Situation:

A small (420 member) Federal Credit Union was saying good bye to its founding General Manager who retired. The Board of Directors decided to hire a person who had no working background in Credit Union operations. The new manager wanted to bring in a marketing group to help him establish some new communication programs.

Strategy:

Because membership in the Credit Union is restricted to a well defined audience of about 2,000 employees and their families it was decide to create a program designed to reach the existing membership first and then target new accounts.

Tactics:

A newsletter redesign, and a postcard series were created. The news letter was sent monthly for the first three months and then every other month after that. It’s a single page / one color on printed on two sides.

The postcards each featured a bank service to call attention to how the Credit Union offered similar services to regular banks but at better rates. These were also done monthly at first then they took the alternating month from the news letter.

Once school was back in session we developed a poster campaign that echoed the postcard offering. These were put up in the main offices and teacher lounges in all schools in the district.

Results:

The client began to experience immediate results from the campaign. Current members began to comment on the new communication effort. They began to increase deposits and because we had launched with a Christmas Club program in September they had an upturn in new account openings. During the first year membership grew to 650. The second year it grew to 875. Deposits at the bank grew over 300%