DENVER–CUNA CEO Jim Nussle, attending both his first America’s Credit Union Conference and World Council World CU Conference, said credit unions in not just the U.S. but around the world need to “deliberately” create their own future.
Three thoughts he said he hoped all attendees would take home were:
- “I think it’s important as a leader to define success. Winning is about growing. It’s what (Canada CU leader) Scott Kennedy said, ‘How can we reach out? How can we reinvent? How can we revitalize?’ Winning is about growing, and for us to serve you, we have to serve that growth.”
- “The second is that the power of our association together. Our power, our strength, is when we are all pulling the wagon together. We sometimes are too modest. Pulling together as an association to be good advocates is the third thing.”
- “When you do good advocacy, it’s good for business. You can serve new generations, you can reach new member bases, you can invest in new technology.”
Nussle noted he has spoken extensively to U.S. audiences about the issue of political advocacy, but he posed the question, “to what end?” The answer, he said, is that “we want to remove the barriers to service to your members. There have been so many barriers and we end up serving the bureaucracy in our national capital and our state capitals. We don’t want to serve the bureaucracy. We’re not the ones who caused the problems, and yet we’re lumped in with everyone else. Our members not only love what we do, they are willing to engage and are willing to talk to even more people about the credit union movement. We need to harvest that. That’s what 360-degree advocacy is all about.”
Nussle also spoke to the issue of low awareness of credit unions around the world, despite the growth CUs are seeing. “Maybe it’s this mentality of why do we need to tell anyone about the good things we’re doing; shouldn’t we just do them? I’ve also heard, ‘What we’re doing sells itself,’ but no, it doesn’t. There is so much clutter, so much information out there, if you can’t explain the credit union difference, especially the new generations, that’s our challenge.”