Something we like to go on and on about is how important it is for credit unions to live out their foundational brand of social change. In our podcast, we’ve talked about credit unions being built on social change from the beginning, and how the passion for this movement is grossly underutilized because it never seems to make its way outside of credit union employees.

That’s why I was excited to hear Robin Richmond’s session on “Creating a Community Development Program for your Credit Union.”

She went so far as to refer to Cause Marketing (marketing revolved around a cause) as a potential “pillar” of credit unions who run with it, and she said credit unions should consider hiring a full or part-time employee to handle community involvement.

She just barely touched on using the web as a catalyst for community involvement by encouraging credit unions to add a community calendar to their site. I feel like creating a network like Change Everything, where the volunteers themselves could carry a lot of the weight, would save gung-ho credit unions the need to hire a full-time employee.

Also, she focused on making sure your involvement is relevant and cautioned credit unions away from using philanthropy as a quick-fix to appearing compassionate. Basically, don’t be evil and manipulative. Which is a good call.

After the talk, I asked her if she had any ideas for quantifying the value in a community outreach campaign (I know, a very Ebeneezer Scrooge thing to ask). She didn’t really have a clear answer and basically said that you’re looking for long term growth, and the best way is to check in on market-preception of your credit union. Do they associate you with the good you’re making happen? So the long-short of it is: no, she didn’t have a lot of ideas on how to measure it.

This made long-term growth sad, because it wants to be measurable, too.

I wasn’t crazy about her encouraging spam (“email blasts”) as a means of promoting the program. Let’s not annoy people into being decent citizens.

Overall, I really enjoyed it though. Her message revolved around credit unions being authentic and passionate from the inside out and using member passion to make their own role more meaningful. I saw a lot of parallels in her message to our own.