genesee co-op federal credit union: the family secret that needed to get out

the brand

Genesee Co-op Federal Credit Union is a community development financial institution (CDFI) that has been serving Rochester, New York since 1982.

Genesee Co-op serves members with all credit scores, debt-to-income ratios, and financial histories, including many who have been turned away or let down by every other institution in the city.

the partnership

Genesee Co-op’s warmth, depth, and radical inclusion were an open secret: known and beloved by insiders, invisible to anyone who hadn’t already been brought in by word of mouth.

The website looked outdated. The messaging didn’t lead with the value. And in the communities where Genesee Co-op was least visible, mission-aligned organizations didn’t even know they existed or understand what made them different from any other credit union. 

The task was to revitalize Genesee Co-op’s brand and messaging to accurately reflect who they are, attract younger members without alienating the legacy community that built the place, and launch a modernized digital experience worthy of the trust they’d already earned in the neighborhoods they serve.

my role

As senior strategist and lead copywriter, I led the creation of the brand messaging architecture (vision, mission, value proposition, tone and personality guidelines, and audience-specific messaging) and carried it all the way through to web copy for the redesigned site.

I didn’t parachute in with a brief someone else had written. I built the brief. Before a word of messaging was developed, I led a full research phase: a competitive landscape analysis across six financial institutions in the Rochester market, stakeholder interviews with members, community partners, board members, and staff, partner and member focus groups, and member and employee surveys.

I synthesized everything I heard into a formal insights brief, the strategic document that gave the whole project team a shared understanding of what we were actually solving for, and why.

What the research revealed was something I find often in this work: the gap between what an organization knows about itself and what the world can see. Genesee Co-op had forty-plus years of stories about taking chances on people when no one else would. Those stories were alive in the mouths of their members and partners. They just hadn’t made it to the website.

the outcome

The site launched and landed well.

Members recognized themselves in it, and staff found that the added clarity made their day-to-day work meaningfully easier.

When the messaging is right, it doesn’t just attract the right people. It also helps the people already inside the organization do their jobs better.

deliverable spotlight: workshop facilitation

I co-facilitated an in-person brand workshop with Genesee Co-op’s key stakeholders, including their outgoing CEO, their incoming CEO, member bankers, community members, and some of the founders who built the credit union in 1982.

This wasn’t a presentation. It was a working session designed to build shared understanding and move the organization toward alignment on some genuinely hard questions: Who are we? Who do we want to reach? What stories are we telling about wealth, and what stories do we want to be telling? What does our brand personality need to feel like to serve both a legacy member who’s been here forty years and a twenty-five-year-old in Rochester who’s never heard of us?

Getting a room full of people with different backgrounds, roles, and relationships to the institution to align on those questions required more than a good agenda. It required knowing when to slow down, when to name what’s underneath a disagreement, and when to push.