Community Investment Strategy at North Shore Credit Union

The goal of this project is to examine and analyze North Shore Credit Union’s (NSCU) approach to community investment (CI) in conjunction with its overall business strategy. As NSCU continues to evolve its brand position and enact change to its corporate structure in keeping with future expansion plans the CI criteria must change to fit with this new direction. The current CI strategy will be reviewed along with an analysis of competitors and industry best practices to determine a new CI strategy for NSCU. An examination of available CI studies and benchmarking data indicates that NSCU’s CI strategy needs to be updated to reflect and support the enhanced premium brand positioning and business strategy of the credit union. Among the recommendations of this report is to re-align NSCU CI strategy to its evolving brand and business strategy in order to better target the mass affluent customer demographic. There is also an opportunity for NSCU to optimize their CI management systems, performance measurement and involvement in LBG Canada. Consideration of how to more systematically capture program management costs, the value of time and the value of in-kind contribution are also presented. NSCU should also look at ways to leverage additional resources from internal and external stakeholders for the benefit of community partners.