During the 2020 CUNA Governmental Affairs Conference in February, Christopher Lorence urged attendees to “stand up, step up, and get fired up” about boosting awareness of credit unions, and to shift their mindset to one of growth and potential.
The Open Your Eyes to a Credit Union® digital campaign had just launched in 21 states (it’s now in 24) and engaged nearly 34 million people (now nearly 100 million), says Lorence, executive director of Credit Union Awareness LLC.
Focus
- Credit Union Awareness retooled its Open Your Eyes to a Credit Union® digital marketing campaign when the coronavirus hit.
- Increasing consumer consideration for credit unions remains at the core of the campaign.
- Board focus: Credit unions’ people-helping-people philosophy and people-over-profits mission are incredible differentiators.
When the coronavirus (COVID-19) hit the U.S., the campaign paused to retool and adjust its messaging.
It was time well spent.
“We used the pause to finalize the conversion to a new media partner while evaluating every message to ensure they aligned with our target audiences, our consumer consideration strategy, and the rapidly changing consumer mindset due to the pandemic,” Lorence says. “The Open Your Eyes campaign is quite unique. In the first 15 months of deployment we gathered a tremendous amount of data that we unpacked and looked at closely to help us restart in the new, COVID-dominated, economically challenged market.”
Lorence explains how Open Your Eyes can serve as a resource during the pandemic and details what’s next for the campaign.
Credit Union Magazine: How did the Credit Union Awareness team prepare for the campaign’s restart?
Chris Lorence: We knew we wouldn’t be able to pick up where we left off. We had to take into consideration the impact of COVID-19 on consumers and the overall impact on credit unions. Our approach was to “crawl, walk, run” to full restart. This approach opened the door to in-market A/B testing for ads and messaging to ensure we had the right tone, creative, and message to engage consumers.
In addition, we conducted two focus groups with millennials to check in on their financial well-being and mindset to help validate that the campaign restart timing was appropriate. The focus groups revealed that many of the same myths about credit unions persisted, but millennials were ready to receive information that was not coronavirus-related.
One thing stood out loud and clear: Consumers were not quite ready for the edgy, “fantastic future faster” theme from the pre-COVID campaign. The campaign did, however, need to stay focused on credit union differentiators and how consumers could gain access. The broader theme of Open Your Eyes is still relevant.
We were crazy busy researching, evaluating, strategizing, and meeting with our digital media agency to prepare for the restart. All the while our entire team went fully remote due to the COVID crisis. Our mighty team of eight is now spread over three times zones.
Q: Has the campaign’s primary objective changed?
A: Increasing consumer consideration for credit unions remains at the core of the Open Your Eyes to a Credit Union campaign. The opportunity presented in today’s consumer market allows credit unions to be seen clearly as much different than other financial providers in market.
Our people-helping-people philosophy and people-over-profits mission are incredible differentiators, which is no doubt why we’ve had such a positive restart response from consumers.
Q: What insights did you gain from the consumer focus groups?
A: The consumer focus groups were limited in scope, but they allowed the campaign to get a better understanding of where consumers’ minds were during the COVID-19 crisis. One group was with millennials who had children and the other with millennials without children. None of the participants were credit union members.
Our takeaways were that credit union membership and the ability to join were still unclear to many. Nonmembers perceived that credit unions had limited accessibility and scale compared to big banks and may not provide the same level of technology that large national banks do.
One major takeaway was that millennial consumers were not unhappy with their current financial relationships.
As found in previous research, once consumers learned more about credit unions during the focus group, they wanted to do more research and find more details about how to join.
Q: How does Open Your Eyes help credit unions during these unprecedented times?
A: Credit unions have an incredible opportunity to elevate their individual brands and focus on demonstrating the credit union difference locally during these unprecedented times. Because credit unions focus on their members and communities instead of profits, they have a clear edge in differentiating themselves in the marketplace.
The national Open Your Eyes digital campaign cuts through the clutter by targeting consumers who have expressed a potential financial need and providing them with opportunities to learn about credit unions. When credit unions partner with the campaign and use the campaign materials locally, they help connect the dots for consumers who take the next steps to include credit unions in their financial services search.
NEXT: Elevating the credit union brand with consumers
