Day: October 19, 2007

Under the guise of Happy International Credit Union Day

I received an email yesterday from a large CUSO, first of all stating “This e-mail and any attachments may contain confidential and privileged information”. Interesting that a Happy Credit Union Day e-mail would have that. So I continued to read.

One sentence on Happy CU Day and a paragraph about CU contributions to the community in terms of ‘we’. Heah this is getting cozy. The final half of the email is titled with the buzz phrase “navigating the future” and a list of our common threats. You have heard them all before – credit crunch, mergers and consolidations (which should read take-overs), interest rates rising (their crystal ball must be pretty good to see that so clearly), leaders retiring (usually called succession planning), bank competition (instead of CU competition), eroding CU philosophy (how does a philosophy erode?), a stronger dollar (in case a lot of your commercial lending is in manufacturing and exporting) and of course the environment (thanks Carthage, Tennessee). You are then invited to take their poll to number your top 3 threats. WOW! Happy CU Day and here are the threats you face. Sort of a mixed message. The next birthday card I should send will be Happy Birthday Frank and bankruptcy may be the only way to get out of your excessive credit card debt.

And what are they going to do with the results of the survey? Prepare their Christmas message in a similar fashion with updated information? Probably.

I was thinking of taking the survey and stating some new ones.

1. The infiltration of bankers in the CU system.

2. The further and growing chasm between those who pay the bills and those who control the system.

3. The lousy 3rd party companies that we can’t get rid of and only bring us higher costs and bad service.

4. The ignorance of who we are and where we are going.

5. Stupid emails like this which are supposed to do what? Get us scared and run to those speaking today’s business mantras?

But the main point that needs to be said about this endeavour is how lame the message is and what a pathetic way to send it. I can’t show it to you (confidentiality) but it looks pathetic. Really pathetic. And we are supposed to swallow this? No thanks. I am taking the greatest delight of pushing my delete button with this one. We should have a contest to guess who this is from but then what would the prize be?

Boy did we have fun yesterday

It started out with a bad weather forecast for our area. They had been talking about this Pacific storm coming in with rain and high winds from the south west. That usually means a lot of water. In B.C. and the Pacific Northwest you have a number of definitions for rain. Some of them are: Looks a little gray, drizzle, showers, intermittent showers, rain, it’s pouring, it’s coming down.…..you can gauge how bad it is by how someone defines the rain. Yesterday we were all waiting for it to pour.

We got everything ready and then the members came. We had over 180 people come to our celebration of International Credit Union Day. That represents about 10% of our membership. In fact we ran out of hamburgers and had to head up and get more. We put together a video on YouTube so you can see some of what happened.

Every year, after its over, you sit back and wonder how it went. This year was pretty special. We purposely asked the members what they liked about the credit union and what they wanted changed. We took a video of it all and last night when I was editing the clips it struck me. We are doing a good job but we never really ask and hear directly from the members. This ia a real testimony that all the staff can see. Members really do like us. There is a community and social aspect of who we are. There are a few clips that I will put together for a future download. The one with Earl Lehman speaks of being an owner. It is one we need to watch occasionally. It’s a good reminder.