RAPID CITY, S.D.–A South Dakota credit union has targeted an underserved population in its service area with television commercials in the Lakota language.
Black Hills Federal Credit Union has released a 30-second commercial called “Mitakuye Oyasin” in December and plans to air it on commercial and cable TV stations in the Raid City and Sioux Falls markets in South Dakota. This is the second Lakota language spot the credit union has done.
Though South Dakota’s Indian reservations include some of the poorest counties in the country, Native Americans make up a significant percentage of the state’s population—10.3%, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
Black Hills Federal has a member services center in Eagle Butte on the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe reservation in northern South Dakota. It acquired a credit union operating on the reservation in 2012, when it merged with CR Community First Federal Credit Union.
Carol Brown, vice president of marketing and business development at BHFCU, said the idea for the campaign came when the firm was filming a cultural training session. The credit union’s CEO quickly gave the approval.
She said Black Hills now plans to make one Lakota language commercial each year. “It really felt important,” Brown said of the campaign. The tremendous positive response “has been very gratifying,” she added.
Brown said the financial firm “set out to make a difference” on the reservation, “and it’s paid off. We’re helping people. It’s helping us, too.”
Brown noted Black Hills has a large Lakota membership and has Lakota employees throughout its whole operation, including Cheyenne River.
It plans a brick-and-mortar branch on the reservation within the next two years, she said. Currently it has an office in the tribal housing authority building and a mobile unit.
BHFCU has allowed reservation members to have access to debit cards, for the first time.
A look at the credit union’s mortgage lending for 2015 shows that while its loans to Native Americans are less than two percent of total volume, its origination rate to them is quite high.
BHFCU funded nine mortgages to Indians in 2015 out of 12 applications, according to Home Mortgage Disclosure Act data from the LendingPatterns database of ComplianceTech, a fair lending and technology firm based in McLean, VA. Just one application was denied, while two other apps “fell out” during the process.
The latest commercial shows three riders on horseback with a voiceover that says in English translation, “You and I, are not so different. I see the sun rise and fall and you as well. So... let us... see it together."
“Mitakuye Oyasin” means roughly “all my relations” or “we are all related” in Lakota.
The $1.1-billion, 64,500-member cooperative, which earned $7 million through Sept. 30 of last year, and had $696 million in loans on its books at that time, released its first Lakota language commercial, also 30 seconds long, late in 2015.
The first commercial, voiced over by a Lakota man and called “Tiospaya Wicasa,” shows a family traveling in a motor home towards the Black Hills. A second version, voiced over by a Lakota woman, is called “Tiospaya Winyan.” A third version is in English.
The voiceover in English translation states, “The reason we have money and savings, loans and interest rates, and just about everything else in this world is because there’s one thing that’s worth more than all of it put together – family.”
The commercial was done in collaboration with the Lakota Language Consortium, which is based in Pierre, S.D. and is dedicated to preserving the Lakota language.
The commercial was produced with Jackalope, a Rapid City-based marketing and communications firm.
The original ad campaign last year won Jackalope Best of Show and a gold American Advertising Award at the American Advertising Federation-Black Hills awards show, as well as several silver awards.
Brown offered an interesting perspective on the credit union’s outreach to the CRST reservation in a letter she wrote to the National Credit Union Association around the time of the merger in 2012.
In citing the importance of CU outreach (she noted Eagle Butte, with 1,318 residents, was the largest town in an area the size of Connecticut), she wrote to Mary Rupp, NCUA Secretary, that she was surprised to find that residents of the remote reservation were quite willing to travel the 170 miles to Rapid City to shop and bank.
One reservation resident told Brown that she appreciated the convenience of BHFCU’s six branches in Rapid City—a drive of more than two and a half hours over two lane roads in often extreme weather conditions.
The commercial can be found here.
–Mark Fogarty