CUNA Launches Website to Showcase Credit Union Impact
"Advancing Community" includes stats and stories from across the country.
CUNA has created a new website to help credit unions tell their stories in a way that will be heard by policymakers.
The “Advancing Community” site launched Monday is designed to promote the value of credit unions using brief text by theme, short videos of members and links to state-by-state statistics.
“The campaign was made in collaboration with state leagues to reinforce how credit unions are providing personalized support to members navigating difficult circumstances, namely financial recovery from the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic,” a CUNA news release said.
The site is organized both by geography and themes: Creating opportunities for underserved populations, expanding financial services in rural areas and helping small businesses thrive.
Richard Gose, CUNA’s chief political officer, described the website as a “quilt” of materials that covers the broader story of credit unions and their mission, providing a chance for lawmakers and policymakers to hear about credit unions for the first time, or reinforce their importance.
The site is designed to be used by credit unions and their leagues to pull together information and media for targeted audiences of lawmakers, policymakers, think tanks or others in a position to influence the credit union mission.
“The beauty of this thing is that each one of the state sites will take on their own personality as they change and grow,” Gose said.
Clicking on “In Your State” presents a U.S. map. Clicking on “Tennessee,” for example, pops up a sheet of credit union statistics for the state. A link at the bottom of the pop-up invites the viewer “to learn more about” the state where it detects you’re located.
There ain’t no place this writer would rather be, but CUNA carried him instead to South Carolina, where he could see state-level facts and a video from a member of Carolina Foothills Federal Credit Union of Spartanburg, S.C. ($143.7 million in assets, 16,656 members).
Manually rewriting the web link from “/state/south-carolina/” to “/state/Tennessee/” carried this writer back to Tennessee.
The Tennessee Credit Union League has used the CUNA template and built it out like the national site, but with a Volunteer State twist throughout. Its landing page video includes views from Beale Street in Memphis to a glimpse of the 1982 World Fair-famous Sunsphere in the Knoxville skyline.
Down the page and three miles to the west on Middlebrook Pike, Ian Dovan holds forth on a video about his five-year relationship with UT Federal Credit Union of Knoxville, Tenn. ($367.2 million in assets, 24,662 members).
Dovan is founder and “commander-and-chief” of Seeds of Change, a faith-based lawn-care enterprise that hires people who are homeless, recently incarcerated or otherwise in need.
The Knoxville business has grown to $1 million in revenue and a workforce of 20 people.
Like many small businesses, the COVID-19 pandemic wreaked havoc, and Dovan was having trouble meeting payroll by the time the Paycheck Protection Program began in April.
He turned to UT, but it wasn’t set up to handle the program yet. “At the time only the big banks had the bandwidth and ability,” he said.
So he mined his contacts at area banks, and found they all had long waiting lists.
He was surprised a few days later when he got a call from UT, telling him they could take Seeds of Change’s application.
“I was impressed by how quickly they built a system out,” he said.
And he said he could tell “they were working tirelessly” after getting an email in the middle of the night over a weekend.
Banks are now more interested in working with him now, and he often gets offers.
“I’m pretty loyal,” Dovan said. “I say, sorry, you didn’t take the risk with me before when I was getting my first business started.”