PLYMOUTH, Minn.-A small group of members has a much better understanding of their credit union's inner workings after attending a "Behind the Scenes" day at TruStone Financial FCU here.
The event, held at the CU's headquarters, was the brainchild of CEO Tim Bosiacki. Members were invited via a small notice on the back of the invitation for the annual member meeting, according to Marketing Manager Katie Grindeland.
"We crossed our fingers that people would be interested ... and responses started coming in almost immediately," she said.
In the end, about 20 people RSVPd, a list that was narrowed to nine based on responses to an advance survey about what the members hoped to get from the event.
"What we found was a general curiosity, and I think a lot of people didn't understand that there was more to a credit union than taking in a deposit or making loans," said Grindeland. "They didn't realize that we have an entire loss-mitigation department or a contact center made up of 20 people, or all these behind-the-scenes departments that they may never need or know about."
Grindeland acknowledged that nine members out of more than 57,000 is an exceedingly small portion. She pointed out, however, that because TruStone was unsure what to expect from the event-the first of its kind-it was important "to make sure it was something that we could control."
She added that because of the nature of the event, small groups are better so that "we're doing the members a service rather than a disservice and floating them from department to department and them not really getting anything out of it."
TruStone strived to answer as many of the members' questions as possible (based on the results of the pre-event survey), while keeping in mind that "we do this every day, so it's really easy for us to talk about it, but not always easy for us to explain it to a member," said Grindeland. Because CUs differ from other types of institutions, "the jargon we use and the way we conduct our business is something they're not used to, so we tried to bring it to a level that everyone would understand. ... We tried to give them an over-arching view of how the credit union is run-anywhere from an organizational chart to what happens in different departments," as well as day-to-day activities and some of the CU's strategic planning.
Two-Way Street of Learning
For all its members learned, Grindeland said that the CU learned just as much. "We came to the conclusion that we have a very captive, engaged audience that we're not leveraging," she said, adding that having the "conversation with members is the most cost-effective form of finding out more about what they want and what their concerns are. You can spend a lot of money on a focus group, but we had the focus group here."
Grindeland said the credit union will almost certainly repeat the event next year, possibly doubling the number of attendees to about 20 to allow a wider variety of participants. The agenda might change a bit in the future, but the overall content will not.
"This outcome was our best-case scenario," said Grindeland. "It was much better than we ever thought it could be."
