Credit Union Marketing Veteran: "We Don't Want to Go Back to Normal"

Mindy Uitterdyk is a credit union marketing veteran. She’s currently the VP of Marketing at UniWyo Federal Credit Union, where since 2011 she’s led their team through major strategic marketing endeavors including a rebrand and creating a customized member experience program.

Mindy is what we in the credit union marketing industry like to call a boss.

Today, she’s sharing how her marketing team is getting creative in connecting with their members during the COVID-19 crisis.

Here’s our Q&A with Mindy:

Q: As an executive team, what was your approach during those first few days and weeks?

Once we made the decision to close our lobbies, we also made the decision to get everyone remote. We got all 70 employees to be remote, except service reps and their managers. It was a huge endeavor for IT, and it all happened within a week.

Q: We’ve heard the word “pivot” a lot lately in credit union marketing. What has that looked like for your marketing team?

Once our marketing team was remote, I knew we had to pivot. We do a lot of in-branch events and a lot of community events. I knew we had to go digital and change our messaging.

We used talking points from On The Mark Strategies. We told people we’re here for them and we’re not skirting from what the situation is. But we also wanted to be there for people in a fun way. It’s not always about the products and services. It’s about UniWyo.

Access was our number one thing to communicate to our members. I needed people to know how they could access us digitally. Number two, I wanted our members to have an outlet or a release. We’re still a part of their family. We’re together but apart. That’s where the #stayathome challenge started with GooseChase.

Q: Tell me about GooseChase and UniWyo’s #stayathome challenge?

GooseChase is a scavenger hunt app that let us create challenges for families and individuals to complete at their homes. Every day, we released seven new missions on the platform that people submitted through photo or video. We had about 375 teams. People are having fun with it.

We also opened the #stayathome challenge to the community, not just UniWyo members. Now more than ever we need to all come together.

Lots of families are participating, which is what we wanted, but there’s also college students. That’s the beauty: this is being done all over the country.

Q: How has your team leveraged social media during the quarantine?

We definitely increased our online and social media presence. We do Sunday Funday, Wednesday Wisdom and Feel Good Friday. They’re all different things for people to do, trying to put out fun ideas for people. We’re also able to support local businesses by rewarding challenge participants with gift cards to local places.

We also added FAQs to our website to help get the word out there with little videos that show people how to do the things they can do online.

Q: As a marketing veteran, what is your take on how this crisis will impact credit union marketing in the future?

If they didn’t already, people are definitely going to up their digital game. That’s all we’ve been hearing for years, but now more than ever, if people don’t do digital they’ll get left behind. That’s true whether this ends soon or if we ride it out for a while.

For us at UniWyo, we’re realizing just how much we drove people into the branches and we want to capitalize on these digital platforms. We don’t want to go back to normal.