The postmortem on last month's two failed merger attempts that were victims of member opposition hits on three ingredients: poor communications, a rushed timetable and lack of enough advance explanation to constituents and the public.

That was the assessment this week among merger consultants and the principal parties themselves as to what went wrong with the rejected mergers in Montana and Louisiana, the first such formal public defeats in years involving a member vote at large or mid-sized CUs.

"It seems pretty clear that the positive message simply did not get through and somebody in management or on the boards miscalculated potential opposition," surmised David Bartoo, head of Oregon-based Merger Solutions Group, which in serving a CU client has at times encountered a scenario in which concerns were not addressed in advance.