When Credit Union Journal completed its latest redesign, we updated our news categories. The "credit and debit cards" category became "payments," for example. But easily the biggest category change was probably all-but-invisible to anyone not on our staff: the elimination of the "general news" category.
I know that doesn't sound like a big deal, but there was a pretty big idea behind it. Eliminating that one-size-fits-all, miscellaneous category forces us to rethink what is—and isn't—news. It forces us to stop and think about what a reader is hoping—and should be able to expect—to get out of reading a given article.
One of the types of stories that previously had always been relegated to "general news" was merger stories. Instead, those stories now reside in the "growth strategies" category—which is actually an interesting proposition when you think about it.
Sure, there absolutely are credit unions out there that see merging as a growth strategy. This has especially been true of credit unions that have pretty well penetrated their existing field of membership and see roadblocks to adding new groups or areas to their FOM.
But for many credit unions, merger is more an issue of survival than growth. They're either already at death's door or recognizing that without an herculean effort on their parts, that's where they're headed. Rather than fail their members, they choose to merge so those members will still have a credit union.
And while there's a plethora of evidence that, in credit union land, size does matter, girth for girth's sake does not a growth strategy make. I've heard it said 100 times: if you take two stagnant credit unions and merge them together, what have you got? A bigger stagnant credit union.
Growth by merger can be a good strategy—but then it's also got to be, well, strategic. There's got to be a plan in place to capitalize on the new-found girth. Without a strategy behind it, growth by merger starts to look an awful lot like that old "general news" category—it's what you use when nothing else seems to work and you don't have time to think just a little bit harder, press just a little bit deeper to find where the real opportunities to grow might be.
Editor in Chief Lisa Freeman can be reached at lisa.freeman@sourcemedia.com.
