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Exciting. Engaging. Exclusive... and you're invited!

Year 1: Marketing 101 - The Basics
Randy Schultz, lead speaker and facilitator, will guide you through CUNA Marketing Management School's Year 1 of marketing training.

When you attend this school, you will leave inspired, enthusiastic and passionate, never to see marketing as a job that you "have to show up for every day" again. You will learn how to elevate your brand while educating those from the top down about its importance in viewing it at a holistic level as it pertains to marketing, your culture, public reputation. Define member relationships that raise the bar by going beyond the norm of being caring, responsive and personal. Now you can measure your results, scenario plan campaign ROI, and be ready to attend CUNA's Marketing Management School: Year 2 full-speed ahead!

Zappos announced as opening keynote session!
V.I.P Experiences – Your best marketing tool - Zappos Insights culture evangelist Jon Wolske talks about the Zappos approach to customers, customer service and marketing. Imagine an entire organization (including the marketing team) that is focused on supporting non-sales oriented initiatives to help your organization live its culture out loud. See how repeat customers and word of mouth marketing are used as the keys to driving growth, and learn how Zappos has become a Billion dollar company in just 10 years by embracing the customer experience.

This event is produced by the CUNA Center for Professional Development and endorsed by the CUNA Marketing & Business Development Council.

Through the CUNA Marketing Management School's Year 1, you will:

• Identify the components of an effective marketing plan
• Determine which approach is right in creating a marketing budget
• Determine the right media mix, it's not "one-size-fits-all"
• Explore campaign ROI scenario's to make sure what you're doing is right for you
• Learn how communication channels can be categorized and successfully used
• Identify the 10 elements for consideration when creating a community giving program
• Discover the tools available to leverage public relations including media contacts, annual marketing calendars and corporate citizenship activities
• Identify when to write and when to ask for help on a release, article or speech

Earn your designation as a Credit Union Certified Marketing Executive™ (CU-CME).
Year 1 attendees will have the opportunity to begin working on their Credit Union Certified Marketing Executive™ (CU-CME) designation. Testing will be available Thursday evening for those wanting to earn their CU-CME designation. CU-CME...increase your marketing value within your credit union. Learn more.

Already attended CUNA Marketing Management School: Year 1?
Continue toward your Credit Union Certified Marketing Executive™ (CU-CME) designation by attending Year 2 and Year 3.

"This is the only marketing executive certification program in the industry. You will be able to apply what you have learned immediately and increase your value to your CEO and your credit union! Increase your value today, start earning your CU- CME!”
- Anne Legg, CU-CME Advisor
VP Marketing, Cabrillo Credit Union

CUNA Marketing Management School: Year 1: April 30–May 3, 2012

CUNA Marketing Management School Pre-Conference Workshop: Marketing Compliance:  April 29, 2012

CUNA Marketing Management School: Year 2:  April 30–May 3, 2012

CUNA Marketing Management School: Year 3:  April 30–May 3, 2012

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Preview the schedule

GENERAL SESSIONS

V.I.P. Experiences – Your Best Marketing Tool (General Session)

Hear from: Jon Wolske
Zappos Insights culture evangelist Jon Wolske talks about the Zappos approach to customers, customer service and marketing. Imagine an entire organization (including the marketing team) that is focused on supporting non-sales oriented initiatives to help your organization live its culture out loud. See how repeat customers and word of mouth marketing are used as the keys to driving growth, and learn how Zappos has become a Billion dollar company in just 10 years by embracing the customer experience.

Bring the Zappos Approach to Credit Unions (General Session)

Hear from: Randy Schultz, Mark Arnold, and Jeff Rendel
This fun and highly-engaging session will have you working with your classmates and lead facilitator to turn the principles learned in the opening keynote session “V.I.P Experiences - your best marketing tool” into tactics that will help you bring the Zappos experience in to your credit union.

See Your Marketing in a New Light (General Session)

Hear from: Randy Schultz, Mark Arnold, and Matthew Purvix. Moderated by: Jeff Rendel
Have you ever wondered what you could have done to improve your marketing efforts? This unique session offers that chance. Bring recent marketing samples and allow three marketing experts to help you see your marketing in a new light. They will offer tips on what you could do to improve your pieces. This session will be playful, fun, entertaining, honest and beneficial to your credit union’s marketing efforts.

• Hear constructive criticism on how a particular piece or campaign could have been better
• Gain feedback from a panel of three distinct marketing professionals
• Ask questions of the panel
• Identify key principles to improve any future piece

Year 1: Marketing 101 - The Basics Sessions

Marketing Plans & Building Brand Momentum. How to Influence Decision-Making in 2012 & Beyond

A strategic marketing plan doesn’t happen in a vacuum, rather, it is dependent on a number of different elements in the organization for it to be successful. During the first part of this session, we’ll lay the groundwork for building a marketing plan that generates revenue. In the second half of the session, you will apply those elements to a real-life case study. Through this session, you will:

• Discuss how your credit union’s competitive strategy relates to the marketing planning process
• Describe the role market segmentation plays in developing member-focused marketing plans
• Create new marketing strategies that are aligned with members changing needs
• Refocus brand appeal to reflect new buying patterns and a new set of values
• Acquire and retain profit-generating members while achieving the best ROI
• Understand the components of an effective marketing plan and how to build one
• Take the knowledge and experience gained from applying the concepts in this session to a real-life case study and transfer them directly back to your credit union

Marketing to the Numbers

How marketing a credit union is different? Like all marketing, the first rule of success is not graphics or message but understanding the business model. How do credit unions make money? Through this session, you will:

• Discuss what marketing can do to increase balances, non-interest income, revenue, acquire and retain members
• Learn the basics of budgeting, how to budget starting with strategy before moving to tactics and how to connect those strategies and tactics to the business model so you can talk about your marketing plans with senior management
• Gain tools and techniques to track your marketing investment will be discussed with ideas on how to track the impact your marketing efforts are having including response rate, lift and Return On Marketing Investment (ROMI) and use this tracking to plan future budgets
ROI, the most important marketing decision metric

Putting the Numbers to Work

Now that you’ve had some time learning about the numbers it’s time to get to work on applying them to your role in marketing at the credit union. Spend this afternoon session working in peer groups applying the tools and techniques covered in the morning session to a variety of scenarios facing your credit union.

Reputation Management & Crisis Preparation

Is your credit union’s reputation safe? Is it prepared for a crisis? Does your credit union know how to best communicate?

Today’s credit unions are increasingly at risk of crises of all shapes and sizes that can severely disrupt their day-to-day business operations. Unfortunately, the majority of credit unions are ill-prepared to address and communicate through these diverse crises, as well as navigate through the excessive speed of today’s crises—such as false perceptions of financial institutions, natural disasters or viral social media postings. LT Public Relations’ President Casey Boggs will address today’s business crisis landscape, the break-neck speed of today’s crises and how credit unions can best prepare its communications efforts before, during and after a crisis.

Participants will learn the importance and the fundamentals of sustaining a strong, ongoing public relations effort, while preparing the credit union for unexpected crises (beyond a disaster recovery plan)—including social media tactics and the essentials of sustaining strong communications with members and the communities the credit union serves.

Taking the Lead on Activating Your Brand Strategy

Leading and activating a powerful brand strategy within your credit union is the biggest challenge most marketers will face, even though it is the most effective path to organizational fulfillment. To be successful, marketers must understand the fundamental concepts that comprise "brand," and lead both management and staff through a defined organizational process that will culminate in internal audiences embracing their brand and the realization that it is so much more than their logo and tagline, color palette and pretty brochures.

Your credit union staff are the caretakers of your brand. Continual education and motivation are required to create a common understanding among staff and to connect (integrate) their personal values to the credit unions organizational values. Staff becomes brand ambassadors when they are fully engaged in the credit union’s brand. Brand success is measurable through financial outcomes and research results.

NikeRunning.com embodies the three principles of Emotional Experience Design (EED) by focusing on training instead of products, offering content and tools that create a clear brand personality, and engaging users with well-integrated video and tactile experiences. Companies that want to follow the NikeRunning.com example should find out what's driving users to their sites in the first place. Through this session, you’ll do some investigating to make some parallel’s to our own industry. Through this session, you will:

• Identify how to build a knowledge foundation and set goals
• Examine ways to crystallize a brand strategy
• Explore how to align brand elements
• Discover how to engage internal audiences to "live the brand" – Turning that sales culture, or no definable culture at all, into an effective relationship-based brand culture
• Learn how to measure success

What Keeps Your Members Coming Back? The Credit Union Experience!

The days of monologue marketing are over. Today's consumers (our members), want to be involved in the marketing process by being engaged in a dialogue with you and your brand. So how do we get there? We have to stop the funnel-vision approach to only informing and make sure we entertain members as well. Interactive, emotional, and strategic can help you deliver on your brand promise and make the member experience highly memorable.

Analyze a study of responses by Forrester Research showing that seniors are the most likely to recommend companies while younger boomers are the least likely to recommend. We’ll address this fact, and give you solutions to turn that study into new opportunities for you. Through this session, you will:

• Gain tools to help you measure ROI and ROO of your retail strategy
• Learn how retail experiential marketing can extend, elevate and reinforce your brand, marketing strategy and campaigns
• Hear stories and successes by other credit unions to help you build your case for a retail assessment at your credit union
• Learn how to build a marketers branch-of-the-future

Affiliation with CUNA/League is required for attendance.

CPE Credits

"I've been to a few training conferences and when I left, I felt like they were trying to sell me something or a product, rather than teach me. This conference was full of helpful information and great speakers! I've been on the job for over two years with no structured training and I've learned things I would have loved to know two years ago. I just wish I would have come sooner. I learned all of the basics I needed to know from part 1 and then some. I'm back at my credit union with new ideas and I'm ready to put them to work for us and our members. I can't wait until next year!"
- Heather Brown (2008)

"Whether you are a first-year marketer or have spent 20 years in a credit union, this school is a great learning resource. I highly recommend this school."
- Matt Sheridan (2008)

"I highly recommend this program. From participants just starting out in credit union marketing to the seasoned professional, this program fostered awesome networking opportunities and learning sections to gain knowledge, experience, ideas, and contacts that I will carry with me through my marketing career. The staff was excellent and the program was well-coordinated and very conducive to learning. It was like a pep rally for credit union marketers, I came back to work bursting with ideas and ready to hit the ground running! Thank you CUNA!"
-Tara Kochansky, First Capital Federal Credit Union (2007)

"This class was perfect for me: brand new to the industry and in my marketing position for only a month. I learned more about the industry and I had the chance to meet a lot of peers who will be long time relationships (peers & friends!). Great time!"
- Séverine Williams, American Airlines Credit Union (2007)

"This was an extremely effective program that helped validate the importance I play in my credit union. The tools and networking opportunities developed this week are priceless and will help me be a much better marketing professional. I feel this polished the existing skills and knowledge I have with some great marketing people from across the country. I strongly recommend this for anyone who wants to either get a crash course of credit union marketing or simply polish what they already know."
- Brett Valdez, Tooele Federal Credit Union (2007)

Mark Arnold, CCUE

Randy Schultz

Jeff Rendel

Matthew Purvis

Jon Wolske

Richard Jones

Casey Boggs