news.cuna.org/articles/123488-add-data-to-your-story

2022_06_CUMag_Ligia-Vado_1200 — America's Credit Unions Senior Economist Ligia Vado

Add data to your story

Credit Union Impact Dashboard measures the transformative powers of credit unions.

April 5, 2024

The credit union movement is built on people helping people, financial health, and the cooperative spirit.

Advocates have spread that message for decades, but they have a new tool at their disposal: America’s Credit Unions’ Credit Union Impact Dashboard, which updates in real time to tell the credit union story, measure their transformative power, and showcase how they outperform other financial institutions.

“We’re taking all the great stories and narratives, and bringing them to life with data,” says Mike Schenk, chief economist at America’s Credit Unions. “The dashboards allow us to build out and communicate the narrative around the data, bringing information to life in a new, dynamic, and interactive way that’s going to help credit unions.”

“This is advocacy data we've shared for a long time with credit unions,” adds Senior Economist Ligia Vado, who has spearheaded the dashboard since joining the association in 2022. “We’re just changing the way we do it: a web-based platform that uses cutting-edge business intelligence tools to offer credit unions an easier access to data and trends.”

The data comes from nationwide sources such as Equifax, NCUA, Datatrac, and America's Credit Unions. The dashboard launched within America’s Credit Unions and leagues last year, going through testing.

Noting that America’s Credit Unions doesn’t want to be the gatekeeper of data, Schenk says the ideal dashboard audience is credit union advocates. Anybody interested in telling the credit union story can view the dashboard, turn it into a PDF or PowerPoint, and add their own information.

“It’s a shift from traditional analytics to more self-service,” Vado says. “You can download data and export it for your own impact studies or marketing campaigns. This dashboard is powerful. It has a lot of data, and it’s a new way of data storytelling.”

The dashboard’s story has these macro-level takeaways:

Credit unions deliver billions of dollars in financial benefits to members and nonmembers through lower loan interest rates, higher saving yields, and fewer and lower fees.

Credit unions have a high impact on local economies by creating thousands of jobs, generating billions of dollars in economic output, and billions in tax revenues for state and federal governments. “The data shows that credit unions really are consumers’ best financial partner,” Schenk says. “Members can save thousands of dollars a year by doing business with credit unions. It’s an important, impactful story.”

The story can be localized. Thanks to the Equifax database’s ability to locate credit union members by ZIP codes, Schenk says. “We can drill these dashboards down to a granular level and tell stories around how this data looks in your backyard. If you’re on Capitol Hill meeting with a representative, you could say, ‘There are X number of credit unions in your district, and those credit unions serve X number of members, delivering these financial benefits.’ That can be a compelling part of any narrative.”

The Credit Union Impact Dashboard likely won’t be the last of its kind at America’s Credit Unions. Vado plans to continue showing the power of the credit union difference by building dashboards around auto, mortgage, credit card, and other unsecured lending.

“Once you use a dashboard, it becomes obvious how powerful they are and how useful they can be,” Schenk says. “It helps America's Credit Unions build out a world-class approach to data curation and communication. It puts us in a position to not only tell compelling stories, but also to bring powerful proof points into those discussions to advance our advocacy agenda.”