By Frank J. Diekmann
Some notes from the road, from former Sand States turned All-is-Now-Grand States, after recent trips to Las Vegas for CUNA Marketing & Business Development Council meeting and Phoenix for MountainWest CU Association annual meeting (and airports inbetween). But first a quick note on something that is clearly not acting its age.
CUToday.info turns six this this week: six months old that is. And what a remarkable half-year it has been. CUToday.info has quickly become the #1 digital news platform serving credit unions and the CU community. All of that is thanks to you, our readers, who have embraced and contributed to CUToday.info in ways we were hopeful for, but were never so optimistic in our rosiest projections.
In just 26 weeks CUToday.info has produced more than 2,600 news items, vids, ‘Tude-ish opinion pieces, and much more. The Fresh Today daily e-newsletter now goes to more than 10,000 people every day, and we even went Old School with a print issue earlier this year that was delivered to 5,000 credit unions, plus CUNA’s GAC, and we’ve got another print issue in the works!
As always, we welcome your input and feedback to CUToday.info—that is, after all, what has helped to grow so quickly. Thank you, and we look forward to hearing from you.
And now, in no particular order:
- “The brain is an amazing thing,” according to Lisa Bodell. “It starts working the very second we wake up in the morning, and it doesn’t stop until the very second we step into our office.”
Bodell’s humorously pithy observation was a prelude to a piece that she summed up as “if you want to save the credit union you must kill the credit union,” which was among the most highly read pieces we’ve published on CUToday.info recently. You can find it here.
In keynote remarks at the annual meeting of the CUNA Marketing & Business Development Council meeting (the group said it was the largest in its 20-years-plus history), Bodell said one reason so many meetings are unproductive is that most participants may be physically in attendance, but…
- 18%--laser focused on what’s being said.
- 25% are having a completely unrelated thought or a sexual fantasy.
- 57% of you are doing “on-demand thinking. This is where you’re thinking about the email, or an errand, or a phone call.”
Indeed, said Bodell, in organizations one thing that one of the reasons so many meetings about don’t lead to objectives being reached are the meetings themselves.
“If you want people to change, don’t give them a 12-step program,” said Bodell. “They want simple things they can do every day.”
When company employees are polled on what they want less of, “The first two things out of everyone’s mouth are meetings and emails. They are not there thinking about innovation and change.”
* If you’re thinking to yourself, I wish I could visit a completely obscure website at random right now, consider this. And if you want the story behind it, here you go.
- Noting that Apple Pay usage lags significantly behind Apple Pay sign-ups, one person recently told CUToday.info that he believes there is a cap, maybe 20%, on the number of people who will ever use the payments solution. Hearing that it was hard not to think back to the days of the so-called “33% ATM Wall,” when ATMs were first being introduced and the conventional wisdom was the hard-and-fast rule that just one-third of consumers would ever use ATMs. Ever.
Banks and credit unions placed people in branches to physically walk customers/members over to the ATM to walk them through a transaction. Perhaps the same is true of Apple Pay, and credit unions need to take the non-human process of downloading an app and add the human touch by making sure to explain how the whole swiping thing works with some in-branch interaction and online videos.
- At the MountainWest CU Association meeting one speaker observed (yet again) that “60% of Americans don’t know what a credit union is.” I think that might be one of the 73.8% of “facts” that are made up on the spot and which go unchallenged 84.2% of the time. But regardless of whether its 36%, 63% or 96% of Americans, the disconnect that always strikes me when someone makes this great pronouncement is, “Then who are all the people who are joining?” And even if these are indeed the clueless masses who are somehow accidentally wondering into credit union branches or mistakenly signing up via apps, credit unions have no one but themselves to blame for the ignorance. Do you want consumers and members to understand what credit unions are? Try telling them.
Frank J. Diekmann is Cooperator-in-Chief at CUToday.info and can be reached at fdiekmann@CUToday.info.