Credit unions have three primary “superpowers” they can leverage to maximize membership growth, engagement, and impact: empathy, the personal touch, and cooperation, says Kerala Taylor, co-owner and senior marketing manager at PixelSpoke.

She addressed America’s Credit Unions’ 2024 Marketing & Business Development Council Conference Tuesday in Las Vegas.

One of the biggest challenges credit unions face is uncertainty, Taylor says. “The world is expected to change more in the next five years than it has in the last 100. The big question is, what can we do about it?”

She cites several ways credit unions can leverage their superpowers:

1. Empathy. This has a lot to do with understanding your members beyond age and other demographics. Empathy mapping entails focusing on what members are saying, thinking, doing, and feeling instead of on their age.

“It helps you challenge any assumptions you may have made about them,” Taylor says.

Other ways to foster empathy include providing financial health resources, conducting member financial health surveys, serving ALICE (asset limited, income constrained, employed) people, providing financial counseling, and reframing your service to stress cases.

2. Personal touch. It’s the hallmark of credit union service, but it’s becoming more challenging in the digital age.

Using photos of members and employees instead of stock models can humanize your digital channel, she says. “Stock photos don’t look like me, my family, or my community.”

Putting branch staff’s photos on your website also can help, as can making small gestures to let members know you’re thinking about them, and celebrating members’ life events, such as graduation or a home purchase.

3. Cooperation. It’s embedded in credit unions’ cooperative ownership structure.

Forming partnerships that generate meaningful impactis one way to leverage cooperation, Taylor says. She cites several such efforts involving affordable housing, business incubation, access to emergency funds, equity investments in other cooperatives—and even a partnership with a brewery.

“As marketers, we’re under a lot of pressure to sell products—and these products do help people,” Taylor says. “But what we’re really trying to do is solve members’ life problems.”