Bummer – our June 30 deadline to reach 100 pledged attendees for Your Symposium has just passed. We tried. This crowd sourcing experiment was both a failure and a success. The failure – we did not reach our goal. We did not promote nearly enough. Our day jobs at FORUM Solutions got in the way – as they should. These are challenging times for credit unions and FORUM is no exception. A lot going on and FORUM Solutions is doing a lot of routine and innovative stuff to make a difference at FORUM Credit Union. I feel like I let down the people and companies that pledged their attendance and support. You all are so passionate about our little symposium and we love you for that. I apologize I did not promote more. Now, the success. We learned a lot about crowd sourcing and had fun while we learned. Hey, life is way too short not to learn and have fun. We feel like we can apply what we learned not only to future symposiums but also other projects. By experimenting with crowd sourcing we saved the money we would have lost by subsidizing the symposium with the attendance totals we would have drawn. Trust me, it is not cheap to host this event in the manner we do.
We will miss not seeing you in Indy this year. If you have any ideas on how to preserve the momentum this event had please reach out to us and let us know what is on your mind. We would love to host again some day and bring the brightest and most passionate credit union people together again.
We need 27 more pledged attendees to move forward with the ‘09 Your Symposium. We could use more presentation auditions – lots of talk, lots of inquiries, lots of threats – not enough action.
Earlier this year, Vantage Credit Union purchased our internet banking source code. They went live a few months ago and earlier this week they shared these staggering numbers:
- They had 9,102 active users when they converted and they now have 28,214. In full disclosure this may not be an apples to apples comparison as their former internet banking solution was account based and our internet banking source code is user based. Users can see all of their accounts with one login.
- They had 6,500 bill payment users before the conversion and they now have 12,900.
- e-Statements was 9,139 and now is 27,580 – this translates in to a $130k per year savings.
- 91% of their members are now auto enrolling in to internet banking.
Kudos to the Vantage team for their conversion (conversions are always difficult) and success. If you are a credit union that wants to take control of your own destiny with internet banking please reach out to us.
Yep, we received the third edition of Tim McAlpine’s symposium video to be a part of the Your Symposium agenda today. Another amazing entry. Take a look – enjoy, vote, pledge your attendance to see Tim and gang in person, and consider submitting your own video to be part of the action.
Oh, and Deandre, I have something that rivals Sonic – Frosty Boy in New Palestine. Treats on me as I already owe gen Xer Tim a pineapple whip.
From the Inside Indiana Business – a list of Mira winners. We are thrilled to be included with so many innovative and entrepreneurial companies as well as individuals. This was the inaugural year for the excellence in corporate IT award so we are humbled to be recognized as the first winner. A team accomplishment. As we said in the acceptance speech – we thank TechPoint for the opportunity and we appreciate the support of our 100,000+ FORUM Credit Union member/owners who we love to serve.
We have met our goal of 10 sponsors for the ‘09 Your Symposium. We will happily take more if there is interest. Remember, if we can get more than 10 we will do the math and lower the price of admission to attend the event. We have 66 pledged attendees, so we need 34 more to green light the event. June 30 is the hard deadline. Most importantly, we need content providers. Going in to this crowd sourcing experiment we figured sponsors would be one of the more difficult objectives and that content providers would not be a problem. With so many creative, passionate and outspoken credit union people we figured the videos and proposals to speak/facilitate would be coming at us from multiple directions. Please help us out. Be part of the solution, the future, the change, the conversation, the event.
A big thank you to the sponsors listed on the site. We appreciate you taking a chance on the event and your trust in us. It means a lot to us.
We remain hopeful that we will reach our crowd-sourcing goals of 100 attendees and 10 sponsors. We need content providers so don’t be bashful as this is an opportunity that doesn’t come around very often. There may be potential attendees who would pledge participation if they knew more about the content. June 30 is the deadline for both pledges and content entries. We are ready to host if the demand is present to make this event a break even for us. We also want to make sure the event is worthy of your time investment.