On the 6th of April, Soar headed down to Blackpool to take part in the annual UKCU Conference. The weekend kicked off to a great start in the Imperial Hotel Blackpool, with Cathy Greig, UKCU’s chairperson, opening the conference. This was followed by the keynote address from Gerry Foley, from Progressive Credit Union in Dublin, talking about ‘Embracing Change’ and we then heard from Andrew Breese from Moneywise Credit Union in the plenary session on ‘Is a credit union a business or a social entity?’
Throughout the weekend, we had the pleasure of giving the UKCU members a little look into what our Credit UnionConnect event offers and some insights into our technology. Our workshop, ‘Engaging with your future membership,’ covered everything from millennial attraction tactics to how important millennials are for the future of credit unions. We also spoke to UKCU members about their overall marketing strategies and gave them some advice and tips on how to market their credit unions online.
We enjoyed highlighting some of the main challenges that credit unions are facing and offering them solutions. Millennials love to share so they are your best marketing tool, and this is what we stressed to the audience in our workshops. Credit unions notoriously use word of mouth as their main marketing tool and they can still do this, we just need to look at it from a different perspective. The use of technology and good websites are a main driver in this and the two are key in attracting millennials, so we showed off some examples to inspire UKCU members to put some focus on this in their credit unions.
We left the attendees with a few things to think about and ask their credit unions.
We would like to thank UKCU for a great weekend and a very well run and organised event. It was inspiring for us to talk to so many credit unions and find out what their priorities are and their plans for the future.
It was also great meeting Gnorman at the conference, he “Gnows” a lot about credit unions!
Emma McBride
Business Development Manager
