Until April 8, you can help kick start a collaborative program aimed at boosting CUs’ market position.
By Kathryn Clancy
Remember the last time you tried to explain to a friend from out of town exactly what credit unions are, and why working in the movement is so important to you? You probably said something like, “They’re member-owned, not-for-profit financial institutions dedicated to improving their owners’ financial lives.” And then when your friend said that sounded great and he wanted to join one, you said, “Um… .” After all, what do you know about the membership criteria of credit unions far away? Helping your friend find a credit union isn’t the whole story here, however.
Take a look at NCUA and U.S. Census Bureau data, and you’ll see that only about 100 million U.S. consumers are members of credit unions. With 300 million people in the country all told, that’s a lot of untapped potential that credit unions could get together and dig into. But helping anyone on the street find just the right credit union to join has been difficult in the past. Enter Credit Union Match, a website envisioned by my friend and former Callahan and Associates colleague, Sam Brownell, now founder of CU Collaborate LLC, Washington, D.C. When complete, Credit Union Match will allow consumers to quickly and easily determine which local credit unions they are eligible to join. The list will be generated using a database that aggregates data from both public agencies and credit unions. In the short term, Credit Union Match will help you help your friend—and anyone who wants to know which CUs he can join. In the longer term, it will form a basis for greater success with collaborative marketing efforts, since it will provide a common industry platform to help consumers navigate membership rules. And in the even longer term—as Sam envisions it—Credit Union Match will bring credit unions and other industry organizations together to share their marketing successes and best practices, to help drive everyone’s member acquisition costs down. An important first step in the success of this undertaking is reaching $40,000 in donations through Credit Union Match’s Kickstarter campaign, which ends April 8th.
As of this writing, the campaign is three-quarters of the way to its goal and has less than $10,000 left to raise. The campaign has a variety of backers at variety of funding levels, including CUES. It has one $10,000 supporter, which earns that donor “co-founder” status, including input into the development of the site. For $250, a contributor can join the Credit Union Match focus group and get the video shown below. However, every donation—from $1 on up—counts. [video poster="https://skybox.cues.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/cumatch.jpg" width="512" height="288" mp4="https://skybox.cues.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Credit-Union-Match-generic-commercial.mp4"][/video] One thing not everyone knows about Kickstarter is that if a project doesn’t reach its goal, all the contributions go back to the donors. I sincerely hope that doesn’t happen here. If every person who read an industry article about this campaign personally gave $5, it wouldn’t take long to finish funding it. So I am hoping that, in the next eight business days, credit unions, credit union organizations, and their employees, will come together and make Credit Union Match happen. Then there will be much celebrating—together.
Kathryn Clancy is CUES’ director of member relations/northeast region. Learn best practices in innovation by attending Strategic Innovation Institute.
