Holly Fearing
Hello, everyone and welcome to the Filene Fill-In. I'm Holly Fearing with Filene. The Filene Fill-In is the podcast where we fill you in on what's been going on here at Filene's home base and out and about in the financial services world. Today's episode is very special. We have a guest on that is well known in the financial world from a national media stage, and we're unpacking everything about a new highly valuable Filene member benefit offered through a new partnership between Filene and HerMoney. If that name sounds familiar to you, you know our guest today is none other than Jean Chatzky. Jean Chatzky is a former financial editor of NBC's Today Show, best-selling author, award-winning personal finance journalist and advisor to major media companies and financial firms across the country.
(00:59) The company Jean founded called HerMoney makes one of the country's leading taboos, talking about money, more accessible, educational and fun because of how they have figured out how to meet people where they are with the financial content they want. Helping people connect, learn, and take action on their finances with confidence is the winning strategy that enabled the company to gain more than 550,000 followers on social media, more than 250,000 podcast listens a month, 2 million annual website visitors and more than 100,000 newsletter subscribers. By partnering with Filene, HerMoney is bringing that same high quality financial education content and customizing it for credit unions to personalize and share directly with their members every month.
(01:48) The goal of this effort is twofold. Make life easier for every credit union marketing professional with a full plate. Yes, I am right there with you all, and to enable credit unions to engage members where they are while being more effective in their work to improve consumer financial wellbeing. Now, if you're curious about what the future might look like with social media and all the constant changes that are happening, or how the HerMoney team got people to be entertained by financial content or the strategies that make finlit more effective, I'm with you there too. Luckily, Jean has a lot to say about all of this and more. We are just so honored to have you on the podcast today, financial wellness expert and HerMoney CEO, Jean Chatzky. Welcome to the Filene Podcast.
Jean Chatzky
(02:37): Thank you so much for having me.
HF
(02:39): So I just mentioned HerMoney and some of our listeners may not know what that is. So Jean, can you tell us a little bit about your organization, HerMoney?
JC
(02:49): Sure. HerMoney is a company that launched with a podcast about six years ago called the HerMoney Podcast, but has grown into a company that provides financial information for women in a variety of formats. So we produce a lot of content for our HerMoney website. We have other podcasts that are in production. We do coaching. We launched a coaching division during the pandemic and we launched a coaching division during the pandemic and now have two coaching programs, one in the budgeting space called Finance Fix and another in the investing space called Investing Fix also for women. And we work with companies as well. So we are working with Filene to develop social media content for distribution by a lot of your members. And we are really excited about that.
HF
(03:53): We are so excited about that too and so that really leads into my next question. I'm curious how you first got connected with Filene and how you started talking about this idea to support credit unions with financial wellness content for their members.
JC
(04:11): I feel like I've been in the Filene orbit for a good decade plus. I've been a credit union supporter for many, many years as those of you who have followed me on the Today Show know. But I started working in the credit union space about 10 years ago doing events for some credit unions. For the past five years I've been moderating hosting the co-op conference that many, many credit unions attend, which has been a pleasure and it was there that we started talking about the potential of developing social media content for credit unions. I'm a journalist at heart. I am a writer my whole life. So one of the things that we produce a lot of for my channels and for the HerMoney channels is really high quality social media content. And your colleague Christie Kimbell and I started noodling the fact that many credit unions, particularly smaller credit unions, but also those that just don't have strong content arms of their own could use content that was created specifically for them. And we put our heads together and made it happen. Christie is definitely a wizard when it comes to packaging things up and rolling them out. And so it's been a real pleasure for me and for my team. I don't do this by myself to work with Filene.
HF
(05:49): Can you tell us a little bit more about the credit union connection? I think you just spoke a little bit about this, but what is it that you see in credit unions versus other players in the financial services space that are the perfect entity for delivering this type of content to consumers?
JC
(06:12): I'm all about getting the best deal for the consumer, for the member at all corners of the road, at all forks in the road and credit unions are all about putting the member first. And so when I take on partnerships and when HerMoney takes on partnerships, we're always looking to see if there is an alignment of mission. We're always looking to see if this is a product, a service that we can get behind. I have absolutely a hundred percent confidence that we and credit unions are marching in the same direction because we're all about making consumers stronger and putting the financial power and the financial knowledge into the hands of consumers and members that need it. The financial landscape has gotten really cluttered and really confusing over the past decade with the rollout of numbers of fintechs and different competitors and new technologies. And you're never sure when you sign on with some new service if they've got your back or if they are looking to take advantage of you in some way and you find yourself having to really dig deep and read a lot of fine print to get to the bottom of things. That's just not true with credit unions. You know they've got your back. They are owned by their members. They are member first, pro-member, pro-consumer, and so I just think it's a perfect alignment.
HF
(08:07): We are very excited about the whole program at Filene and I'd love to hear from you around what you might be most excited about with the Filene and HerMoney program as it starts to get into full swing this year for the first time.
JC
(08:23): So first and foremost, I am excited about getting the information that is in our posts. Whether we're talking about tweets or Instagram posts, videos, Facebook posts, however we're packaging them up, the articles that are coming out with each month's worth of content; I'm most excited about getting that information into the hands of members that need it so that they can make positive change in their financial lives. But what I also know, having grown the HerMoney community over the past half decade and having grown my own following over a quarter century on the Today Show is that when you provide quality information, valuable information to somebody else and they use that information to either get smarter or make a smart decision or save some money or make some money, you build incredible loyalty. And so I'm also really excited about helping credit unions strengthen their relationships with their own member bases because they're the ones that are going to be putting this information out there.
(09:51): We're the back engine that is creating the content because we know what's on the minds of individuals at any point in time. We know what they're thinking about, they talk to us, in emails and on social media, and so we know what they're worried about and what they're concerned about and we're gonna be building all of that information as well as information about the news into our content. But we're not the deliverers. Credit unions are the deliverers and they're going to reap the benefit of providing this solid information to their members. I'm also really excited about strengthening the relationship that I have and that HerMoney has with credit unions. I mentioned that we have a coaching arm. We are in the process of rolling out our coaching through credit unions so that members of credit unions can take advantage of this coaching as well. And I'd love to use this relationship or see this relationship grow our contacts and our relationships in that channel as well.
(11:09): So I have to ask because there's so much going on with social media today, and as you were just saying, this program really, it uses the social media platforms to help credit unions amplify their brand awareness and their engagement with their members and their outreach to members and potential members and the general public via social media. So why do you feel that the social media platforms are an effective way to meet people where they are with this type of education?
JC
(11:46): Precisely because that's what they do, right? You use the phrase "meet people where they are." Social media meets people where they are, it meets them in their phone, it meets them on their commute every single day. It meets them when they're taking a break at work and lifting up their head for a couple of minutes to go through their feeds and see what news has popped up. It doesn't ask you to do anything except for the follow up. It gives you something and once it gives you something valuable and you engage with that post, what we know about the algorithms is that it will serve up more of that same content. And so we know this works precisely because it doesn't ask a heavy lift of your members, it doesn't even ask them to open their mail, right? It just asks them to continue to engage with Instagram or Twitter or LinkedIn or Facebook or TikTok, whatever they're already engaging with. It asks them to open these channels that they open already and just gives them something of value. And that's why this works.
HF
(13:06): Absolutely. I was just talking to a CEO the other day who said, you know, when he comes back to his computer and it's full of emails, it's just like he doesn't even have the energy to look at those emails because each one takes work, right? But social media is what people do to take a break from that. So they're probably in the mindset of, okay, I can take this little bite size nugget of information in right now. I'm in the head space to do that.
JC
(13:36): Yeah and it's our goal and to be quite honest, our challenge to make it fun. To make this information cause you know, financial information can sometimes be dry. We are making it fun and poppy and vivid in terms of the graphics that we're using so that we grab as many eyeballs as possible, so that we're sticky. So that maybe, you know, at some point we catch lightning in a bottle in the content that we put out because we've got multiple credit unions pushing it out starts to trend.
HF
(14:11): And along those lines, I know that the organizations that are participating in the program here, starting in January, they're not only getting a ton of this exact market ready financial wellness content that you are speaking of, but they're also getting this really valuable best practices playbook that walks them through some of the key information and practices for more effective use of social media platform by platform. Now you've connected with hundreds of thousands of people on your social platforms. So through your experience growing the HerMoney brand on social media, what have you learned is the best way to engage with your followers and what types of messages or interactions do you find work best or are most well received by your audience?
JC
(15:02): So I find that the messages that work best are either incredibly timely or a little bit dry or self-deprecating. They have to be genuine. You're not going to get traction with a message that comes off as as being canned. And so we work really hard to make sure these messages come off as genuine, but then the way to build a following is to actually engage. We invite you to engage with us, tag us. We'll happily try to engage with all of you as much as possible, but you should be engaging with each other. I really hope that all of the credit unions that are in this program are following each other and that when their members like or comment on a particular post, they get right in there and they talk to those members. That's what it takes when you start a dialogue.
(16:05): When you have some interaction, it builds on itself. People start to share it more. People don't like to feel like they're alone on social media. They like to feel like they're in the thick of something important. And by engaging, even if it's, by doing something as simple as liking something, that's exactly what you're doing. My team put a ton of work into this best practices guide and we've got people on our team who have been specializing in social media for years now. They gathered all of our tips and tricks and put it together in this manual so that I hope that it's really as helpful for people as we expect it to be.
HF
(16:46): And that's such a great idea to have all of the participants sharing and liking and engaging on each other's posts because that's really how we build that community across credit unions and highlight that real differentiator that credit unions collaborate with each other.
JC
(17:05): Yeah and just a word about that, hashtags. So when we are all using the same hashtag, that's how posts start to trend. That's how the algorithms recognize that everybody or a large number of people are talking about the same thing. And once you get some momentum, these engines share the content even more. It shows up in more feeds more frequently. So we've included hashtags on the posts that we have crafted for all the credit unions. Don't get rid of them. They're really, really important. You want to be using hashtags and you want to be using them back and forth between the various credit unions. And while you're waiting for your members to start to engage, engaging with each other is exactly the right thing to do because it's going to result in activity that is gaining momentum, which is exactly what you want to see.
HF
(18:17): I'd love to take a step back just for a moment because Jean, you have been such a key influencer and expert in the financial wellness space, and I'd love to have you let our listeners hear a little bit more about your background and how you became so passionate about helping others gain financial knowledge to improve their lives. Can you walk us a little bit through your journey?
JC
(18:45): Sure. So as I mentioned, I'm a financial journalist. I started as an editorial assistant as many journalists do. And I found my way into the world of personal finance. Some people might say that was by accident or by coincidence. I think I was drawn to the field of personal finance because I was making a mess of my own financial life and I didn't know how to sort it out. And I thought it was more complicated than it truly is. This stuff is not rocket science. And by reporting on personal finance for many, many years, I straightened out my own financial life and then was able to explain to other people in language that they could understand what they needed to do with theirs. I was an English major in college. My secret sauce is not that I spent time as a hedge fund manager, it's that I am able to take these sometimes complicated topics and explain them in a way that people can not only understand them, but take action on them.
(20:05): So I was at SmartMoney magazine, which some of you may remember when it launched, in the early nineties, I had been a young reporter at Forbes. I was recruited to join the startup staff at SmartMoney and we had a big PR effort for that magazine. SmartMoney was the child of two very wealthy publishing parents, the Hearst Corporation and the Wall Street Journal. And so we had a budget for PR and the PR guy who was in charge of the account got a segment for my editor-in-chief on the early morning version of the Today Show. He was supposed to go on once a week and talk about a story in the magazine, but he was also supposed to show up there at 5:00 AM and he did it once and came back complaining that they didn't even have coffee and that was the end of that.
(21:05): So they started just putting random staff members from SmartMoney on this early morning Today Show segment. And one week it was my turn. I went on, I talked about a story and the producer came running after me and asked me if I could just come back every week. I definitely had a little bit of an advantage. I grew up in television. My father ran local market television stations, so I kind of knew what was needed in order to make a segment work, but I did that for three years. I got picked up on the Today Show. I spent 25 years there and then found my way into podcasting and launched HerMoney.
(21:49): And I'm often asked, how do you do one thing for such a long time? I mean, for me, personal finance has been what I've done for 30 years, more than 30 years if I'm being honest. And I love it because it is always changing. There's always something new and different to talk about. But I also just love having this opportunity to make people's lives a little bit better. I feel good about the fact that people still come up to me and tell me that they started a 529, years ago when their kids were babies and now have money for college because they heard me talking about it on television. And so the mediums have changed a little bit, but the message really hasn't.
(22:40) You mentioned Holly, this term financial wellness and that's kind of a new term. I feel like financial wellness was teetering on the verge of acceptance for about the last decade. But in the last couple of years, employers, credit unions, healthcare providers have started to truly accept the fact that financial wellbeing, that your financial life is a really important component of financial wellness. We know when we look at surveys about stress, that nothing stresses us out more than money. And if money is making you anxious, it's likely making you unhappy. It's probably creeping into your personal relationships, your ability to do your work. I mean, there's so many different ramifications, even physical ones, when we're anxious about our money. It makes us physically ill, but there's so much that we can do about it. And getting the right information into people's hands is the very first step in helping them make the sort of changes that are possible in order to create a life that's a little less stressful financially and financially sound.
HF
(24:04): Yeah, it's so fascinating. Your story and the work that you're doing, it's entirely essential. I heard you say once that, you know, this is in the effort of the fact that everyone deserves to enjoy life. And when you put it that way, you know who could disagree with that? And if this is one of the key ways that people can enjoy their lives, then this work, it's so essential.
JC
(24:32): Yeah and it's so personal, right? I mean, I'm not gonna tell anybody, you know exactly what they should want to do with their money, right? Your goals, are your goals. Your resources are your resources. I can suggest the best accounts to put that money in to give it the opportunity to grow the fastest. But we need to understand that this stuff, although not rocket science, needs to be managed in order to create the outcomes that we're looking for. And because money's a limited resource, we have to manage it pretty well in order to get there.
HF
(25:15): Yeah, so again, I want to dig into this one a little bit because I've just really been interested in getting your perspective on how in the financial services industry, we often hear that financial education alone does not really work to help people get to a better financial standing. And yet, as you've spoken about, and we know this very well here at Filene, that financial skills, like basic budgeting techniques and retirement saving strategies or just investing or paying taxes is rarely taught in school. And a lot of us have had to try to learn on our own sometimes the hard way just as we're entering adulthood. And that can be awkward and isolating. So what are your thoughts on financial education? Does it work? How might it work better? And like, why aren't these skills ever taught to us sooner?
JC
(26:11): Boy, there's so many questions in that one question. Why are these skills not taught to us sooner? I think teachers these days have so much on their plates that they are required to test for, that asking them to make room for financial education is, you know, that is a steep hill to climb. Now, we've seen some movement on it in the last couple of years because during the pandemic, people realized again, how important this actually is. But yeah, I'm waiting. I'm waiting for a national mandate and I don't think that you can teach it just once. I think you need to teach it every year. I also don't think it has to be a separate topic. I think you can put it into your math lessons and into your social studies lessons. You can build it into your curriculum.
(27:02): I also think that people have to be ready to receive the information. I think when you look at people and how they manage their financial lives, I think they separate themselves into three pretty distinct groups. There are people who wanna do it themselves and they are hungry consumers for all this information. They'll take it in, they'll put it to use, they'll maybe do some additional homework and figure out the steps to take from there. There are people who want help doing it. And these are the folks who will come into the credit union, who will maybe sit down with somebody at the credit union who are ripe for the coaching programs that my company and others offer that look to financial advisors to help them manage their financial lives and make the right decisions. And then there are people who just say, do it for me.
(28:03): And those are the folks who hand over their money to other people to manage for them. It's about helping people in all three of those categories, not just absorb the information, but absorb it and then take a step. Absorb it and make a change. And so when information is presented in a way that gives people a to do, not a list of to-dos, but a to do, we have more success in the behavior change part of the equation. But human beings, human beings are tough. Um, you know, if you've looked at the behavioral finance work that's been done in universities around the country, you know there's a whole science devoted to the fact that human beings often don't do what we know are the right things to do with our money. You know, it's the eat less, exercise more problem. We know exactly what we have to do to lose weight and we don't do it. Save more, spend less. Yeah, we get that. And yet we don't do it because immediate gratification is so much more fun than delayed gratification. And so we've built into our systems and into our tax code different ways to help people automate good behaviors. And I think we need more of those, not fewer.
HF
(29:41): Right, so it's the coupling of the information with action and something that's doable. So a bite of information, a bite of action, until that becomes kind of a rote pattern or behavior for us.
JC
Exactly.
HF
(29:58): That's great. That's really useful kind of just background on, you know, it's a much more nuanced discussion than this works or this doesn't work. So, I think that's really valuable information for our listeners. And so I wanted to kind of go into that a little bit more and see if you have any advice for credit unions that want to do a better job of supporting their members financial wellbeing and help their members live a better financial lives. How can they do that?
JC
(30:32): Well I think the first step is to listen to what their members are asking of them. I've worked with enough credit unions to know that different credit unions have different membership bases and they have vastly different needs. Ask them what they need from you and then use that in your planning as you decide what to deliver to them. And once you give it to them, don't let it be a one and done interaction. If you are refinancing a car loan for somebody, that's fantastic, but don't let that member walk out the door without figuring out how else you can help, how else you can be of service, what else they've got that you can help them make a little bit of money or save a little bit of money or do a little bit of planning around. And while you've got them there, make sure that they are following you on social. My guess is that a lot of members don't even know when their credit union has robust social channels or which channels they have. And you gotta ask for the follow up. You know, tell them about the kind of information that you are sending over their channels. Ask them to give you feedback and start engaging in a dialogue. I think that's how we all get better.
HF
(31:58): And how might they know, or how have you demonstrated that in the past that this work is actually making an impact?
JC
(32:07): Well, we know in terms of our social channels, because we get feedback. We engage with people. We, you know, when people tell us that they opened their IRA, we cheer them on. We've got 20,000 people in a private Facebook group, that are all helping each other every single day. So we see the results on a regular basis, but we also survey. We survey our podcast listeners. We understand where we're helping them, we understand where they're looking for additional help. It makes us smarter. And so we're always, I think you can't be afraid of the feedback and in fact, you have to go out after it because there's too much competition out there. It's the only way that you stay appropriately engaged with the people who are in your community.
HF
(33:07): Well, this has been really, really wonderful information that you shared, and I know we're getting kind of to the bottom of our interview time with you here. So I wanted to ask just a little bit more about what's next for you and what are you hoping to accomplish through your work in the year ahead?
JC
(33:25): Well, we are really excited about this relationship with Filene. We are actively producing content for the months ahead. We're looking so forward to engaging with all the different credit unions that are signing on. And I'm really excited to see so many, so that's great. And we are working on our coaching programs. That's really where a lot of our effort is going. So we're spending a lot of our time producing new assets and, and hiring new coaches and bringing them up to speed and just building out that landscape as well.
HF
(34:04): Wonderful. So is there anything else that we didn't maybe cover today that you wanted to tell our listeners before we wrap it up?
JC
(34:14): Well, I said ask for the follow. So let me ask for the follow. If you guys are not following me on social, you're gonna wanna do that in order to engage with me through this program. So my handle is just Jean Chatzky on pretty much every platform and HerMoney's handle is HerMoney as well. So we hope to see you there.
HF
(34:35): Wonderful. And we will make sure that Filene and Jean and HerMoney are all following each other as well, and take your advice today. Thank you again Jean so much for your time today. We are just thrilled to be partnering with you, with HerMoney and with credit unions on this project.
JC
Thanks Holly.
HF
We can't wait to see what else you do this year and beyond, and we're really looking forward to what happens.
JC
Thank you so much. Me too.
HF
All right. Take care.
JC
Bye-bye.
HF
(35:08): All right, that's it for the Fill-In folks. Thank you for listening and of course, a huge thank you to Jean Chatzky for this discussion. We launched the Filene HerMoney benefit at the beginning of the year, and we're already seeing big impacts. To date, the credit unions enrolled in the program represent 8.4 million members with an average asset size of 2.5 billion. And we're just getting started, adding more participating credit unions every week. All Filene member organizations at the leader level or above automatically have access for no additional cost. Just fill out an enrollment form telling us who to send the monthly content bundle to. If you wanna learn more, enroll or check out your options to level up your Filene membership for access to this program, visit Filene.org/hermoney. That's Filene.org/h e r m o n e y. I'd also like to thank our podcast editor Brian Daley, for making us sound good and for ensuring a pleasant audio experience for you, the listener. If you like this episode, please do rate us on Apple Podcasts so more people can find us. And make sure you are subscribed to the Filene Fill-In podcast so you can keep up with what's going on at Filene. You'll find us on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, SoundCloud, Google Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. To get in touch about today's show, email me at [email protected] or find us on Twitter at @fileneresearch. Until next time, thanks everyone.
