Tips for CEOs - Membership Analysis Inquiry

The following are tips for CEOs when using the Membership Analysis Inquiry screen while preparing for Board Report meetings.

Understanding Member Demographics

Remember to click “Continue” (or press Enter) to see the entire series of screens.

 This analysis comes from an automation of the Membership Analysis Report. Once a month CU*BASE runs and stores the data from this report, giving your team the ability to view snapshots of different months and years. One easy way to learn about this process is to run the report (Tool #520) and study all of the information available.

Take the time to review the different data presented when selecting Active Member, New Member, or Closed Member statuses. Here are some simple things you can see, comparing two months side by side:

  • New members added month 1, month 2: How did we do in comparison?

  •  Closed members in month 1, month 2: How did we do in comparison?

  • All Active members as of month end 1, month end 2: What was the net change.

For all three conditions, the system will then give some additional presentations by Gender and Age (press Enter to see these screens)

One important concept to cover here is the ideas related to Member Calculations versus Totaling Individuals/Businesses who make up your membership:

When selecting the Membership tab you will get the actual number of unique membership numbers you have assigned to individuals (represented by SSN) or businesses (represented by TIN). For example, you might have 15,000 memberships that have been assigned to/opened by 13,500 people/businesses. You then have a ratio of 1.11 memberships to individuals/businesses.

 Remember CU*BASE does not discriminate here about the status of the membership in presenting member count. Many credit unions do have their own special rules when counting members. Here are some examples:

  • Members in Good Standing (their primary savings has a balance equal to or greater $x to qualify).

  • Members are counted excluding active members who have a written-off loan.

  • Members are counted based only on the primary owner, or members are counted including both the primary and the joint owner should both have par balances deposited.

This is a good time to discuss how you count members. It is very likely that you need to explain how “apples to apples” is not always the way a credit union talks when stating stats.