are one, then thank you for your continued patronage and we hope you are seeing terrific usage from it by your new members!
I can’t help but notice that Mr. Cheney states that many credit unions have Switch Kits… my only question is: Does your credit union have a Switch Kit, and is it an automated Online Switch Kit, or an old-school static PDF?
With a grass-roots Bank Transfer Day approaching on November 5, now is a great time to implement an Online Switch Kit to make it easier for potential new members to make the switch to YOUR credit union!
We here at EverythingCU are thrilled that there is renewed, extra interest in helping more and more people leave their megaBanks (like BofA), and join their local credit union. I just ran across this article on the Bold Progressives web site, where they are calling for signatures to help pass legislation:
Of course, if you already have EverythingCU.com’s online switch kit, you know that it doesn’t take an Act of Congress to make it easier to switch.
If you don’t already have it, find out what 111 other credit unions have discovered– you can make it easier to gain new members by making it easier for them to make the switch….. without waiting for the gridlock of Washington to untangle. (That might be a very long wait… don’t hold your breath!)
Here’s the latest from EverythingCU, and the first video in the Knowledge Warehouse to give you specific techniques to improve your social media results.
For those of you thinking about jumping in to Twitter, or even those who have started, but haven’t really connected with your community yet, I’ve created the first of what will be a series of instructional videos on how to get the most out of this new communication avenue.
The first one is “How to Find Twitterers Near You.” Check out the preview below, and if this sounds like something you want to learn, click to the order page. Happy tweeting!
Ondine is an expert in credit union credit cards and her consulting branch is Card Analysis Solutions. Because of her deep knowledge of this arena of CU business, she routinely saves her clients tens of thousands of dollars by eliminating unnecessary and redundant charges coming from the card processor.
In this webinar, Ondine will show you how to analyze YOUR current card portfolio to determine what course of marketing action will maximize your ROI. Sometimes your card processor wants to sell you something that will benefit your credit union, but sometimes they are trying to sell you something which is in their best interests, which is not necessarily yours. Attend this webinar to gain the knowledge to put yourself in the driver’s seat of your card portfolio. You might even end up being able to save your CU some money on the expense side as well.
In the meantime, make sure your credit union is listed in the national database of the Credit Card Connection by registering here (which is FREE). Suze Orman continually promotes this site through her latest book and tv appearances, and credit unions that are featured get a steady flow of new card applications.
To learn more about the webinar including pricing, or to sign up for it, register yourself on EverythingCU.com (which is quick, free and easy) if you haven’t already, and check out this webinar’s detail page here.
EverythingCU.com is pleased to announce our next webinar, coming up this Thursday, December 10 at 2pm Eastern/11am Pacific. Julie Ferguson of JRF Consulting, and formerly Business Development Director for First Tech CU in Beaverton, Oregon will be presenting Enhancing Your Existing Member Base: Outreach Efforts.
You already have a membership base but are you maximizing it? How do you get more out of what you already have? You KNOW you can help your members because you have competitive products and services and the service you provide is at superstar status.
In this session you will learn how to make outbound calls to improve your relationship with existing members, resulting in additional business for your organization.
All aspects of outbound calling will be covered, including starting out with the right attitude. Call preparation, telephone etiquette, and asking the right questions that position you to offer solutions will all be covered. Follow-up and tracking are also key components to a successful strategy. Having a strategic outbound calling program by knowing who to call and why you are calling will result in long term members who are so impressed they will refer friends and family to your credit union.
Attend this webinar and learn:
· Call preparation and telephone etiquette
· Tools to create a results oriented outbound calling program
· Learn who to call and why
· Asking members the right questions
· Follow-up techniques
· Creating trust and loyalty that leads to an increase in business
For more information about the webinar or to sign up, click here.
Based on the conversation exploding on EverythingCU.com over the past two days on Credit Unions and the ROI of Social Media, I created and edited this opinion piece down to 10 minutes to fit it onto YouTube. I talk about branding, marketing, social media, credit unions, ROI, the future of credit unions, their Boards of Directors, and their members, and my mom. I think what we currently think of as Social Media (aka Online Community Engagement) has the potential to transform it all. What do you think?
Transcript:
Hi, I’m Morriss Partee, Chief Experience Officer of EverythingCU, and I’d like to make this quick little video blog on a topic that is near and dear to my heart, and that is credit unions and social media. It’s been an amazing thrill to see the topic of credit union’s use of Social Media and its ROI really blossom on EverythingCU in the past couple of days. I’ve watched with great interest as many opinions have been stated very forcefully from both sides. There are a lot of good arguments, both for and against, credit unions using social media.
Online communication is changing everything
Social media, and if we use the term to mean online community interaction, is, without question, transforming the way that people across the United States, and even across the world, are interacting with each other, and interacting with the world [around them]. So this social media phenomenon and revolution has affected or will affect virtually every department of credit union operations. It’s clear there are marketing implications and operational implications. But I’d like to talk about one are which I think in the long run, has the largest potential to truly improve credit union business and the way members interact with and view their credit union.
A Little Background
One of the big sea-changes in the way that credit unions operate with their members is when credit unions were deregulated from standard fields of membership in 1998. And since that time, credit union after credit union after credit union has gone to community charter, or a charter much broader than their original one.
Hi mom!
As example, my mother is a member of UMassFive College Federal Credit Union. Whenever I’ve had the pleasure of working on marketing campaigns for that credit union, I often think of my mother as the ideal target market. And every now and then, I’ll ask her a question about the credit union. “How do you feel about this? Why do you do business with the credit union? What do you like about it? What don’t you like about it?” And the thing that really strikes me is that because my mother is a retired professor from UMass, she feels like UMass Federal Credit Union is HER credit union. She knows the people who run it, she knows that the people who are members are colleagues of hers, that are affiliated with UMass in one way or another. Of course, she’s very proud of UMass. So anyway, that’s the world in which credit unions have traditionally operated. But for any credit union that is now far more broader than an original employee group, or their employer has changed, merged, been outsourced overseas, their original SEG has shut down, gone out of business, merged, diversified, whatever the story is, those credit unions need a new reason for being. Something that is fundamental, that makes you feel like “this is MY credit union.” Well, what do credit unions talk about in terms of the difference [between themselves and banks]? The difference is in their governance, their form of governance. Credit unions are not-for-profit cooperatives. This is supposed to be MY credit union.
MY credit union? Really?
Well, what does that mean, “MY credit union”? Does that mean I can withdraw a million dollars? Well, no, of course not, it doesn’t mean that. Well, then what does “MY credit union” really mean? How can we replicate, how can we make people, feel, understand what “MY credit union” means? We are the members, right? We are the member-owners. That’s the fundamental thing we’ve got going here.
So what does it really mean to be a member-owner? Well, right now, because of previous technological or operational limitations, membership really has only meant that I vote for a Board of Directors once a year. And I’m only voting for 3 out of 9 or so [board] members each year. And unless I’m really well-tied into the community or connected to the community, I have no idea who these people are. I might get one paragraph and a little, tiny one-inch photograph of what the person looks like, and they all kind of say the same thing about how they’re going to make sure the credit union is operated in the best interest of its members. Great. Well, it doesn’t help me choose, it doesn’t help me understand [who these people are]. I feel relatively powerless, and it doesn’t make me feel much like it’s mine–that I get to vote on… I don’t know who.
Ginny Brady, Revolutionary
That’s why I was so intrigued when Ginny Brady, in Plattsburgh, New York, started blogging with her members. She truly wanted to interact with her members to say “here’s what we are weighing as the board, here are the issues we’re wrestling with, we have to make tough choices, we have to balance different facets of financial soundness, with doing the right thing for our members, with maintaining the institution’s integrity.” For several years, she was regularly blogging, saying “here’s what the board’s doing, here’s what we’re up to, here’s our annual meeting, come out to it, we’d love to talk to you, we’d love to get your input.”
She actually stopped blogging after a couple of years. I think it’s simply because she was way too far ahead of her time, and perhaps people in the Plattsburgh region weren’t really ready for a local credit union to blog, and to understand what that meant, and to know how to find it, and know how to interact, or to want to interact. But I still feel like, as people now come online in different ways, Facebook, Twitter, email , blogging, what have you, I feel that there are new opportunties for credit unions to really make a difference with their governance.
Online input on CU governance!
What if there were online polling? What if you polled the membership regularly and said “how many of you prefer X over Y?” or “how many people feel it’s important that we offer this checking account?” or “we’re planning to build a new branch.” I still feel like there’s plenty of opportunity to really engage members, via online channels, via Facebook, via SurveyMonkey, or any other means, to say “WHAT WOULD YOU LIKE? What is it that would make the credit union better for you? What do you like about us and what we’re doing now? What do you hate about the credit union now?” And we can do these things in real time. You could even have a board meeting where you pose a question to the membership at the beginning of the meeting, and you have a decent number of responses by the end of the meeting. So if members have this voice now, and they are actually engaged with the board of directors, and not even directly, but just in an anonymous way, that’s going to make people feel like, “yeah, that’s MY credit union. I have input to the credit union. The credit union listens to me for feedback. The credit union is interested in what I have to say. That’s MY credit union. I’m not going to leave MY credit union. I’m not going to go down the street because a rate is a quarter-point higher or lower, because it’s not MY credit union.”
So anyway, that’s just my thoughts, rambling from here in Western Massachusetts on a dark and stormy, rainy December night. I would love to hear your feedback on whether this aspect of inviting membership into governance has significant potential to truly revolutionize how credit unions market with and do business with their members.
As 2011 comes to a close, we can safely say that social media has become the norm rather than the exception, since Facebook has more than 10% of the world’s population (800 million out of 7 billion) using its site. Even broadcast TV puts twitter hashtags in their show’s title overlays. Because there are nearly as many social media outlets as there are social media users, implementing an effective strategy can be overwhelming. However, a few fundamental principles can help you keep your aim squarely on your marketing and business goals. Join me for this 101-level webinar on how to encourage people to go where you want to take them…back to your CU’s web site.
We here at EverythingCU are thrilled that there is renewed, extra interest in helping more and more people leave their megaBanks (like BofA), and join their local credit union. I just ran across this article on the Bold Progressives web site, where they are calling for signatures to help pass legislation:
