What's happening?
Many of our clients, followers and other friends will know that this month is an important one for the financial inclusion sector. Each third Thursday of October, the World Council of Credit Unions calls on the public to promote, recognise and celebrate the work that credit unions and other financial cooperatives do around the world. It’s an extremely valuable opportunity to raise awareness and, when harnessed correctly, social media is the key to ensuring your organisation takes full advantage of occasions like these.
WOCCU has set 2024’s theme as “One World Through Cooperative Finance”. Society seems increasingly divided at our current point in history, so the aim is to show how the credit union movement brings us together through inclusive, member-owned financial institutions run for people, not profit.
What are we doing?
As a leading marketing agency in the world of credit cooperatives, Zync has a history of creating effective campaigns for our clients as much as our own channels when October rolls around. In 2020, for example, we collaborated with South Manchester Credit Union and well-known creative hub the Bank of Creativity to launch our very own “One Minute Brief”, in which we challenged followers to create posters to encourage people to #JoinACreditUnion. The campaign saw huge success, reaching 80,000 accounts which led to 151 extremely innovative responses.
This year, we’ve decided to shift the focus slightly over to our clients. Each credit union or financial cooperative we work with will share three pieces of information to demonstrate their impact...
A real-life member story. We want to show the human side to credit unions; they’re not just banks. The story could be a review or a case study of somebody who’s benefitted from an ethical loan or savings support.
Meaningful statistics. Just one loan can mean food on the table for an entire family or a small business getting off the ground. We want to talk not only about the impressive data from many of our clients, but also what this means for their communities.
A quote from an employee on why they work in ethical finance. We’d love this to be a video, but if no staff members are feeling brave then a quote will do! The figures above don’t happen without a lot of hard work, so this is an opportunity for those behind the scenes to talk about what they do and what makes it so rewarding.
In line with the global theme, we’ll finish by tagging another credit union from any one of the 98 countries where these organisations exist. They’ll be challenged to post their own stories, stats and quotes before tagging another credit union, and so on - all under our hashtag #ICUChallenge.
Our challenge...
And of course, you don’t have to be a Zync client to take part. The goal of our #CUChallenge is to reach as many people as possible, from both within and outside of the financial services industry. We’re encouraging everybody to help spread the word through our template, highlighting the essential role that credit unions play in making finance fair.
Which story will you share? Which numbers will you shout about? We want to hear, so get planning!
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