WEST JORDAN, UTAH -
Comedian Tim Allen's fictional television show, "Tool Time" served as a benchmark for the construction-themed promotion, which also included a gingerbread house-making contest, crowbar deliveries as teasers and employees wearing hardhats in the branches.
The campaign ran in the first quarter this year, and certainly got MACU members' attention: term deposits skyrocketed to $213.6 million from $94.7 million, and IRA deposits nearly doubled to $26.1 million from $13.5 million.
Matthew Clark, Mountain America's vice president of investments, and Nathan Anderson, senior vice president of sales and marketing, told the Credit Union Journal the campaign grew out of a desire to educate MACU's membership for the future. They realized the best method was to begin by educating the credit union's staff.
"Nathan and I put our heads together, because many financial institutions struggle to get their employees knowledgeable as to the difference between Roth IRAs and regular IRAs," Clark recalled. "We wanted to help our members in their lifetime financial pursuits."
As Clark and Anderson brainstormed with the rest of MACU's marketing team, a "construction" theme soon emerged. Clark said most of Mountain America's members do not do a good job of saving for retirement, even though putting away a little bit each month really pays off.
The construction theme led to a spoof of "Tool Time," a TV show that existed on Allen's 1991-1999 situation comedy, "Home Improvement." MACU's spoof featured Clark in Allen's role as "Matthew 'the Toolman' Clark" and Gordon Combs, the credit union's sales supervisor, in Richard Karn's "Al Borland" role.
"We had three goals," Anderson told CUJ. "First, get employees excited, which would get them talking to our members. Second, we wanted to get them educated. Third, we wanted to get our membership excited."
Mountain America wanted to go beyond a "typical campaign," Anderson continued. He said the $2.2-billion CU wanted to combine different elements of education, excitement and interest from members to get them excited about the topic, as well. The "Tool Time" spoof grew out of the theme of "building" retirement savings and the goal of getting employees excited, which led to a 10-minute DVD.
"Matthew and Gordon were dressed in hardhats and tool belts and helped introduce the campaign to our employees," Anderson said.
Added Clark: "We found a production studio willing to do it for a reasonable price. We wanted to make it fun and upbeat. It got some laughs and was money well spent. Once we had the 'Tool Time' video, we came up with the idea of 'marketing inspections' to make sure members' retirement savings are 'up to code.'"
Gingerbread houses continued the theme of building something, Clark said. MACU often looks for ways to allow its employees to have fun, such as contests in its branches. Clark said a gingerbread house-building contest got the staff in the mood for the initial branding effort. The next teaser was a crowbar, which employees were told they needed for a meeting.
The meeting the staff needed a crowbar for was an introduction to Precision Information's Educated Investor University. Mountain America also set up a one- to two-hour online "Retirement Readiness" course with pre- and post-testing to measure retention.
Of the employees who took the pre-test, the average score was 60%. Post-test, the scores went up to an average of 76%, which management termed a significant improvement. Keeping with the concept of making it fun for employees, Clark said the CU encouraged branches to participate in the Educated Investor University course by providing incentives such as a staff pizza party for every branch that had 100% participation. In addition, front-line employees received incentive payments for every referral they made to an investment services representative.
Clark said 420 MACU employees participated in the retirement readiness course over three weeks. He said staffers had to complete 26 chapters of content, which took about 90 minutes on average to complete. The readiness course gave details about different retirement products, contribution limits and specifics such as catch-up provisions for older members.
After the course was completed, Clark said employees carried "hard cards," which were similar to a cheat sheet. The hard cards gave "cues and clues" as to what to look for when talking to members.
"The feedback from the retirement readiness course was, 'This is hard, but we like it,'" Clark said. "Our employees realized if it was hard for them, and they work for a financial institution, then it must be hard for our members."
Said Anderson; "Everything we did to promote those products was tied to the campaign. That time of year [the first quarter] is when people are looking to contribute to IRAs, which makes the results even more significant."
Anderson and Clark said Mountain America expects to continue and improve upon the campaign in 2008.
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