WASHINGTON– At the same time the CUNA-backed awareness campaign known as “Open Your Eyes to a Credit Union” is reporting robust growth in “consumer consideration” of CUs and website traffic, a CUToday.info analysis shows that in approximately half the states in which the campaign is running membership growth has been negative over the past year.
But membership growth has not been what the initiative is about, according to one person, who said tools to help people join credit unions are now in planning stages and should debut next year.
CU Awareness, LLC, the entity created by CUNA to oversee the Open Your Eyes campaign and the YourMoneyFurther.com website, recently released updated figures showing credit unions and leagues in 27 states are providing financial support and have signed on to the national effort, which in 2018 announced a goal of spending $100-million on the initiative.
The website has seen more than nine-million consumer visits, and raised nationwide consumer consideration for credit unions as checking/savings account providers to 19% from 13% and as lenders to 22% from14%, according to CU Awareness.
But the latest NCUA Quarterly U.S. Map Review, which is based on June 30, 2021 data, reveals that in the 27 states where the Open Your Eyes campaign is currently running, credit union membership has actually declined in approximately half of those states over the past year.
Growing Vs. Not Growing
The states in which the primarily digital Open Your Eyes messaging is appearing and in which membership growth has been positive include Idaho, Minnesota, Missouri, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, Oregon, South Carolina, Vermont, Washington, Wisconsin and Wyoming.
But the same messaging is also appearing in states where as of mid-year credit unions had fewer members than they did one year earlier, including Arizona, California, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, North Carolina, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Texas and West Virginia.
Chris Lorence
Overall, NCUA data show growth has declined in 24 states and the District of Columbia in the year ending June 30, with Pennsylvania reporting the largest membership decline at 1.7%.
Overall membership growth in the U.S. has continued to increase, but that has been almost exclusively among the largest credit unions. During the year ending in the second quarter of 2021, NCUA said at the median, membership declined 0.4%. Membership declined 0.3% at the median during the preceding year (over the year ending in the second quarter of 2020). Overall, about 55% of federally insured credit unions had fewer members at the end of the second quarter of 2021 than a year earlier, NCUA data show.
Credit unions with falling membership tend to be small; 65% had less than $50 million in assets, according to agency analysis.
Focus on ‘Consideration’
Chris Lorence, executive director of CU Awareness, LLC, told CUToday.info he is aware of the membership numbers, but the objective of the Open Your Eyes initiative has never been growth but instead has always focused on consumer “consideration” of credit unions as a financial services option.
As CUToday.info has previously reported and as Lorence reiterated, the research conducted prior to launch of the awareness effort uncovered two primary “myths” about credit unions: many consumers do not believe they are eligible to join a CU and, if they do join, they believe they will not have easy access to their funds.
“The entire impetus behind the whole program, whether it’s Open Your Eyes or Your Money Further, was really focused on first capturing the attention and the awareness of consumers that are not credit union members and getting them to at least consider a credit union as a financial option,” said Lorence.
Lorence said all consumers are surrounded by countless digital marketing messages and other advertising every day, including from social influencers, but whatever is being marketed and promoted won’t get very far if the consumer has a “block that says, ‘I'm not considering you’.”
An Unforeseen Development
Lorence, who said he believes the membership growth “will come,” noted that in January of 2019 when the campaign launched no one envisioned that a pandemic was coming a year later.
“This is a partnership between credit unions and Credit Union Awareness. If credit unions are focused on taking care of their members and their communities, I'm not surprised membership wasn't lifted during the COVID pandemic,” he said. “It's not directly related to what the paid campaign was doing, which is increasing consideration.”
Lorence said Credit Union Awareness did pause the campaign for 62 days during 2020 in response to the pandemic, when he said there was other “positive outreach” and “pro-credit union messaging” in the markets on the assistance credit unions were providing.
“Whether credit unions were marketing or not, there was a system in place that was talking positively about them so that as consumers became aware or they were looking for financial services, they were receiving advertising or receiving pro credit union messages to begin to get into their heads that credit unions may be a financial option for them,” said Lorence.
The Membership Metric
Has there been discussion that membership growth should be a factor to be measured when it comes to Open Your Eyes?
“Our strategic plan is focused primarily on step one and that was our foundation,” Lorence responded.
Lorence said that three years in, the campaign’s target for longer-term market share is “definitely within our sites.”
The credit union representatives who comprise Credit Union Awareness’ board, he said, as well as its Marketing and Industry Insights group have been satisfied that the initiative is achieving its strategic objective of lifting consumer consideration “by a larger margin than we expected.”
Those individuals, he added, are now “helping us shape the next leg of the journey.”
Lorence said three-quarters of the visits to YourMoneyFurther.com have occurred in the past 18 months, indicating that as “consumers have been quarantining and using their mobile devices they've been getting the ads and they've been clicking, they've been visiting and they've been learning about credit unions.”
Lorence said the data and measures around “consumer consideration” is gathered via what are now biannual surveys, after being conducted annually in 2019 and 2020. The most recent numbers released reflect surveys conducted in July of 2021. The surveys are conducted online using a survey firm that probes for both unaided consideration and aided consideration, as well as ad recall. Additional input is also gathered around data around perception, including implicit and explicit reactions from members and non-members alike (specific findings appear below).
“We’re interested in seeing what happens to that consumer once they become a member and we've seen that, for example, if a nonmember consumer doesn't necessarily think that a credit union is easy to access, once they become a member it opens their eyes and that no longer is an issue,” Lorence said.
Lorence said the research has not really offered any insights into how the pandemic may have changed the way people consider financial institutions and the issue of access.
The Next Conversation
But Lorence also acknowledged the next conversation is going to be around marketshare, which he said is going to require a “bigger partnership with credit unions.”
“We want to make sure that if we're out beating the drum, consumers can now physically find a way to join a credit union. We need to make sure that credit unions have that door open and the ability to click and join,” said Lorence.
Tweaking the Messaging
What about the messaging itself? Has the research led to any tweaking of the language being used to change consumer perceptions?
The answer is yes, according to Lorence, who said “one of the interesting things about a paid digital campaign is it gathers market intelligence” that generates insights from what he called “uber-intelligent solutions” such as the Google Display Network.
The Google Display Network, said Lorence, is “looking at the person on the other side of the screen and saying who are you, and then creating ads that are delivered to that person. They basically get something that's very appropriate to them so we don't come out of the chute saying, ‘Hey, credit unions are fantastic.’ Our message testing shows us that consumers are really focused on things like investing and savings and making my money work harder for me, so, as an example, when we go in with the approach of ‘It's your money working hard for you,’ that's what captures the consumer’s attention and gets them to click through.”
From there, said Lorence, additional information is delivered on how a credit union can help them make better use of their money, which he described as a “solution type of approach.”
The CU Feedback
But with membership not growing in half of the states in which the campaign is running, having slowed overall nationally during the pandemic, some credit union leaders who have spoken to CUToday.info have questioned the ROI.
While Lorence said the feedback from credit unions toward the Open Your Eyes effort has been varied, it has not been about what the membership data is showing.
“It runs the gamut,” said Lorence. “Again, the pandemic has really added a layer of complexity that probably was never anticipated. The campaign is designed to be turned on locally and customized by a contributing credit union. We're updating the material on a quarterly basis, adding new content and campaign graphics, etc. And credit unions use it make it their own. We have others that have probably much more robust marketing teams and are using more of the organic social content in their own channels and using the messaging guide.
“But what we're hearing mostly from credit unions is they like the research, they like the insights that we give them on a quarterly basis, so we're able to tell credit unions in Kansas, for example, ‘Here are the ads and the messages that consumers in Kansas are responding to most favorably,” Lorence continued.
The campaign also provides other online metrics, such as traffic information, data on number of visits, where visitors are coming from and insights into where within a state member prospects are most likely to be found.
Where to From Here?
When asked about where the Open Your Eyes/Your Money Further initiative goes from here and whether membership growth will become a metric in the future in deciding on the success of the campaign, Lorence said plans call for building out functionality that allows consumers to move past just visiting the website to using the website to join a credit union.
“We’ve had 10-million people visit YourMoneyFurther.com and we've had a billion video views of the videos in the two-and-a-half years since this program has been launched,” said Lorence. “We now need to take those video views and those visits…and create a consumer journey more directly to credit unions.”
The YourMoneyFurther.com site currently includes a “Find a Credit Union” button, but Lorence said plans call for enhancing that functionality in early 2022, and then replacing that site with what Lorence called a “a much more robust consumer resource” that will be able to narrow down for consumers the credit unions they may join.
That would include functionality allowing CUs to add their own text or for the consumer to set up an appointment so that as the “consumer is coming through the digital journey that we've created they have a digital destination in mind and the credit union can basically pull them through the marketing funnel. We’re at the very, very top of that funnel with awareness and consideration. The next step is an actual conversion, so we want to get that consumer closer to the conversion stage so that contributing credit unions can reach in and pull them through the funnel.”
The Data Points
In its most recent release of findings from the research, CU Awareness, LLC said the data show:
- Over 60% of consumers who visit YourMoneyFurther.com have household incomes of $50K or less
- About 67% of site visitors are non-white, 29% identify as African-American, and 33% identify as Hispanic
- Nearly 60% of site visitors have no college education and 52% have children
- Consumers who engage with the campaign are 2.3x more likely to also be searching for credit, debit, and personal finance education