Denise Wymore sent me this blog post about Alliant Credit Union. Dave’s comment at 2:42 AM, January 18, 2008 summed it up:

I had the same problems. It is difficult for me to put my money in an institution that:

1) cannot even get their application process to work correctly, and

2) cannot be clear on who can be a member who who cannot.

Even though 5.40% is a good rate, I will also find another credit union or bank to park my money.

I think it amplifies the point I tried to make with my last post: CU websites should be operations oriented, not just sales oriented. Make the online experience as close to the in-person experience as possible.”

Why can’t the credit union staff use the online application form while taking applications in-person? This solves several problems:

1. It streamlines the application process for operations 2. It familiarizes employees with the online processes (a CSR laughing and admitting the online application isn’t reliable…really?) 3. It tests the system. It’s easier to fix a problem if you can replicate it on the spot.

Dave’s second point is salient. Most CU’s provide FOM information on their sites, and I think they should continue to work to make it crystal clear who can or cannot be a member. I think this also helps the credit union remind itself of who it is serves.

It touches a branding point, too. I’m not a fan of the diaphanous CU name. Be who you are. Alliant was United Airline’s Employee’s Credit Union. I understand the need to grow and diversify. But moving completely away from who you are as a CU is disconcerting. Why not build the brand around your original sponsor SEG and grow from there? When picking a new name, why not put more effort into staying close to your primary SEG or community?

Of course, I also don’t think sports teams should not have mascots/names that can’t be pluralized.

Ron Shevlin said something to Matt and I at dinner a few months ago that resonated with me. Credit union websites should be operational. Sites should be a resource for staff to solve problems, not just a marketing tool.

Coast Capital Savings Credit Union does a great job of communicating its voice. It’s aggressively casual. It communicates the personality of the credit union and is an extension, perhaps even the center piece, of the marketing campaign. Creatively, it’s good work.

I hope more credit unions don’t do this. I hope they realize Coast Capital is a rare breed, willing to cop an attitude in a very conservative, very attitude-less industry. There’s only room for one smart-ass in the class.

Instead, when creating content for a site, credit unions should focus less on what the Coast Capitals of the world are doing and more on what their MSR’s are doing. Don’t worrying about fluffy, fun, catchy content – go the other way. Become operational. Become informational. Creative writing is expensive and difficult to maintain (insert picture of frazzled brand manager wringing her or his hands and asking “is it ON BRAND???!!!” with every update).

This idea of sites being operational is something that as a web development firm, I’m going to discuss with our clients. It’s something any of you in credit unions out there reworking websites and creating copy might consider. Leverage what you do well when developing content.

Don’t be flashy. Inform. Solve problems. That’s what CU’s are good at. And consider the first audience to be your front-line staff. Put information on the site that they can use to solve member problems when they call or come into a branch. Consider what information CAN go on the site. I’m sure most operational CU documents might find a home on the website for your staff and membership to use. PDF’s of forms; outlines of procedures; how to find your routing number.

At that point, it really DOES become a resource. It informs. And information drives traffic.

Well, I hope everyone had a happy 4th of July and are reading your emails this morning with all your digits. Mine was excellent despite my back seizing up while I wheeled the smoker out of the garage. He fought me, but the sign clearly read, “No Smoking: Violators will be wheeled out.” BA-DUM! Get it?

But SRSLY, folks.

It’s our custom to keep up with all the bits of the social media we can manage so we can make right-on recommendations to you. One of the communities I’m in is on a video sharing site called Vimeo. It’s very different from YouTube in that you are only allowed to upload a video you made, no TV shows, no commercials, no viral marketing. It’s genuinely just a bunch of folks sharing their videos with each other and their families. They have excellent privacy options if you don’t want everyone to see everything (i.e. baby’s first bath is only for family).

But I’m not just recommending a fun site to surf. They recently redesigned (It’s gorgeous by the way, but not my point either.) and added some new features, and with any major overhaul there comes hiccups. Last Sunday their upload page broke and no one could upload their videos. They got it fixed and the site’s creator wrote a blog post apologizing for the hiccup. His apology and the responses are what I’d like to recommend your reading. The own-uppins from the founder and the love and understanding from the community is an excellent example of cultivating a loyal community. But it doesn’t read like a guy following “best practices” for web community management, but rather like a guy honestly responding to a group of people he’s built a relationship with.

Here’s what I saw when I logged in for my Monday morning surf: Blazing Notification. It was right there in my face when I logged in, not buried in an internal page.

Here’s a little snip of the post:

I want to personally apologize for the problems with the site in the past few days, especially with uploads. It’s the result of a small, careless technical error that had wide-reaching consequences. We screwed up.

And the closing sentence:

If you have any questions, please post them in the comments below and I will address them directly.

Which he did. You can read the whole thing here and see the responses and his directly answering their questions.

So, who cares, right? They aren’t a credit union. But they are members of a community. And the people in charge of that community are very reachable and very visible and shoot straight with their members. Can credit unions learn something from this? Can your CEOs be more reachable, more visible? When you need to address your members, can you do it easily and conspicuously so they don’t have to hunt for it? When they have questions, is it easy for them to get those questions to you and hope for a direct response from someone, or are the sent to an FAQ page?

Bonus Round! Because I have neither the emotional nor social nerve-endings that stop most people from making fools of themselves, I’ll give you my latest video contribution: Don’t Go No Farther (with out-takes).

Have good days.

From our new project page,

We first started Open Source CU as an idea exchange. Now we think it’s ready to become a code exchange as well.

Over the next few weeks we’ll start releasing our Content Management System as an open source project. This CMS is the tool we developed to allow non-technical staff at a credit union to keep their website updated. We hope that other credit unions can use it to keep their sites fresh and relevant.

We’ll also be looking for other projects that are either currently open source or are willing to become open source. If you have a project that you would like to share, please let us know.

By the way, it’s Rails-based and it’s spectacular.

In her post today on CreditUnions.com, Melanie El-Sabaawi relays a recent CUNA radio spot that “cited credit unions’ role as trusted financial providers to the ‘little guy.’”

Melanie writes:

Given the station’s generally progressive listenership, it struck me as a clever marriage of message and audience.

The spot ended with an invitation to visit the website www.lookoutforthelittleguy.com. As soon as I got to work, I typed out the URL, eagerly anticipating a new consumer-oriented site explaining why and how credit unions are the protectors of economic democracy and equality. The link opened up CUNA’s regular home page. The top of the page featured a link to a credit union locator, but no other obvious consumer-oriented information, actions to take, or reference to the “little guy” theme.”

Contrast this with an advertisement currently running in the current issue of Fast Company magazine. This full-page ad reads “I don’t [heart symbol] my bank.” It sounds like a theme that credit unions could build on, but it actually directs readers to the site www.startabank.com.

Melanie goes on to bring up some great points and she asks, “If www.lookoutforthelittleguy.com was a brand-new site, what do you think are the most compelling points it should provide to consumers? What actions should it enable visitors to take?”

Glad you asked!

My thoughts are (and I posted these as a comment on the article):

Great article, Melanie. What a terrible call for CUNA to have that URL redirect to the main CUNA site! Wasted opportunity.

What would the ideal site look like?

• It would present credit union vs. bank rate averages.
• It would show the amazingly high customer loyalty scores that CUs get vs. banks.
• It would focus on initiatives like the NCUF’s REAL Solutions project.
• It would provide a simple zip code locator for consumers to find local credit unions and see how membership requirements could be met.
• It would speak in plain language and incorporate social media elements like a blog/podcast dealing with financial literacy.
• And it would focus on telling real stories about CUs standing up for the little guy.

What other ideas can we throw CUNA’s way to make this message more effective if they continue giving out that URL in this campaign?

Update: The address is actually http://www.lookoutforthelittleguy.org. So why not have the .com point there? See the comments in this thread for more advice to CUNA now that we see the URL they want folks to visit.

Thanks to Chris Miller, one of the creative geniuses behind the Coast Capital Savings Credit Union website we discussed a few weeks back. He’s their Web Editor, External Sites, and he graciously hooked me up with some answers as to what went on behind the scenes in launching their new website.

Trey Reeme: Chris, we’ve been doting over your new website since we first saw it. You worked with an outside agency on the project, I’m guessing?

Chris Miller: Yes, we worked with our advertising agency, Rethink, and their interactive design partner, Burnkit.

TR: Mighty fine work you got from both, at least from what I think the finished project says about the quality of their efforts. How long did the project take from start to launch – and how did you manage the creative process?

CM: The project took approximately one year from start to finish. Development and QA took approximately 3 months. The creative process started with a creative brief defining our current state and goals. We then worked with our agency to create the site wire-frames based on the information architecture created within my department (E-business development). Once the wireframes were completed the interface design was proposed, reviewed, revised and finalized.

Julie, our Online Greeter, was developed as a natural extension to our already established brand. We had previously created a micro-site targeting the youth market with a supporting DM piece and guerrilla marketing to drive traffic to the site. Julie also mirrors our approach to our television, radio and print ads.

TR: So, who’s the real-life “Julie” and is she being used in any of your offline marketing?

CM: Julie is an actor – Jackie Blackmore. We are considering possible offline marketing tactics for Julie based on the success of the site.

TR: Very cool. So how did you manage the redesign process?

CM: For the creative process for the online greeter development we created a list of products, services and top searched terms and popular pages to create skits. Scripts were provided by our agency on each topic for review, and once the content of the skits was finalized a three day shoot was completed to film the skits. The clips were reviewed and selected, edited and polished for audio and compressed for use with Flash video. Development for the greeter application was completed by Burnkit, which included a CMS tool that allows us to manage the skits and videos, search terms and promo links, as well as a robust reporting tool to gather stats on popular skits, search terms, user session data and more.

TR: Who actually wrote the copy (it’s absolutely amazing, by the way) – and how tough was it to balance entertainment and humor with professionalism?

CM: The copy was a joint effort with in-house subject matter experts and a writing committee, and our agency. Page content was reviewed for accuracy and broken down to its base message and content – a lot of unnecessary content was removed. E-business development worked with Marketing and our agency to create a writing style guide. From there our writing committee (made up of a member from marketing, communications, and my department) wrote most of the copy, and then sent it to our agency to add the humour. The balance of humour and professionalism has always been one that has tightly defined and executed with Coast Capital Savings, as our approach to banking has always been a little different. Our goal is always to offer simple financial help – breaking down our products and services to a base level and taking a light approach to topics that are often considered to be of a serious nature.

TR: What’s your member response been?

CM: Quite positive – as far as launches go it has gone very well, with a handful of issues and a small amount of negative feedback. We’ve had a lot of very positive feedback from both members and non members.

TR: Speaking of feedback, have you thought about blogging with your members or adding RSS to the site?

CM: Yes, both. We’re investigating both aspects and hope to implement both in the future.

I’ve been watching for Vancity’s entry into social media for a while now – so much so that I feared a letdown. Oh my goodness, I was wrong! Thank you Vancity for launching this project.

Without a doubt, it’s the best example of any financial institution successfully using the social web (blogging, user-generated content, building a true online community). Wells Fargo should be taking notes along with every credit union with a culture open enough to participate in social media with their members.

From Rob Cottingham’s blog:

Targeted to people living in Vancouver, the Lower Mainland and Victoria, ChangeEverything.ca is a place where people can discuss, plan and make changes. Some of the changes are modest in scope (I want to get my bike out of storage, for instance), but some are a lot more ambitious – scrapping Daylight Savings Time or providing affordable housing for families with kids.

Users list their changes and blog about them… but that’s only the beginning. The real fun starts when users join each other’s changes and start collaborating and communicating. Even though it’s early days, you can already see the cross-pollination beginning to happen.

The site ties in with Vancity’s Change Everything ad campaign, but goes way beyond what you’d usually think of as marketing. That’s part of what’s made it such a joy to work on this project, especially since Vancity really gets the social web. I don’t know of another financial institution that’s launched such an open, inclusive online community.

Where do I start? Flickr integration. Members building content to affect change throughout the community. This just scratches the surface. You must visit the site and see for yourself.

It’s exactly how the brand of a “credit union” is supposed to be represented. Efforts like this can change the entire industry/movement/whatever-you-care-to-call-it. And while I’m on that point, this site says “movement” not industry.

Brent just blurted out, “This is awesome. I signed up for an account.” Brent is hard to impress. As am I.

Yesterday, the new filene.org went live. I fully believe that Ed himself would have been a blogger – and he would’ve been pleased with the flattering pictures of him on the site. Check it out, leave a comment, and download some reports if you’re a member.

On the topic of Filene, one of their i3ers just happened to spend yesterday in our office – our good friend Doug True. We realized something pretty cool after we caught up for a couple of hours: this was the first time we’d met outside of email and our blogs.

And finally, one of our new friends Josh Jones of CUNA just hooked us up with a link to his blog, People, Not Profit. Enjoy!

We stumbled upon the new website for a Canadian credit union yesterday. It’s for Coast Capital Savings, and it’s hands down in the top 1% of credit union sites (and CU marketing in general, for that matter).

Here’s the conversation we had internally yesterday about the site. (Brent didn’t type his thoughts out, but he was quite impressed. I’m sure he’ll leave something in the comments.)

Matt’s opinion:

The more I look at this, the more impressed I am. Take a look at the Online Banking page.

The code is clean, the content is funny:

Lines of credit: Be a loan shark to yourself. With a CoastLine personal line of credit attached to your chequing account, you can write yourself a loan anywhere, anytime. Just remember to pay yourself back, because you know where you live.

They even used sifr (font) on their article headlines.

Raises the bar for us a bit, I think.

Mark’s opinion:

Sure … I’ll bite …

Homepage – Excellent! A https homepage allows direct login to online banking. Very clean seperate areas of focus. Julie kind of freaks me out … her loop is very evident and she blinks alot … if you stay on the homepage long enough. I understand the message they are going for … and at least she’s not wearing a headset :)

Navigation – Awesome! Top level 1 and 2 with the sidebar coming in if it goes deeper. I like the addition of the sidebar nav on deeper page … you don’t need ads there on level 3 … people are already seeing what they came for … no need to divert them. Also I like the use of content banners on the main links, and then their removal on deeper pages.

Overall I think the site is good … just a little on the casual side in most aspects … colors, fonts, content, ads. It’s always a hard balance between being personal and professional … so that sparks some questions in my mind.

Which side is it better to err on a credit union site?

Will being too casual or businessy ever turn people away? Will it ever draw people in?

My opinion:

It’s easy on the eyes, intuitive, and the brand is carried out on every page in both the design and content. By far it’s the best CU site I’ve seen.

Great use of cookies for returning visitors with the surprisingly non-annoying Flash girl saying “Welcome back. Was there something else I could help you with?” – right before she broke into the robot and knitted the Coast Capital logo. It feels weird to say it, but they pulled it off without being cheesy.

And yes, I typed a-dollarsign-dollarsign in the Other Products search box to see what she’d say. She told me she’d trace my IP address and call my mother. :)

I just got an email from Mark, a fellow Trabianian*, pointing me to a Pew Study about the internet’s role in key life decisions – PDF File.

Highlights include (based on the May 2005 survey):

• Over the last three years the number of internet users who used the internet to help make investment or financial decisions increased by 45%
• Within the past two years 41% of internet users have “Made a major investment or financial decision”
• Only 5% of people who said the internet played an important or crucial role in their decision said they got bad advice or information online

That last stat got me to thinking about the most frequent bit of misinformation I’ve found on credit union websites: I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen incorrect IRA contribution limits listed (presumably because contribution limits have changed so much over the past few years). And now that the deposit insurance for IRAs has increased to $250,000, I’m betting a lot of sites still don’t reflect that change either.

—

On a completely unrelated topic, one of my favorite blogs, Ask Uncle Bill, included a quote today that would make Yogi Berra smile. I dub it The Open Source CU Quote of the Day:

Overnight success usually takes a long time.

Read Uncle Bill’s Advice From A One-Earred Man post to give the quote some context.

*Personal to-do list: Make up new word today … check.

You may or may not have noticed that we’ve made a few tweaks to the design of this site. If you haven’t…well, notice.

Speak up

The primary change was to make the comments more prominent. We really do want to hear what you have to say, and have a little office celebration every time someone decides to leave their thoughts on a post. Our goal here is to charge discussion, and we’re going to keep pushing that until the bitter end.

So come on: Discuss! Embellish! Disagree! Talk trash! Discuss!

Nice to meet you

We also added brief bios, including photos, for each of us. Click our names to meet us, and see the roster of articles we’ve written. Trey’s roster makes Matt and me look like slackers.

Subscribe

The link to our RSS feed , that orange icon labeled “Subscribe,” is also more prominent now. Not sure what it’s for? Read our article, “The Complete Idiot’s Guide to RSS…for Dummies,” on this incredibly easy way to have our articles hand-delivered to your doorstep, so to speak.

Check out our friends

We’ve also added a section of links to other credit union blogs out there. Check them out, and get in touch if you’d like to be added.

With all the discussion of the need for credit unions to blog with their members, all of us at Trabian decided that we needed to start practicing what we preach.

We redesigned www.trabian.com and made blogging an integral part of it.

In case you don’t know, we make our living as a credit union website development company. The new Trabian blog is our way of showing clients, critics, and the curious what keeps the doors open. Open Source CU is our way of sharing ideas we’ve picked up along the way with anyone in the industry who wants to listen.

Whoever you are, thanks for reading either and/or both. We do all we can to make every post worth your time. The only way we know if it’s truly worthwhile comes from your feedback.

Hold us accountable for what we say – as a CU vendor on the Trabian blog and as passionate believers in the credit union movement here on OSCU.

As a follow-up to Trey’s post on improving your website, one of today’s most popular stories in the blogosphere is the Nature article Web users judge sites in the blink of an eye. Specifically, a user gets his/her impression of the quality of your site in the first 50 milliseconds of viewing:

Lindgaard and her team presented volunteers with the briefest glimpses of web pages previously rated as being either easy on the eye or particularly jarring, and asked them to rate the websites on a sliding scale of visual appeal. Even though the images flashed up for just 50 milliseconds, roughly the duration of a single frame of standard television footage, their verdicts tallied well with judgements made after a longer period of scrutiny.

In the crowded and competitive world of the web, companies hoping to make millions from e-commerce should take notice, the researchers say. “Unless the first impression is favourable, visitors will be out of your site before they even know that you might be offering more than your competitors,” Lindgaard warns.

The article also describes what research shows to be the ingredients of a good-looking website.

Attention All Credit Unions:

You’ve got to improve your web presence in 2006. No excuses.

Personally, I didn’t set foot in any of my credit union’s branches this year. In fact, if they built a branch at every intersection in Texas, I still wouldn’t be dropping in. I do, however, visit their website often, so all interaction with my CU occurs online.

If you want to reach me, you’ve got to do it online. Your outdated site has got to go. It screams unprofessional. Imagine me showing up in your lobby having not bathed or groomed myself in five years.

Don’t wait for a survey to come out to tell you the website needs your immediate attention or for a marketing conference later this year to point it out. Take my word for it.

Begin with this 10-step list. It’s not a total redesign, but hey, it’s a start.

1. Step into your user’s shoes and make sure the website works for them.

• Test your site on several browsers – including Firefox, Safari, and Opera – to make sure it works across the board for all users. Go through the site page by page with Firefox, in particular, as more than 10% of Internet users are browsing with it.
• Change the resolution of your computer monitor to the highest setting allowed (right-click on your desktop and select Properties and then the Settings tab if you’re using Windows). Many of your site’s visitors have already moved away from 800×600 screen resolutions.
• Take fifteen minutes to invent scenarios that would bring a member to your site. After inventing, find the least technology-savvy person you know to perform those tests starting at the homepage. Watch them closely as they browse. Take notes on what confuses them. Examples include:
  • “I’m looking for your savings rates. After I find them, I’d like to apply for an account.”
  • “I’m trying to get set up on the online banking tools, but have never done so before. Oh yeah, it’s during off-hours so I can’t call your help desk for advice.”

2. Compare your print marketing pieces (including Annual Reports, credit card designs, billboards, etc.) to the look and feel of your website. If the styles don’t match, they should. Sending a consistent brand message is crucial.

3. If anything on your website (1) blinks off and on or (2) is animated to scroll across the screen from right to left, remove the animation. That’s fine for your in-branch LED displays but it’s one of the worst things you can do to your website. Why? It distracts from your message, clutters up your site, and is a dated design technique (see example below in 3a). Plus it’s just plain annoying; it would be like a teller going “Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey!” inside of a branch.

3a. The waving American Flag animated GIF circa 1996 (see below) must go bye-bye. Using a still image of an American Flag in your marketing materials is fine; it’s the animated GIF that isn’t.

4. Cut the fluff. Keep your content as short and sweet as possible.

5. Don’t underline anything that’s not a link.

6. Teenage members should never be called “kids.”

7. If you have a splash page, nix it. There are no exceptions to this rule. Splash pages do much more harm than requiring an extra click to get to your real content; they also hurt your search engine rankings.

8. If your domain is www.samplecu.org, make sure “samplecu.org” points to your site as well. Ask your tech department to make it so.

9. Never link your users to a PDF File without indicating it’s a PDF File. Also, don’t make any part of your menu link to a PDF File.

10. Check your site map to see if it matches the actual contents of your site. Broken links must be fixed immediately.

10a. Make sure your search tool accurately searches your site. Try different terms like rates, apply, and join. If you’re disappointed with the results, just think of the frustration your members feel when searching for those same terms.

Here’s a few “Steps to Help Your Homepage Grow Up” from the adaptive path piece Is your homepage immature?

• Think of every pixel as dynamic content. Very little on your homepage – besides the navigation and logo, of course – should be considered permanent.
• Divide the homepage into sections representing some of your brand directives. Be concise and direct on the homepage so that the amount of content doesn’t overwhelm users.
• Consider creating a section for quick links. Watch your logs and note the most popular destinations according to a predefined metric. Change the quick links to reflect these top destinations weekly or monthly.
• Don’t feel obliged to list products. Trust your navigation and product-finder tools. Visitors will know where to look for what they want.

I’ll take this opportunity to suggest something else: download the Firefox browser, then visit your own website. You may be surprised at what you see (or – more accurately – what your members using Firefox can’t see). BTW, Firefox recently passed the 100 million download mark and it’s barely a year old.