Spectra Sheds Light on DEI

Kristen Shultz, president/CEO of the $588 million Spectra Credit Union in Alexandria, Va., has spent nearly five years in her leadership position developing and supporting diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) efforts both internally and externally.

Internally, she’s created an incredibly diverse executive team. Externally, she’s taken on the immense task of tackling a set of expansive DEI marketing goals.

During a ceremony in November, her credit union was recognized as the winner of the CU Times 2022 LUMINARIES award for DEI – Organization. One of the many reasons her credit union won the award stemmed from a unique rebranding strategy to the name Spectra after it dropped its original name of Naval Research Lab Federal Credit Union.

As Shultz put it, the old name reflected a restricted field of membership, despite the fact it was open to the community. “So in developing a new name for the credit union, it was really important to us that everybody would feel welcome,” she said.

Incorporated into the rebranding strategy was an external DEI communications strategy that involved the heavy lift of ­creating a new animated website that reflected (literally) the new name Spectra – which is the plural form of the word “spectrum.”

Shultz explained, “We liked the tie back to the rainbow and all walks of life and everyone being a part of it and the prism reflecting light. You can see how the colors on the webpage change. It’s like light passing through it, so you get different shading of it. That was very purposeful as well. Of course, it was also important to us that the website was clean, but also reflected various types of people and various types of products. We also highlighted our commitment to our community in a way that we hadn’t done before publicly.”

CU Times spoke with Shultz shortly after the credit union won the LUMINARIES award. The following interview has been edited for style and punctuation.

CU Times: Walk through your leadership team and how it reflects your DEI efforts.

Shultz: My CFO and my COO are female, and I recently hired a CLO and he’s male. But my VP of retail and my VP of lending are also African-American females, and then I have two others who are male. You know credit unions, I feel, have always been really great about this. We’ve always been diverse, but I don’t think we’ve always advertised or celebrated that diversity because it’s just been a fabric of who we are. Right? That’s what we’ve always done. I’m really proud of our credit union and how we have embraced that.

CU Times: The diversity strategy appears to have expanded beyond your executive team. How?

Shultz: We also really have worked hard to serve our Hispanic community, which is a growing community in our area. So we have a number of bilingual staff. Our branch folks mostly, at least in one branch, are all bilingual. We have bilingual folks in our call center, our loan area [and we have bilingual] underwriters. We have bilingual staff everywhere so that those folks feel special when they come in and feel like we are really going to help them because nobody wants to come to a financial institution when you can’t understand what the forms mean. That’s not open. That’s not welcoming.

CU Times: And your corporate communications DEI plan traces back to one of your branch managers?

Shultz: It was another very deliberate act when we redesigned our website that it is in Spanish and in English. You know, I need to give some of that credit to one of our branch managers – his name is Victor Salas and he has been at the credit union longer than I have. But he is a champion for the Hispanic community, and he was a big driver for us making a mark in that community and helping them in a way that we hadn’t because of him. He was such a catalyst to helping them.

CU Times: How did you approach translating your entire website into Spanish?

Shultz: We really used those folks in our organization who are bilingual speakers, and our marketing firm also has some native bilingual speakers. So those teams worked together to make sure that the translation of the website made sense because as you know, there are many different dialects and words mean different things to different folks. So it really was a group effort to make sure that the words were generally the most accepted and would make sense to the most people. So it was that group I mentioned and Victor was certainly part of it. Our other bilingual folks in our call center and our marketing team really did most of the work there, and they did a beautiful job and our members really respond to it. They feel like they have a place to go where their language is right in front of them. They don’t have to worry about not understanding something because it’s written for them in their language.

CU Times: One reason your credit union won the LUMINARIES award was due to your inclusive advertising approach. Can you explain the “You Are Welcome” campaign?

Shultz: It was really important for us to put a broad statement out there that everybody would feel you can come to us even if you went someplace else and you didn’t feel welcome or you didn’t feel like you were good enough to be part of that financial institution. You are welcome at our credit union! And it doesn’t matter to us what your background is, what your ethnicity is, what your financial status is. You are welcome and you are important to us. And so that was really the tagline behind our rebrand. We want everybody to feel like they can come to us. And I will tell you so far, it seems to be working even better than we had hoped. We have record membership numbers this year and I’m really hopeful for a fantastic future for our credit union.

CU Times: As Spectra’s CEO, how does this make you feel in that you were able to achieve so many things with a rebranding strategy that reflected your DEI strategies?

Shultz: Wow. I don’t even know how to describe it. It’s such a feeling of accomplishment for the team. I’m the lucky one that gets to represent the credit union, but it’s the team that did all the work to make it happen. And that just makes me so proud, especially for the great work that we’re doing in the community. And I have done a core conversion in my past, and I thought that was the biggest project I’d ever been a part of. Well, that’s not true because a rebrand by far exceeded the core conversion because of everything it touched and all of the things that we wanted to do in that rebrand. It wasn’t just changing our name. It was changing our website, changing our outlook, changing our community focus. It’s really been fantastic! But I’m so proud. I guess that’s the word that I would use to describe it, and [I’m] so thankful for the hard work that everybody did to make it, to execute it in such a spectacular way.

CU Times: What’s next in your DEI journey?

Shultz: It’s only going to get bigger and better and we’re not stopping learning. You know, the DEI process continues, and one of the things that I heard recently that we need to add to our DEI considerations is acceptability for folks that are hard-of-hearing, or folks that have trouble seeing or [have] other sorts of physical limitations to make sure we’re meeting all of those. So I think we just scraped the surface and there’s so much more to come, and I’m so hopeful for the great work we’ll do.