COLUMBUS, Ohio—The Ohio CU League has introduced Huddle, an online community for its member CUs to help them effectively network.
Huddle is an offshoot of the Ohio CU League earlier this year evolving the state CU chapter system into a new network called the Credit Union Outreach Alliances. The sole purpose of each alliance in the network is conducting meaningful outreach at the local or regional level. An Alliance has a steering committee made up of local CU representatives from league members and meet as needed, as initiatives dictate.
Katie Walton, OCUL director of marketing and communications, told CUToday.info that in discussions with credit unions about moving to the Alliance structure, executives said that if they did not have a chapter system they would miss the interaction with each other, which leads to a lot of questions raised and answered.
“So we said, how do we make sure that credit unions can still talk to each other,” said Walton. “It’s the league’s job to make sure networking happens. So we moved to this online system.”
More than 4,000 CU leaders, volunteers and staff can now connect online through Huddle, Walton said. Users access the community and post messages through the league’s website. Each morning, participants receive an e-mail summary of the previous day’s activity.
Walton said Huddle is an improvement on the listserv system.
“It’s the next step,” said Walton. “You get into the queue and start a discussion. And the nice thing about the system is it knows who you are. Plus, the question stays on the system forever, and people can comment on it now or at a later date—whereas listervs use tend to be somewhat immediate.”
With Huddle a person can search on an issue, see if anyone has addressed it at any time since the database was launched, find it, see who wrote it, and then contact the person through Huddle.
“It’s a more robust system,” said Walton.
Sine Huddle was launched in late April, it has received 319 comments on 93 topics. In two months, 606 people have logged into Huddle 3,480 times, Walton said.