The course, "Sustainable Business Strategy," presented research indicating purpose-driven organizations are both financially and socially more successful in producing better outcomes for employees, customers and the community.

The credit union executives in Boston talked about how they could expand beyond traditional financial measures of institutional strength and efficiency, like ROA, to measures of the credit union's impact on members and the community.

"This is a new way of thinking about performance from a credit union perspective," Johnson said. "It's thinking about your impact beyond just your four walls."

Measuring outcomes might be difficult, but it's worth the effort, said Taylor Nelms, senior research director at Filene Research Institute, a non-profit credit union think tank in Madison, Wis.

Credit unions should consider tracking metrics such as credit score improvement, racial and ethnic composition of members, savings rates and percent of loans to small businesses. "Credit unions have a long way to go in building out metrics that accurately reflect the impact they're having well beyond institutional growth," Nelms said. "I would love to have more transparency. It's less important what specifically you're measuring, than that you're starting to measure."

On the financial side, some credit unions measure how much money they're saving their members. Navy Federal Credit Union of Vienna, Va. ($103.1 billion in assets, 8.4 million members) advertises on its website that its members save $289 a year on average, including $158 on interest rates, and $131 on lower fees and discounts.

About half of Navy Federal's members are under 36 years old, and a third are active or former members of the military.

"We take pride in serving our younger members," many of whom are first-time borrowers for cars or homes, Jaspreet Chawla, Navy Federal's vice president of membership, said. "We can genuinely provide them with lower rates on lending products because our caps are different than what banks' are."

Some credit unions are considering going further, by measuring the degree of improvement or deterioration in members' credit scores over time. "You want to be seen improving members' financial profile," Johnson said.

For savings, some credit unions have created reverse-tier savings accounts that pay a member, say, 5% to 6% on the first $1,000 they save, and then charge a lower market-level rate after that.

Some credit unions are considering measuring how many of their members have adequate savings balances to pay an unexpected $500 expense. "There are still people who are challenged. Half the people can't afford a $400 expense," Johnson said.

In the 1990s, Callahan developed a tool to measure how well credit unions were serving members' financial needs. It called the metric "Return of the Member" (ROM) and relied on data publicly available through NCUA Call Reports.

ROM captures savings rates and loan rates, dividends paid and changes in share balances. It looks at the extent the member relies on the credit union as its primary financial institution through measures including the number of share accounts per member.

"The idea of that metric is flipping the traditional financial measures away from what you might normally look at," Johnson said.

Other measures can include fees per member. "If you're looking at what the value to members is, you want that lower," Johnson said.

The credit union difference in savings is key to CUNA's "Open Your Eyes to a Credit Union" advertising campaign. The campaign was launched in January and reached 11.8 million people in Minnesota, North Carolina and South Carolina by June 30. The campaign was extended in July to North Dakota, South Dakota, Indiana, Kansas and Missouri. More states are expected to join in September.

The campaign addresses research showing that many consumers – including many low-income consumers who would most benefit from credit unions – don't seek out a credit union because they're not familiar with them.

Part of the challenge for credit unions is that their membership has changed radically in recent years, and their capacity for understanding their members' needs has not kept up, Nelms said.

Many credit unions and CUNA have also been studying how to make credit unions stronger forces for equity and inclusion, CUNA Senior Economist Jordan van Rijn said.

"That's something we've really taken on," van Rijn said. "It's a new area for us, and we're just starting to get baseline data."

One starting point for van Rijn has been looking at compensation structures at credit unions and how they compare with banks. Credit union CEOs earn less from bonuses than their peers at banks. Among banks and credit unions with less than $3 billion in assets, about 24% of bank CEO compensation is directly tied to performance, compared with 7% at credit unions.

In a survey earlier this year, 1,085 credit unions responded to a CUNA survey asking them to identify factors used in awarding bonuses to top officers in 2018. It found:

• 48% considered earnings or return on assets, including 81% of those with more than $1 billion in assets.
• 42% considered loan, asset and membership growth, including 82% of the biggest.
• 25% considered portfolio quality, including 41% of the biggest.
• 22% considered member satisfaction or customer service, including 62% of the biggest.
• 12% considered new or improved products and services, including 23% of the biggest.
• 3% considered member financial education, including 7% of the biggest.
• 1% considered membership diversity or inclusion, including 4% of the biggest.
• 10% considered other financial performance indicators, including 20% of the biggest.
• 18% considered other non-financial performance indicators, including 24% of the biggest.
• 29% offered no incentives or bonuses, including 4% of the biggest.

For credit unions trying to enhance impacts beyond the income statement, often it's best to offer a higher base salary and use bonuses as a smaller part of compensation, van Rijn said.

"Otherwise, they're going to focus on just earnings and growth," he said. "Hopefully that's not all a credit union wants."