8 Things Your Credit Union Needs to Have on its Website

Website design can be a tricky business. Having a well thought out website is essential for a good user experience. If your credit union is considering a website rebuild, here are the top things you should have on your website.

• Security – With weekly news reports of a data breach with another large retailer, security with personal information is at the forefront of every member’s mind. It’s important to let your credit union’s members know that your site is secure and that when they login they can be assured that their personal information will be safe.
• Good visual design – After establishing the security for your credit union’s website, the next big thing to look at is its design. Designing a visually pleasing website that is clean and simple in will ensure that your members come back time and time again. If the website lacks in visual design or elements of the site are hard to find, members will not use it.
• Search bar – Every great website has an easy-to-find search bar that allows the member to search the site quickly for exactly what they are looking for. For most users, the search bar is a faster way to find what they need.
• Social media links – If your credit union has social media profiles, make sure those links are on your website. Social media users tend to “like” or “follow” the organizations they frequent on social media – giving them easy access to information they post.
• Easy to find contact information – Most of the members coming to your site will be looking to check their balances or find a way to contact your credit union directly. Contact information that includes phone numbers, addresses and email addresses should be in a location that members can get to in one to two clicks. 
• Education – Financial information can get very technical, especially when it comes to the terminology. An education resource center that provides information about the products and services your credit union offers can help you and your members in many ways.
• Links – Your credit union website should include links throughout the site to other pages that are relevant to the content on the page. Not only should your site have links to other pages on your site but it should also include links to outside sources that are creditable and help your members have a better understanding for what they are looking for. 
• News section – Providing your members with the most up-to-date financial information will let your members know that you are in tune with the latest news.  The most important thing to remember is to update the section often with the correct financial news that will help your members.

If you are considering a website rebuild, let CU Solutions help. CU Solutions has the tools to help you make the best possible credit union website for your members. With our helpful website compliance review, content management system and website design and development products, we can take your credit union website for ordinary to extraordinary! 

Attracting the Web 2.0 Generation Presentation

The presentation below is from a talk I gave called "Attracting the Web 2.0 Generation:"

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It was supposed to have been focused on how Facebook, Twitter, blogging, etc. can be used to attract younger members (i.e. "the Web 2.0 Generation"), which it did cover. But the more I researched and prepared for the presentation, the more I realized two things:

1. Use of social media is growing across all age groups (See USA Today Article called Boomers zero in on social networks). In other words, the Web 2.0 generation is not just kids anymore, it is much bigger than that.
   
2. The social web is not about the individual technologies, it is about building relationships.

In fact, the key points of my presentation focused on the things credit unions are doing informally already in the offline world, namely talking and listening to members, that can be extended online with the social web.

What needs to happen, however, is that the "informal" should be turned into the "formal" via planning and strategy development. So instead of those important member interactions happening by happenstance, they could and should be sought out in a strategic and regular manner.

The P.O.S.T. model (which I have discussed in prior posts) is a great tool to get that done, and I think there is a reason the "T" comes last. It comes last because the more important parts of the planning process are the People (who you want to reach), your Objectives (what you and your members expect to get out of it) and your Strategies (how you expect to get the job done). Arguably, Technology is just one enabler among others, including face-to-face interactions.

A Social Web Strategic Plan for Credit Unions

I just gave a presentation on the social web for the Michigan Credit Union League this past weekend. As I was preparing for it, I realized that while I have blogged about ROI for credit union social web activities, I never addressed the planning aspect of it.

So below is a mini-strategic social web plan for credit unions using the P.O.S.T. model presented in the book Groundswell. Its main focus is to use members to generate ideas for product development.

People

• Members that want to help the credit union innovate and improve
  

Objectives
Credit Union Objectives

• Ensure member satisfaction and loyalty
• Provide new products and services that members want
• Gain insights into member financial needs and issues
• Enable and encourage ongoing member dialogue and collaboration

Member Objectives

• Be part of a financial institution they like and have a vested interest in using
  
• Have access to financial services that will help them and make their lives easier
• Have someone to turn to with questions about their personal finances they can trust
• Be part of building a better credit union to meet their present and future needs

Strategies

• Regularly encourage and ask for member input on the service they receive
• Make it easy to provide service and quality feedback and rankings
• Garner member input and feedback on new products and services they might like
• Engage in conversations with members about the financial issues and questions they have
• Provide thought leadership on personal finance matters
• Ask the question “What would I do if I were a credit union?”

Technology	Purpose	Why
Twitter	Quick, short updates	Provide nuggets on the future of personal finance, product and service improvements and personal finance tips
Blogger	Thought leadership	Thought leadership on how personal finance technologies and resources can improve member lives
Facebook	Relationship building and member feedback	Main forum to capture member input, and a scrapbook of member-focused activities focused on their role in helping the credit union
YouTube	Educational videos and testimonials	Educational videos, and member testimonials and ideas
LinkedIn	Credit union information	Maintain a presence and be part of a large audience of networked professionals.

A few other ideas for a plan focus are:

• Members that want to be involved in community events
• Members that want to have better control over their finances
• Members that are a part of student branches

Obviously, depending on the area of focus you choose your plan could look very different than the one above. The important part, though, is that you have a plan in place to guide your efforts and help ensure you stay on track.

Measuring Social Web ROI

How do you measure the ROI of social web initiatives?

The snappy answer is that it doesn't matter because the investment, beyond your time, is probably zero. (In most cases, getting on sites like Facebook, Twitter, etc. is free). But your time does have value. So if you're going to spend it on something, you and your credit union should expect some benefit.

To get the discussion going, and I do hope to get your thoughts on measuring ROI, I very briefly want to lay out the social web planning model defined by Li and Bernoff in their book Groundswell. I think it is a worthwhile exercise because if you don't first define what you want to achieve, there really is nothing to measure. The acronym for the model is P.O.S.T. and it goes like this:

• People - Who you want to target and how you expect to engage them
• Objectives - What you expect to achieve and what your members expect to get
• Strategy - How you will connect with your members
• Technology - What applications you will use

The Objective portion of the model is where you define what you want to achieve. It is certainly OK to have marketing and sales goals like increasing membership, loans and the like. But those cannot be the sole basis of your initiative. You have to dig deeper, because the social web is about conversation, sharing and collaboration. So think of objectives that can develop into an enduring storyline that will engage your members more than a litany of marketing messages would. It could be helping your community, providing financial education or many of the other great things credit unions do to help members. Or your objective could simply be to gain insights into the financial needs, issues and concerns of your members.

Once you have your objectives defined, determine how best to measure how you're doing at achieving them and ROI. Measuring the number of fans, followers, traffic and return visits are all metrics you want to watch because they give you a sense of usage and reach. But what they don't measure are member insights and depth of relationship the social web can give you, or the value of that.

To give you an example, I have been getting email questions since starting these efforts from a credit union about social media and the web, which have been great. They have helped to validate that there is interest and in discussing the ways credit unions can leverage the web, and they have given me insights into how at least one credit union is approaching it all. That dialogue helped to inspire this topic, and will influence CU Village's approach to providing services. Honestly, I don't know how you place ROI on those series of interactions, but I do know they have been of huge value to me. I look forward to getting more of those kind of interactions, especially those directly in our blog, Twitter or Facebook page, precisely because of the insights and relationships they give not just to me or CU Village, but to the community of credit unions that are participating.

For credit unions wanting to measure the ROI of their own social web efforts, I recommend looking to the member interactions you get and the insights you gain from them. Because measuring success for the social web is more like the way you would measure success from a focus group or survey than a direct mail campaign. The value comes from what you learn and act on.

Don't get me wrong, the social web is not all soft goals. Sales and marketing goals are critically important too. But if you get your member relationships right through better understanding of their needs, the natural outcome will be achieving your business goals.

For more information on measuring ROI, check out The ROI for Social Media Is Zero by Augustine Fou, chief digital officer of Omnicom's healthcare consultancy group, and How to Measure Social Media ROI for Business by Aaron Uhrmacher from Mashable.

Social Web: The Technology

This is the third in a series of blog posts laying out CU Village's plan for using the social web. In the first two posts I talked about the people we want to reach, our objectives and our strategies. In this post, the last in the series, I'll hit on the technologies we'll be using, for what purpose and why.

Technology		Purpose	Why
Twitter		Stream of ideas, resources, trends and topics of interest related to web strategy and execution. Also, share quick updates on CU Village initiatives, accomplishments and promotions.	In response to customer focus group input for CU Village to help clients keep on top of web innovations and ideas. Our Twitter feeds focus on the best-of-the-best provided in bite-size chunks.
Blogger		Thought leadership, best practices and big idea promotion.	In response to customer requests for insights and resources that can be used to perform better and help credit unions continue to innovate. If Twitter is a raw feed of ideas, our blog is the place we provide analysis, context and guidance
Facebook		Relationship building and sharing of the more visual and design oriented aspects of what we do.	Because many of our clients cannot access Facebook at work, this one is a bit tricky. But like Twitter, it is a great place to share ideas with a network of people that have something in common. We hope that our "fans" will use our fan page as a place to network with us, each other and share ideas of their own. Dell's social media Facebook page is a good example of a successful community in action.
YouTube		Educational videos and showcase of our multimedia work.	Still very much in the early-stages, but we do a lot of great video and multimedia (see http://mcul.cubetvonline.com, which is technology we developed and videos we produce). YouTube is a great place to distribute media because of its large audience and reach.
LinkedIn		Company information	Maintain a presence and be part of a large audience of networked professionals.

There are other technologies we are and will be using, like Picasa, and our own web site and own technologies. But what I've listed above hits the key ones. We'll also be looking for ways to improve how we provide customer support online. Our partner Constant Contact, mentioned in one on our recent Tweets, has a great model we'll be looking at to possibly emulate.

On a related note, the other benefits that we are hoping to achieve with our social web plan are to continue to position CU Village as a leading credit union web site developer, improve our search engine rankings, and build awareness of who we are and what we do. So while first and foremost, it is about helping our clients and credit unions get the most out of the web through collaboration, it is also about marketing.

The marketing elements of our social web plan, in fact, are one of the reasons we are using third-party technologies like Blogger and Twitter. This is important because search engines determine rankings, among many other criteria, by the number of sites linking to your site and the content you have. The social web helps with both. (Check out Mark Arnold's blog post on search engine optimization, he is senior vice president for Neighborhood Credit Union.)

The writers of Groundswell tell readers to "concentrate on the relationships, not the technologies," hence the word "social" in social web.

From there it is not too big of a leap to make the connection between credit unions with fields of membership and common bonds, and the communities and networks being built through the social web. Using the planning process defined in Groundswell (People, Objectives, Strategy and Technology), I'll be exploring how credit unions can use the social web to connect with members in future posts.

Social Web: Getting the Job Done

In my last post, I opened the hood a little on CU Village's objectives for getting onto the social web. The question I left at the end, however, is how do these objectives tie to our strategies related to using the social web? So here is a quick summary of our social web objectives (what we want to achieve) and our strategies (how we are going to achieve those objectives):

Objectives		Strategies
Drive thought leadership		Keep customers abreast of current trends and issues Develop and identify best practices
Build better and deeper customer relationships		Provide easy access to training, resources and support Make client communications easy, meaningful and frequent
Enable and encourage collaboration and dialogue		Garner customer input on product development and customer service Cultivate an ongoing forum for sharing ideas

I am sure we'll be adding to and revising our strategies, but it is a start and meant to evolve.

In terms of who we want to reach, which is an important question to answer when developing a social web plan, we want to connect with you. We want to target those that truly want to leverage the web to serve their members, and play a role in driving the future of doing that.

What are the risks? We may get some critical feedback. No one may show up. We may make it easier for our competitors to find out what we're doing. We could stub our toe on our execution.

Is it worth the risk? A quotation from a recent Harvard Business Review blog post sums up the answer pretty well…

Hold the social web up as a mirror - look at yourself through the eyes of your customers - and you'll uncover new possibilities for growth and innovation that your reflected glory efforts can help deliver. (The Power of Reflected Glory Marketing, Alexandra Samuel)

…in other words, yes it is worth the risk.

Next blog post, I'll dig into the technologies and how we will be using them.

Social Web: Opening Up the Hood

CU Village recently made the plunge into the social web realm. In part we had to because we're a web company. It is expected. I also firmly believe that you have to practice what you preach. Or as I tell my staff, we have to "eat our own dog food" to gain real understanding and credibility that what we do, say and sell actually works for our clients in the way we promise.

Just as importantly, we jumped into the social web because I think there are real and meaningful ways we can use it to engage our customers. In this post and ones to come, I will be opening up the hood on our thinking about the social web and how we plan to use it. In a similar way, I'll be sharing some ideas on how I think credit unions can make use of it too. Consistent with the idea behind the social web, we welcome your input along the way.

CU Village's Definition of the Social Web
Web-based tools that enable interaction among individuals that have some common bond.
Examples include Twitter, Facebook, Blogger and YouTube.
(agree or disagree, we use Web 2.o
as a somewhat synonymous term)

The social web is not an end unto itself. It is a tool, a strategy and way to get an objective accomplished. For CU Village, that objective is customer engagement in three key ways:

• Thought Leadership
• Relationship Building
• Collaboration and Dialogue

Thought leadership is the cycle of guiding and learning. For example, CU Village has years of experience creating web sites, and we share that expertise with our clients through our web development process. However, we learn something new with every project and every client. We help our clients be better and smarter about the web, and they return the favor by helping us do the same through their divergent viewpoints and ideas. Thought leadership, then, is the process of cultivating great ideas from internal and external sources, and sharing them.

Relationship building is just as it sounds. It is the building of trust and knowledge that can be used for synergistic value and benefit. The better we know our clients and they us, the better we can anticipate need and provide the right solution. Likewise, the better our clients know us the better they know how we can best serve them.

Collaboration and dialogue is the ongoing conversation we want to have with our clients. It helps to ensure we stay on track. It also brings our customers into our product development process. Of course, we need to do our part in staying ahead of the curve, but some of our best product and service ideas come from our clients. We love that, welcome it and want more of it.

So what does all this have to do with the social web? Check back later…

What They’re Doing Right: Amplify Credit Union

Not one of ours, but want to give recognition where it is due. Amplify Credit Union has taken an expansive and yet holistic approach to leveraging the social web. They have a presence in Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and other key sites. Importantly, they are doing it in a way where there is consistency across the sites they are in and one effort complements the other. For example, posts on their Twitter site often point to what is going on in their Facebook page. Also important is that Amplify is striking a good balance of keeping it fun and interesting while still being professional.

• Name: Amplify Credit Union
• State: Texas
• Assets: $502,072,213
• Members: 41,179
• Web Site: http://www.goamplify.com/
• Twitter: http://twitter.com/goamplify
• YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/user/AMPLIFYFCU
• Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Austin-TX/Amplify-Credit-Union/25493017892
• Flicker: http://www.flickr.com/photos/goamplify
• LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/companies/amplify
  
  

  Amplify's Facebook Page