PHILADELPHIA–When Ardent Credit Union took to the streets of Philadelphia with a camera and asked people “Do you know the difference between a bank and a credit union?”, it found most had no clue. But it has come away from the experience with new clues for itself on messaging, marketing and more.

The $900-million Ardent Credit Union has for years participated in the “#ILoveMyCreditUnion” initiative that took place last week and which is aimed at being a one-day social media blitz to raise awareness of CUs. This year, Ardent sent a videographer and an interviewer—its own Gabby Collins—to ask people in Philadelphia what they know about the not-for-profit cooperatives.

As the video it posted on Instagram reveals, it found exactly one person who did—and it was a relatively loose understanding at that. 

The 34,000-member Ardent CU wasn’t surprised by the cluelessness of the average person on the street. It’s one of the reasons the credit union is active in social media channels and why it offers the Ardent Money Ninja Training App,  a proprietary financial education app geared toward kids and teens 6 – 19, that is a gamified experience that uses cartoon videos and quizzes to teach essential money skills. The Money Ninja-specific socials include Instagram and TikTok. 

On the adult education side, it offers CreditSavvy built into its eBanking platform, as well as First Home Concierge and Auto Buying Concierge programs to provide one-on-one support to guide members through major financial decisions. 

Week-Long Initiative

This year it sought to turn #ILoveMyCreditUnion day—which credit unions marked on June 25–into a week-long event that included educating consumers on its socials and offering one person the chance to a $150 No-Strings CD.

But it was the man-in-the-street interview video that was most telling this year.

Below, Alletta Emeno, chief marketing officer at Ardent Credit Union, discusses with the CU Daily the video, what it has learned, how the lessons have influenced its marketing and future plans, and more.

CU Daily: Tell us more about how your involvement in ‘#ILoveMyCreditUnion’ and how this video came to be.

Emeno: We’ve been participating and #ILoveMyCreditUnion day since the beginning and every year we try to do something a little bit different. Last year, we had a series of three giveaways over an entire month culminating with the final big prize. But this year we kind of decided to do something a little different. Those of us that work for credit unions think everybody understands credit unions and knows about them.

I had a recent experience where Ardent served as the client for a capstone class marketing class at Temple University, and as I sat down with the students I started by explaining Ardent and I realized at some point that not a single kid in the class even knew what a credit union was. It was very disheartening, but at the same time, it was a bit of a light bulb, wake-up call.

It was a reminder that the industry generally has kind of this issue and this just kind of smacked us in the face a little bit. That kind of got us thinking about what could we do and, then, with this day coming up, we thought we could celebrate the day but also try to inform and bring some of these things that make credit unions so different to the forefront. Even if we can just educate a few people we’re starting to make a dent.

CU Daily: Has what you’ve learned and experienced here influenced your marketing in any way or changed your messaging?

Emeno:  This is relatively new as (the marketing class) was in June, but the answer is I think it will. We know the credit union industry has tried to do campaigns…and they’ve never really taken off. We do have a special interest in Gen. Z and younger potential members; that’s really where we felt like we kind of need to start.

We have separate socials (channels) for the younger demographic. It’s Ardent Money Ninja. We even have a microsite related to that and that is a lot of more TikTok style videos and those kinds of things.

I think we just need to keep beating the drum on the difference. The good news is when I got done with this class I felt like I had 20 kids who understood. I told them, ‘Tell a friend.’ You gotta start somewhere.

We will probably be spending more time talking about that because I think over the years we have kind of forgotten a little bit about how deep in the hole the industry is on this particular topic.

CU Daily: You are no doubt aware that when younger people understand what credit unions are, it really resonates with them. Given what just occurred in the video you filmed, will you go back to the basics?

Emeno: We’ve been doing some of that. We partner with Villanova University and we have several NIL athletes, and with one of the athletes we’re working with we actually have him do a video every month…and we always start with the difference between a bank and a credit union, and then start talking about other things.

This generation doesn’t know. They don’t get enough financial literacy education through general schooling or even from their parents, so we’re trying fill that gap.

When I was talking to that class about where they banked, they called it ‘mom’s choice.’ That was their term. I was like, wait a minute, what do you mean? They said you bank where your parents bank. It really got us thinking that we can’t just rely on that.

We started talking to those kids in that class and they were kind of like, ‘Why aren’t we at a credit union?’ That’s a good question, because once people know it piques their curiosity and they start to realize there might be something better out there.

The CU Daily: Is the Instagram video representative of the people you interviewed?

Emeno: The one person in that video who knew what a credit union was the only one we found.

The CU Daily: What do you plan to do with the video?

Emeno: Currently, it’s on our socials, it’s on TikTok– we’ve actually gained 50 followers since that video came out. We thought it was kind of a good, lighthearted way to start that topic with folks and then we want to go from there. We don’t necessarily have a full plan yet because we wanted to see how this went.

Now, we’re finding, oh, this might be resonating, we might be getting a little traction here, we need to keep going.

The CU Daily: You’ve been involved with the ‘#ILoveMyCreditUnion’ campaign from the beginning. How has what you’ve done evolved or changed and have you learned anything?

Emeno: Over the years we’ve put a little more effort into it. To be honest, it used to be like one post on that day or maybe a couple of testimonial posts that we would put out there. But we’ve really started to try to turn it into something that talks about credit unions and also celebrates our members.

A couple of years ago we did stuff in the branches where people came and we had food, we had giveaways, that kind of thing. We’ve tried to take that celebration and bring that forward. I think this is the first year that we’ve spent more time on that education piece just based on the experience that we had recently.

I think what we’ve learned over time is that people are interested in it. It’s a good time of the year to try to do something like this. International Credit Union Day comes in October. It’s really busy then and we have a really hard time getting any traction with things. It’s a tough time of year.

The CU Daily: Have you found that one sort of messaging or one channel works better than another? What resonates well?

Emeno: We’re finding that videos seem to resonate, especially with younger audiences. They don’t want to read anything, they want to see things. Even with the things that are more static we try to animate (that) and do things that get their interest. We also try to bring it down to their level.

The worst thing you can see is videos that talk about either credit unions or just financial literacy, where they’re talking like the people are 40 years old.

If you look at our Money Ninja accounts, it’s all of our interns that are on there. We use them because the last thing they want to see is old people talking to young people about money. That will just shut it down right there.

CU Daily: With what you’ve learned and with what has come out of the video, what are you looking to do with that?

Emeno: We need to keep hitting this hard. Sometimes, we do it and then we don’t touch on it for another few months. That probably doesn’t make sense anymore; it probably needs to be something that we keep talking about.

We also have found that when we put those kinds of things out, if we can boost those kinds of posts on social media, that’s going to bring it to a wider audience. Most of the people that follow us already get kind of what we’re about. So, we kind of need to work on bringing that to that wider audience.

That’s a very economical way for us to try to make some of those inroads with the folks that don’t know.

We also do spend a lot of time at community events. I could envision us having maybe some trivia kind of games and things like that to try to…make it fun for people. We’ve had some success with other things, not this particular topic but other topics in the past.

It’s really hard in a mass way to go out and talk about these things. I talk about it like it’s hand-to-hand combat; that’s kind of what it feels like sometimes. When we’re out at community events we feel like we can do more. One of the opening questions we’ll continue to use is, ‘Do you know about credit unions?’ And most people will be pretty honest and will tell you no. Then you know where you’re starting. You start with that difference.

It’s just hard for us to do anything super mass-oriented because we’re in a very big media market. It’s too bad the industry hasn’t really figured out a way to pull this together to get this done because I think it would help everyone.

The CU Daily: Would you consider working with any other credit unions in Philadelphia or anywhere in the country on something?

Emeno: We haven’t gotten to that point but I wouldn’t say no, for sure…We don’t need to compete against each other because, frankly, if somebody joins another credit and learns what it’s about, it’s probably easier for me to be able to offer them some things, as well. We can work together.

The CU Daily: What about your own employees? Do you feel comfortable they understand the difference and they can articulate it when they meet with members or potential members?
Emeno: I believe so, because we do talk about it internally. We have a monthly member benefits meeting that includes all of our sales staff and a lot of folks from back office. We usually talk about these kinds of things. We actually sent an internal e-mail where we talked about all of these points.

But I do think it’s something we need to constantly keep talking about.

I think more than anything what we’ve learned in the last few months is that we can’t just hit this once a year and think ‘That’s it, we’ve got it.’ That is not the case at all.