Making tracks towards ROI

Friends, Romans, Countrymen…

Well, okay. Credit Union folks.

Thank you for being engaged with the NTCUE competition thus far, and for your support. I wanted to give everyone a quick update on my project- Tracking the ROI of Financial Education- as I have been getting a lot of questions about it since the competition launched. For more information on how my project was put together, please click over and read this.

My next update will focus more specifically on financial education and why credit unions and communities need it. Today I want to talk about the other ways our tracking system is being used here at Fibre Federal Credit Union, and how your credit union can use it, too.

We were recently given an opportunity to participate in a new area resident welcome packet. These packets will be sent to families who purchase homes in our community. If someone brings in our included coupon and opens a new checking account, they will receive a $20 deposit into that account. Our first coupons go out in the next few weeks, and we are going to run the program for two months before trying to fine-tune it, in hopes that our sample size will be big enough to test our offer, process, and reporting methods.

These accounts will be coded differently from our financial education accounts, as they are the result of different efforts and goals of the credit union. The account codes are unrestrictive and merely serve as a way for me to pull a report on them later.

I know this isn’t revolutionary, but I think that sometimes the best ideas don’t have to be. What is different than that same old $20 offer will be the level of tracking we give to these accounts. The tracking will go beyond “how many were opened” before a promotion gets dropped. Instead, the tracking will take a long-term approach to seeing how profitable these members are over time, for programs that we anticipate offering for a significant amount of time. 

Other things we anticipate tracking include business development efforts, second chance accounts, and other community outreach efforts. Each different account population will have a different account code. At most I project five different codes, so as not to overwhelm our staff or create sample sizes that are too small to be meaningful. 

These are the things that speak to our focus on our communities and our mission to strengthen them through outreach and education efforts. As I have said before and will likely say again, these efforts reflect what credit unions are all about to me- our heart and soul. Credit unions are great at offering impactful programs and services, but don’t seem to be as great about tracking them- showing why they are valuable as well as validating. I have an opportunity to help my colleagues around the nation prove that doing the right stuff is also what helps make us profitable, and I couldn’t be more excited.

Shannon Cahoon