Welcome to our site

We have a passion for credit unions, Rails development, and social media. Give With Us brings together all three.

It’s based on a 2006 Filene i3 project called My Community Connection. There’s a working prototype at selco.cugive.com.

We owe a big “Thank You” both to Filene for providing a truly open source idea and to our readers and commenters here and on Open Source CU for showing us a need for credit unions to move into social media on a larger scale.

We hope you’ll be willing to let us know what you think about the product, and if you’re interested in getting in on the launch, just send me an email.

Charlie and I battled heart-o-dallas traffic to walk in two minutes late (sorry) for the first meeting of the Social Media Club Dallas last night. Held in the very purple uptown offices of Yahoo!, the roundtable was moderated by Giovanni Gallucci and included twenty-five or so participants discussing social media (and mostly debating the need for the Social Media Press Release).

During the chat I realized I was a little out of touch with the rest of the social media community – meaning I’m guilty of being a lurker on the sites of social media’s A-list. Google Reader tells me that of my “96 subscriptions, over the last 30 days you read 2,692 items, starred 39 items, and shared 59 items” – which may sound impressive, but it was really mostly Lifehacker and financial institution blogs.

I’m starting to see the need to get out of my comfort zone a little more and into the larger social media community.

Not to hit the Digg frontpage. Not to live off AdWords revenue (yeah, right). Just to meet some like-minded folks who are more than happy to share great ideas.

For anyone who was there, I’m glad to meet you. And I’ll see you again.

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As you may have noticed, today we happily rolled out a few changes to our site design.

We’re now including the full content of our five most recent posts on the homepage. Before now, we had to write our blog posts around a teaser paragraph, and that drove us nuts. This will also let us write more often while still retaining face-time for previous posts.

The “about us” blurb moved from its previous hiding spot in the top right (a spot eye-tracking studies have shown visitors are the most likely to ignore) to the front-and-center.

We’ve also updated and narrowed the featured recent projects. We’re currently showcasing:

The Lower East Side People’s FCU, the only financial institution to serve New York’s Lower East Side after all of the commercial banks sold out, packed up and left.

The Filene Research Institute, the think-(and do)-tank for the credit union industry.

NAPUS FCU, which has been serving postmasters nationally for almost 40 years.

And finally, Give With Us – a project we’re unbelievably excited about. You’ll be hearing a lot more on this one soon.

This is the first in a series of site changes we’ll be making over the next few months (including the addition of an in-depth portfolio). Stay tuned, and please comment. We thrive on your opinions.

Hopefully I haven’t already lost half of you creative-types by uttering the word “programming.” Stay with me – this is a chat for right-brained folks. I’m convinced that the business and marketing worlds need to be listening to nerds more often.

Like the Open Source Movement (of which we’ve already sang the praises), Agile Development is more philosophy than technical practice. It spotlights people, communication, and action over bureaucracy and red-tape.

The Agile Manifesto emphasizes:

Individuals and interactions (over processes and tools)

People are more important than processes. Marketing will always work better if it is build around people instead of a product.

Create more people-centric campaigns by

• Listening closely (mine CGM such as blogs, comments and forums, and use Google Alerts to stay on top of keywords).
• Asking the right questions (with tools like the Net Promoter Score).
• Acting on what you learn. And
• Making your message accessible across the media people are using.

Working software (over comprehensive documentation)

Do more and speculate less. Gaggles of would-be great campaigns have been maimed beyond recognition because of focus-group-choke.

Why do you see so many web apps in beta? Because Agile Programming says “Put it out there, let them play with it, listen, and tweak based on what the users say.”

Customer collaboration (over contract negotiation)

It’s not uncommon for a developer and a non-techie customer to sit in a room and co-create a product together. What an incredibly frightening and awesome idea.

South African winery Stormhoek joined the blogging community and let consumer bloggers carry their brand with them. As a result, they’re about to hit a five-fold sales increase in two years.

Denise Wymore once said that if a credit union wants to appeal to Gen-Y, they need to elect one to their board of directors. I couldn’t agree more.

Responding to change (over following a plan)

If you create a plan that cannot shift down the line, you’ll end up hitting a dead-end. Digital and interactive marketing are the best plays here because they allow you to react in real-time to the people you’re speaking with.

One of the best things about a cracking open a brand new year is that it sprays gumption everywhere. In the spirit of that gumption, all of us at Trabian have decided to share a few of our personal resolutions for 2007.

We hope you enjoy them. After leafing through ours, share a few of your own.

Charlie

• Take more photos.
• See more of Texas.
• Be cheekier.
• Go measurably farther down the road to being an authority on Blues music.
• Wear more t-shirts to more business meetings.
• Start and maintain a weekly internet cartoon.
• Become known as The Total Package‚Ñ¢ by getting scorchingly awesome at development while still maintaining my designy skills.

Here’s an example of what I mean by “become known as:”

:::Phone rings:::

Me: Hello, The Total Package‚Ñ¢ speaking.
Caller: Hi, The Total Package™, what’s happening?
Me: Nothing, do you want to buy me a cup of coffee?
Caller: I was working up the courage to ask.

:::Hangs up before working out the details:::

Trey

• Spend one hour a day for two days a week in exercise of some sort. It starts with joining the Plano gym today.
• Play golf at least once a month.
• Read at least one fresh business book a month.
• Quadruple OSCU traffic.
• Early to bed and early to rise.

Brent

• Create more (paint more, write more, photograph more, and so on).
• Start more conversations.
• Record an album.
• Pray more.
• Become a better speaker.
• (not to be contradictory, but) A little less conversation, a little more action.

Kelly

• Read the Bible daily
• Be more active in life and in church
• Find a new hobby
• Learn more about Trabian and what makes it tick
• Do all I can to Help make Trabian tick

Matt

• Warning, cliche ahead: Lose 15 pounds by exercising more and eating less
• Read my Bible daily
• Get more sleep (at least 6 or 7 hours a night)
• Become more organized
• Read more fiction books (at least one a month)
• Watch less TV (turn it off by 9 PM on most nights)