Welcome to our site

One of our clients, Belvoir Federal Credit Union, used a unique online marketing campaign to draw visitors to their website.

The credit union’s website essentially became a game board for a site-wide scavenger hunt. As players found each icon, the game console displayed their progress and encouraged them to continue hunting around the site. Each player’s progress was tracked and remembered by the system for the duration of the campaign, and once players found enough icons, they were entered into a sweepstakes for a prize giveaway. As participants found and collected the pie slices, product details and little-known fun facts about the services were revealed. Rather than use lifestyle photos of people, each slice featured icons relating to specific life events from having a baby or graduating to a new job or retiring.

You can read the whole article here

We’ve been busy and quiet on this blog and doing a poor job of self-promotion. Looking through what we’ve done over the last few months, we’re pretty proud of our latest work. So it at least warrants a brief post and a shout out to our fabulous clients for letting us restyle and re-engineer their sites.

Our sites continue to improve in functionality and design. Take a look:

• Altura Credit Union in Riverside, CA
• General Mills Federal Credit Union in Minnetonka, MN
• CTCE Federal Credit Union in Reading, PA
• Industrial Credit Union in Bellingham, WA (Launching today at ~ 9 a.m. Eastern Time)

As our sites continue to improve so does our content management system – exciting changes are on the horizon this fall/winter.

We spend a lot of time tooting and…um…the opposite of tooting…the horns of various and sundry credit union marketing efforts – particularly if they involve social media.

This time we’re going to toot Third Degree Advertising, out of Oklahoma City, and Trabian’s horns at the same time. It seems Third Degree went and won itself an Addy with the Buck the Norm online campaign. The site won several, actually, including Best Interactive and the prestigious Best in Show. Third Degree designed it and Trabian built the CMS and generally created the Internet magic.

Interestingly enough, this isn’t the first award Trabian has won recently – our work with A-Plus Federal Credit Union landed A-Plus and us a first place in the Lone Star Awards from the Texas Credit Union League Marketing Council in the fall.

Toot.

We launched our first Give With Us site today for Verity Credit Union.

Give With Us was created as an extension of a partnership between Trabian and Filene’s i3 Group in order to facilitate a connection between credit unions, their members and the community at large.

Give With Us is a blog-style website which allows local organizations to post volunteer opportunities – either single events or ongoing events. It allows comments from participants, is RSS-enabled, and is integrated with flickr.com, a photo-sharing social media site that allows the credit union and organization to share images from events.

Give With Us leverages new technology to position the credit union as a conduit for change and goodwill in the community. It helps to establish a community around the credit union, something ingrained in the movement since its inception.

For more information on purchasing Give With Us for your credit union, contact Doug Williams or Trey Reeme.

The Filene podcast

Trey and I spent last week in Madison, Wisconsin with The Filene Research Institute.

We were visiting because in the very near future, Filene is going to kick off a podcast (Update: The first podcast episode is live here). We were fortunate enough to help them get it going.

Filene is an idea factory and one of the major innovation catalysts in the credit union industry (for example: later this week they’re hosting a colloquium on ‘large-scale credit union collaboration’). Their podcast will make for a fascinating listen for anyone in the financial industry.

Also, George Hofheimer, Filene’s Chief Research Officer and the show’s host, has a first-rate radio voice.

Podcasting tools

In setting up the podcast, we integrated several tools that came together to make a nice little podcasting system. If you’re looking to get into podcasting yourself, here are a few tools/services we used in their setup:

Evoca -

Filene’s podcast will be interview-driven, and Evoca is the perfect tool for recording conversations and managing audio files on the web. Evoca integrates with both Skype and your standard phone line, and allows you to record conversations straight to the web.

You can manage the audio files with albums and control if a file is public or private. Evoca also generates an RSS feed of your public audio files.

Also, it’s really cheap – $5/month for a bucket of 200 minutes of collective recording time, which renews each month.

PrettyMay -

PrettyMay is a Skype plugin, also for recording conversations. We chose this as the primary recording tool and Evoca as the file management tool because PrettyMay kept the audio quality a little better.

The interface is very easy to use. You click “record call,” and go. It saves the calls as mp3s on your computer. It also manages recorded conversations by timestamping and labeling who you were talking to.

Audacity -

Audacity is very awesome open source (read: “free”) audio-editing software. It’s great for adding music, editing out any unwanted dialogue, splicing together text to make interviewees say things they didn’t really say, and generallypolishing up your show.

This site has tutorials of some of the most fundamental things you’ll need to know to use it.

Trey is a convict, or how the story ends

Also, Trey should have gone to jail this weekend.

Friday, on our way to the airport to go home, Trey was pulled over by a police officer for speeding. As Trey cursed and I snapped pictures with my Macbook’s built-in camera, the officer ran his information in the cop-car. We braced for the ticket. We were pleasantly surprised when he returned and said “I’m going to let you off without a citation.”

“Thank you so much,” said Trey.

“Well, the reason is – because of how fast you were going, I’m legally obligated to arrest you, and I’d rather not right now. Now get out of here before I change my mind.”

I’d bet that’s the first time anyone has ever gotten out of a ticket by going way too fast.