Creating a consistent scorecard across departments can be a real challenge for credit unions and community banks. It’s rare to see even two departments from the same financial institution utilizing the same documents to measure their goals for the year.

Often, the question is asked “What exactly are we trying to accomplish as an organization?” When there are misunderstandings and misinterpretations of the highest strategic goal in the organization, it’s bound to create conflicting priorities.

The Problem with Vague Scorecard Metrics

Your credit union’s annual strategic goal is to create positive net organic membership growth, ages 18-44. Seems straightforward enough, right? Let’s explore where there could be a misinterpretation of measuring this goal across departments.

• Organic: How do we define organic? Do we exclude indirect lending?
• Membership: How do we define membership? Do we exclude trust accounts, conservatorships, business accounts, and specialty accounts, political campaign accounts and inherited/beneficiary IRAs?
• Age: When do we determine age? What if a member turns 45 before the end of the year? Are they removed from this measurement even though they joined when they were 44?
• Growth: What is our data from the year prior? Is every department working off the same data points from the prior year?
• Alignment: Does each department have a consistent understanding of membership allocation across cost centers?

We can see how a seemingly straightforward goal is now ripe with opportunities for misalignment. Department leaders could interpret the measurement of this goal very differently, creating employee outcomes that are pulling in different directions.

Overcoming Unified Scorecard Miscommunications with Visibility

A challenge we often observe among credit unions and community banks is the difficulty in actual aggregation and modeling of the data needed to produce a reliable metric. This is where having the necessary tooling like a robust data platform becomes key. One of our credit union clients features their four organizational strategic goal trends by month on every employee’s report landing page.

Every employee in your organization, whether you have 10 or 1,000, should be able to explain what your unified goal is and be able to access a place where they can see the progress of the goal. The key here is visibility and repetition – and to remember that your employees have vastly different knowledge sets and perspectives based on their roles and tenure.

Robust Data Modeling Mitigates Unified Scorecard Challenges

From a data analytics tooling perspective, finding a data analytics solution that can provide a robust data modeling approach is critical to creating a unified scorecard. It’s important to have the ability to drill down by granular dimensions that are customizable to your own organization’s logic, such as:

• Date range
• Product category
• Cost center
• Employee
• Persona
• Engagement type

If your organization doesn’t have access to these simple categorizations, you could be missing a key part of the scorecard picture.

To learn more about creating operational alignment through data analytics, download our complimentary whitepaper.

Gemineye’s modern data platform is designed to help credit unions and community banks manage, unify, and activate their data across teams and tools. From data hygiene to real-time analytics, Gemineye gives you the foundation to improve both operations, such as unified scorecards, and member experience.

Schedule a personalized discovery call to see how our platform can transform how your institution stores, manages, and uses data.