KickStart in action

Carole Wight, CEO of Holy Rosary CU in Kansas City, Missouri, recently shared with us an email exchange she had in regards to an inquiry into her use of EverythingCU.com’s KickStart online loan application:

Question: Once they fill out the on-line app, what is the process/member experience from there? 

Carole: Usually we are able to match the account number with the online application. We pull some quick loan data and promptly call the member back. Usually we have the information we need to move the loan to closing when we call so we are WAY AHEAD on the process.

Question: How has the process/member experience changed from before the on-line app? 

Carole: Before online application, they either didn’t call us because they were at work by the time we were open, or the process dragged on. They would call us initially and we would have to pull their credit and get back to them. All this took time and many times the loan was lost. Either because they never called or we didn’t have the jump we needed to catch the loan.

Question: How has it helped the staff in getting or processing a loan? What % of your loans go thru the on-line app comparative to the traditional process? 

Carole: That is a very interesting question. I don’t have a fancy system that captures numbers for me like this. I wish I did and I am getting ready to go there but I am searching for solutions. I would say 10%-20% of our applications come from KickStart. That is just a guess. NOW, if you ask me which of the most have the most successful close rate, I would say that KickStart helps us get closes. My staff like it because they have tons of information when they start to talk to the member. We have more loans because of KickStart.

If you have any questions in regards to KickStart, please feel free to email me at any time!

Member testimonials in Texas

Yesterday, I had a nice phone call with Susan Herring of Brazos Valley Schools CU in Katy, Texas. Susan is awesome, and had a glowing review of our PlumWall testimonial product, which she has been using ever since we rolled it out.

Here’s a summary of what she told me: Susan said she LOVES PlumWall and thinks it’s worth every penny.

She loves how easy it is for members to put their testimonials up, and that members use PlumWall to give their testimonials even more than the online survey system they use.

She also said that staff really enjoys when they are the ones featured in the system. Whenever a new testimonial comes in featuring a staff member, Susan emails it to everyone in the CU so that that staff member gets their moment in the spotlight of doing excellent things for the member, which naturally encourages everyone else to continue doing their great work for members so that they’ll get their turn in the testimonial spotlight down the road.

We are so thrilled that Susan is loving her PlumWall! Maybe it’s something that will liven up your own online member testimonials!

10.49% loan growth for our KickStart client

While the NCUA has not yet released the 4th Quarter 2012 5300-data for all CUs, it is available for many CUs on an individual basis.

We can’t help but be beaming proud of Carole Wight and Holy Rosary CU…. and the terrific results she’s getting with her EverythingCU.com KickStart.

I just checked the 4Q12 5300 report for Holy Rosary, and it’s even better than we thought it’d be! We were hoping they would maintain a 3.9% lending growth rate, and THEY WOUND UP BEATING IT! Lending is up EVEN MORE than the previous quarter! Loans are up by 6.3% in just the past quarter!

The last two quarters combined have seen Holy Rosary’s lending go up by 10.49%! If her loan portfolio continues to grow at that pace, her CU will have seen a TWENTY PERCENT increase in loans for the year! Wow! Never in our wildest imaginations did we think KickStart could have such an immediate impact on a CU’s loan portfolio, but the proof is in the NCUA 5300 numbers.

Here is the latest:
Dec 31, 2010: 4,758,649
Mar 31, 2011: 4,647,966
Jun 30, 2011: 4,623,701
Sep 30, 2011: 4,719,143
Dec 31, 2011: 4,918,250
Mar 31, 2012: 7,623,506 <– Merger with a smaller CU
Jun 30, 2012: 7,607,091
Sep 30, 2012: 7,906,605 <– 1st full qtr w/KickStart
Dec 31, 2012: 8,405,157 <– 2nd full qtr w/KickStart

If you are ready to give KickStart Online Lending a try, then check out the SPECIAL OFFER we are running, or learn more on the KickStart information page.

KickStart results are in… and they are outstanding

KickStart is EverythingCU’s new online lending product. Carole Wight, President of Holy Rosary Credit Union in Kansas City, MO is using KickStart, and is thrilled with the results.

With the release of the latest 5300 NCUA report through the Third Quarter of 2012, we now have some hard numbers that show Carole’s outstanding loan growth improvement with the help of her new KickStart Lending tool.

Holy Rosary’s Total Loans (Acct 025B in the 5300 report) over the last several quarters looks like this:

Dec 31, 2010: 4,758,649
Mar 31, 2011: 4,647,966
Jun 30, 2011: 4,623,701
Sep 30, 2011: 4,719,143
Dec 31, 2011: 4,918,250
Mar 31, 2012: 7,623,506 <– Merger with a smaller CU
Jun 30, 2012: 7,607,091
Sep 30, 2012: 7,906,605 <– 1st full qtr w/KickStart

So as you can see via the numbers above, aside from their merger, KickStart has helped them see significant growth in the loan portfolio for the first time in quite a while. Besides the 4Q of 11, and the merger in 1Q 12, loan growth has been almost non-existent or even negative. Now armed with KickStart, Carole and her staff are able to serve members who want loans who can’t make it into the branch for whatever reason, or who want to apply for a loan during non-business hours. This most recent quarter represents loan growth of the portfolio by $299,514, which is a 3.94% increase. If that rate of growth continues, the CU will see a $1.2 million increase on a yearly comparison basis, which translates to a 15% increase on a starting loan portfolio of $7.6 million.

You can understand how excited we are for Carole to be having such fantastic success with KickStart, and for her members that are being served even better than they were before. It’s a joy for us to see Carole’s happiness with the service backed up by the proof of the NCUA 5300 report.

Thank you Carole for being such a great KickStart client! We are so thrilled that it’s working excellently for you, your staff, and your members! We are eagerly looking forward to more credit unions adopting KickStart and helping even more members apply for their loans online quickly and easily.

For more information about KickStart, just click here.

Especially valuable for small credit unions

Matt and I recently had the pleasure of attending a small credit union conference in Zoar, Ohio, called Making History 2012. It was hosted by CDFI grant writing specialists, CU Strategic Planning led by Jamie Chase and Chuck Cockburn.

One of the reasons we were especially excited to attend was to meet in person one of our favorite clients, Carole Wight, President of Holy Rosary Credit Union in Kansas City, Missouri. Carole was a delight, and the work that she does at her credit union is impressive. Carole also uses KickStart, our online loan generator, and she loves the product. So much so that she wrote the following email to the Director of the Office of Small Credit Unions in Missouri:

Kevin:

I had to write you about EverythingCU.com. I use this site constantly.  You can download sample documents, get advice, purchase an online switch kit, watch inexpensive marketing webinars and have an online loan application system.

I soon will use all of their products. My outreach efforts are stronger as a small credit union because of this site.  Go to my homepage and look at my online loan application. The beauty is that it is designed so that there is no non-public personal information exchanged with social and account number.  It is just simple, but it works. I paid under $500 for the year for this site.  My loan volume has increased as a result.

Small credit unions need a tool like this. In my humble opinion, if they don’t see the value, we need to help them see the value. I would be happy to answer any questions you might have or meet with you. This is probably my number 1 tool for marketing information.

Thanks, Kevin.  Please feel free to have any interested credit union contact me also.

Carole Wight, President
Holy Rosary Credit Union
Kansas City, MO  64106

We are quite honored to call Carole a friend, as well as a client.

Thank you, Executive Members

On this bright and shiny spring morning (Patriot Day if you live in the state of Massachusetts), I’d just like to take a minute to thank all of you Executive Members of EverythingCU. Many of you have been with us since the very early days of the site (2001-2002), and many of you have joined the community along the way. I’m always gratified, honored, humbled and awestruck about the comments you have for the community here. And thank you for sharing the EverythingCU love with so many of your peers and colleagues, at your own, and other credit unions.

I know that this economy continues to be very tough, for both your credit union and your members, which is why we appreciate all the more that so many of you have kept EverythingCU Executive Membership in your budgets. There are currently 270 credit unions who are Executive Members, representing a combined 1,181 credit union professionals.

Just in case you aren’t completely familiar with all the benefits of Executive Membership, let me remind you of them so that you can be sure you are taking full advantage of your benefits.

• Executive Membership applies to all employees at your credit union, no matter if they are already signed up on EverythingCU, or if they sign up later, while the CU’s annual Executive Membership is still in effect.
• Executive Membership allows you to download an unlimited number of documents from the 1451 that you’ve contributed over the years.
• Executive Membership gets you discounts on the products that we offer, including the Online Switch Kit, Marketing Budget Report, Plumwall, Beehive, and Video Tutorials in the Knowledge Warehouse.

And as if all of that wasn’t enough, Executive Membership also gives you the option to post messages on the discussion anonymously for those times when you have a controversial topic you’d like to discuss without fear of reprisal.

If you are already an Executive Member, be sure to tell your colleagues at your credit union that they should register on the site so that they too can enjoy the benefits of your credit union is already receiving.

So thank you again, and enjoy this fine spring day!

Member Profile: Bobbie Garner

Unlike retail businesses, at an online business like EverythingCU.com, we don’t get regular in-person interaction with our customers. Which is one of the reasons I love speaking to CU leagues and conducting hands-on social media workshops for them. And it’s also the reason why I particularly loved the phone call I had today with EverythingCU’er Bobbie Garner.

Recently I got to meet Bobbie in person at the CU Water Cooler Symposium in Indianapolis at the end of October. Bobbie had just attended the first-ever EverythingCU Webinar Roundtable, so it was pretty cool to meet her in-person just two days later. At the Symposium, Bobbie told me that her credit union was really liking their new Beehive online budget tracking tool from EverythingCU.

Recently, I got to chat with Bobbie a little bit more, to find out how Beehive was working for her. She told me that she was excited to be using it for her 2011 budget, and that the credit union had looked at other options, but none was as easy-to-use and inexpensive as Beehive. It turns out that Bobbie works part-time for the credit union; and the marketing budget is coordinated between four people; herself, their full time Community Relations Specialist who is a recent college grad, and two other executives at Health Care Professionals FCU.

In the course of the conversation, Bobbie also told me that the budget that she has to work with at Health Care Professionals FCU is much more than her budget last year, thanks to EverythingCU’s Marketing Budget Report. She said that by using the “Export to Excel” function of several report pages, and turning them into graphs, it was clear that her credit union’s marketing budget was well below comparable credit unions. The CU Marketing Budget Report is also extremely inexpensive, and we keep it that way on purpose, both for selfish and altruistic reasons. We hope hundreds more credit unions take advantage of it; selfishly, because if CUs use it to get their budgets increased, we hope they spend some of those ‘extra’ dollars on us, but also altruistically in that we truly love to further the credit union movement, and increasing marketing budgets will spread the good CU word even farther.

Bobbie also mentioned that the EverythingCU site is a wonderful resource in its own right, and how she reminds the credit union’s Specialist to always check the Document Center before creating a new document from scratch since there are more than 1400 documents in that library!

Basically, we wish we could plant a tree to grow more clients like Bobbie and HCP FCU… they are big fans of EverythingCU (and we’re big fans of theirs), and they use many of our products: the Executive Membership, webinars, the EverythingCU CU Marketing Budget Report, and most recently our Beehive Online Budget Tracking tool. We’re thrilled that they are getting great value from being a part of this online community!

Under the hood of EverythingCU.com

EverythingCU.com’s programmer and Online Switch Kit guru, Adam Lueb, has just completed a page showing all of us some of the great things that your favorite online community web site is doing to further the credit union movement. I’ll highlight a few of the key stats in further posts to this topic, but for now you can check the page out here if you are a registered member:

EverythingCU.com Scorecard

One of my favorite stats from this page: Total discussion message views over the lifetime of EverythingCU.com (about 10 years now) is 1.1 million.

Photo credit: omniNate

Getting your member testimonials online

EverythingCU’s PlumWall continues to draw new member testimonials for the credit unions that have deployed it.

Here’s some of the latest stories that have been shared online:

Heartland CU in Minnesota:

“While on vacation there was a glitch with my Heartland VISA card. I can’t stress enough how the quick actions of Heartland Credit Union allowed my family and I to have a fantastic, uninterrupted vacation! An issue that has taken me days to correct at other banks was fixed within minutes! That outstanding level of customer service and attention to detail is what will keep customers loyal to Heartland for years and years. Thanks again to the terrific staff at Heartland CU.”

“Amy and Carol have always been great to work with. I have been a member for 15+ years and Amy just closed an auto loan for me super fast. It’s nice to see efficiency in motion & the personal touch they give. Many thanks!”

Innovations FCU in Florida:

“I recently switched to Innovations FCU because I was extremely dissatisfied with the customer service with my previous local credit union. I was very cautious….I checked out the online site first, then called the main branch to ask questions. The representative was extremely helpful. I have been banking with them for over 2 months and so far the experience has been extremely positive. No matter which of the 3 branches I have been to…. the customer service has been Wonderful! I use the online banking service… Great response when I had questions. I have been recommending Innovations to my family and friends!”

Centra CU in Indiana:

“Orchids to Rachel and Greg at Centra Credit Union, Edinburgh Branch for helping me so much when I discovered fraudulent activity on my account: Rachel for getting my card closed so quickly and Greg for refunding my account as soon as possible”

Fantastic that potential members are learning about the benefits of being a member of these credit unions!

Describing a credit union

Last week, some great conversation kicked up on EverythingCU about how to describe a credit union in 30 seconds. (Thanks, Butch!)

My own opinion is that describing a credit union is much like the fable of the six blind men and the elephant. Each of the blind men touches a different part of the elephant and comes away with a different idea of what the thing is.

Credit unions are like the elephant in this story. What a credit union is to you is different depending on what matters to you. Some love the low rates on loans. Others love the great rates on savings vehicles. Others don’t care about the rate on their loan, and are just thrilled that they CAN get a loan. Others love the personal service. Others don’t give a darn about personal service. Some love the convenience. Others love the INCONVENIENCE. (seriously, I have had more than one person tell me this conducting focus groups for credit unions. The “don’t tell my spouse I have this fund” account.) Some love the electronic services. Others love coming into a branch. Others love both. And believe it or not, some people love it because it’s a cooperative. Others love it because the money stays local, and makes the community better. Many could care less that it’s a cooperative, because “ownership” means nothing to them. Some love the no- or low-fees. Others love that the CU does what’s in THEIR financial best interest, even when it’s not in the CU’s best interest.

And that’s just off the top of my head.

WARNING: The rest of this message is a blatant sales pitch for EverythingCU’s new PlumWall product. BUT I only say it because I 1000% know it to be true, and I would be remiss in my duties to further the CU movement if I *didn’t* put this out there:

All of the above statement is exactly why we created PlumWall for your CU to utilize. It’s been one hundred years, and we haven’t come up with a universally agreed upon explanation for a credit union, nor a single brand statement – BECAUSE THERE ISN’T JUST ONE.

So let’s STOP looking for the “one right answer” and let our members tell everyone how THEY see it… because people relate to other people like them, and trust other people like them by a factor of 100-to-1 over any marketing that an institution puts out (especially a big scary financial institution). This is why single-SEG CUs are so successful and why no one comes running in the door when a CU goes to a community charter.

PlumWall lets your members tell others, online, why they love the CU. I can’t wait to read more of your members’ stories about how fantastic your CU is.