Sioux Valley Community Credit Union (SVCCU)

SVCCU is a growing financial institution based in the rolling plains of Iowa, with a keen focus on community engagement.

Location: Siouxland, Iowa and South Dakota
Industry: Financial Services

SVCCU is a small but mighty $38M credit union who is quickly expanding throughout Siouxland - a hardworking, rural region in America’s Great Plains. Their old website was woefully outdated, extremely limited in function, and impossible to update. Living in fear of “breaking” their website by making even a minor change, they came to us in search of a modern redesign that was functional, but also represented who they are and where they are going.

SVCCU has four branches, which is unusual for a credit union of their size. They are extremely active in their communities and help underbanked populations like Native Americans and refugee immigrants. They deserved a site that embodied the great work they do and their trusted reputation throughout the region.

We partnered up with Generation Web in Denver, CO, to create a powerhouse team that could both strategize and execute on a new site for SVCCU.

Disciplines

Brand strategy
Customer journey
Brand voice
web messaging
Wireframing
Desktop & Mobile Mockups
Custom icons

“Sioux Valley Community Credit Union recently used Alicia and her team for a much-needed website refresh. Everything was easy to understand and worked smoothly from start to finish. Easy to communicate with and answered all my questions or got me in touch with the person who could.”

— Kelly Potter, Compliance MANAGER, svccu

SVCCU Brand Strategy and Web Design Goals

modernize website

A much-needed website refresh is an understatement. The old site lacked basic functionality which prevented the team from making updates to products, rates, events, and other critical pieces of information. It looked woefully outdated and created a sense of uncertainty among web visitors. Employees at small credit unions like SVCCU wear many hats and rarely have a dedicated web designer or IT manager, creating a need for a site that is usable for non-technical folks.

UNDERSTAND AUDIENCE MOTIVATIONS AND PAIN POINTS

SVCCU resides in a part of the United States with a unique cultural tapestry, including:

Rural, blue collar farmers and oil workers
Native American reservations
A growing population of refugees from the Middle East and South America (read more about Siouxland’s part in helping refugees)

The credit unions serves all of these demographics, which creates a challenging but rewarding exercise in understanding who their website visitors are and what they are looking for. We utilized our unique customer journey mapping methodology to plot out their journeys before we started designing.

Determine PERSONALITY AND VOICE

SVCCU’s brand was filled with personality, humor, and down-home, no-nonsense banking principles, but you never would have known it from their old website. For SVCCU to compete with an ever-growing list of virtual and neo banks, as well as large banks and credit unions, it was critical that we nurtured and built out their unique brand voice.

What did SVCCU want to be known as? How did they want their members to think of them? We used trusty brand archetypes, as well as tone and humor guides to align the SVCCU team.

BUILD TRUST using social proof

Trust is a critical component of a credit union’s brand. More than ever, consumers want to know that their money is safe and that they are doing business with an established organization - especially the underbanked and immigrant communities, who tend to lack trust in financial institutions. How do we build trust with SVCCU’s target audiences? How do we prove to them that their money is safe and that real people are here to help them?

colorful sticky notes described customer journey

Customer Journey Mapping and Wireframing

One of the biggest mistakes organizations make when they embark on a website design project is a lack of strategy behind how their web visitors are going to use the website. While visual design is important, it’s even more critical that there is alignment between your visitor types and motivations and the web design itself.

Using information gathered on regional stats, competitor brands, buyer behavior, and other data points, we helped SVCCU uncover:

What their prospects and members are looking for
How they do their banking and browse for information
What makes them feel special and part of a community
How to keep them engaged

We then took this data and applied it to our proven web design formula, creating website wireframes that were deeply intentional.

SVCCU Wireframing layout

“We have received great reviews from our members regarding the updated site. Thanks, Alicia, for all your hard work and bringing us up to date!”

— Kelly Potter, VP of compliance

SVCCU Website Mockups

Once website wireframes were approved and the SVCCU team was onboard with the strategy, navigation, and flow of the site, it was time to apply visual design elements to the wireframing. In this part of the web design project, we introduced stylistic elements like color, shapes, photos, and icons to really flesh out what the site would look like. Working closely with the web development team and the project team at SVCCU, we determined the unique functional components needed for the site to perform best, like custom interest rate charts.

In addition, we created curated stock photography libraries for the SVCCU team to use, being mindful that the photos represented the region they served and didn’t seem out-of-touch to the locals.

SVCCU WEB MOCKUP LAYOUTS

SVCCU Website Messaging and Copywriting

Lastly, when the site was in development, we worked with SVCCU to collaborate on website copy. The organization wanted to lean into a friendly, knowledgeable, down-home persona with hyper-local messaging to differentiate themselves from the competition. We incorporated the tone and personality data we gathered from our brand strategy work, writing headlines and sub headlines that spoke to SVCCU’s audiences in a unified brand voice, including: