What credit unions can learn from providing financial education to members

It’s well understood that financial education is crucial to bettering the lives of consumers, but what about what it can do for your credit union? While financial education helps your members learn essential financial vocabulary and skills, it can also teach your credit union more about your members to shape your future decision-making.

Of the many benefits credit unions yield by offering financial education, like making members more active and loyal, one of the most valuable benefits is the data they can collect from education initiatives. This data is not only helpful in analyzing the efficacy of your education programming but also to understand members more deeply.

By sharpening your understanding of members’ needs, interests, and more, you can optimize the way you engage with them through products, services, and even marketing.

There are many ways to approach education data application. But here are some easy ways to start:

Unpack assessment data

The first way to collect meaningful data from financial education programs is to analyze members’ functional financial literacy. This is easiest when your program includes some type of assessment—which, according to the testing effect, is helpful both for data collection and for making education more effective.

Recognizing how much your members understand different financial skills, vocabulary, and opportunities will help you shape your programming and outreach. For example, if you find that a significant portion of your members have low financial literacy regarding loans, then you may choose to revise or increase your education and outreach around that topic.

Supplement with surveys

While testing members’ functional financial literacy is a great step toward better understanding your members, you can supplement these insights and give them more color by including surveys in your financial education programming to collect more information.

Surveys are best used to collect attitudinal data, such as how confident members feel about a given financial topic or what services they’re most interested in. By comparing survey data to assessment data, you can create a fuller picture of your members’ needs to inform your planning.

For example, if the majority of your members report high levels of confidence about mortgages but your assessment data reflects that most members tested poorly on that topic, it may be time to reassess your outreach or education on that subject. Or, if members report high levels of interest and confidence in using a given product or service, you may choose to market that service more widely.

If your education program doesn’t have data from assessments or surveys and it seems too cumbersome to implement yourself, don’t panic. Financial education experts like Zogo are here to help easily enable financial education programs that automatically collect and analyze data.

Don’t miss out on this game-changing strategy to enrich your members’ lives while strengthening your business.

SYDNEY MAYER is head of marketing at Zogo.