To paraphrase William from Vancity, how did I miss Michigan First Credit Union? They’re a smaller credit union in the Detroit area who went through a website redesign recently.
They solved part of their “diverse content” problem – straight product and service information vs. the community news/updating members – by separating… the content onto two sites. Ta-da! The Michigan First CU site has the corporate/product stuff, and I guess acts as the basic portal into company, and they put the community updates, etc. into their micommunity space blog. Problem solved, and very clever (and simple – how did I miss this?!).
I asked James Anderson from MFCU about how they ensured that their content remained fresh and current, and he said it wasn’t a problem: there’s lots to tell their members and the task was delegated to the appropriate area of responsibility in the marketing groups. It sounds like culturally and organizationally the idea of using a blog as a current and permanent archive of member news and community news was straightforward for MFCU.
I’ve been thinking about how to incorporate the newsy and calendar stuff onto our homepage, especially the community events which are regularly updated and which I’d like to make more prominent. I’m intriuged by the MFCU method, and will look into it more.
Of course, I’m also keen on users managing their own content. With blogging software – I think MFCU uses WordPress – it’s straightforward. But with TeamSite, it’s not, so I don’t know how feasible this is as long as the blog uses TeamSite as the content management tool.
It’s amazing