Young Parents Earn Baby Bucks for Learning Life Skills

We’re always delighted to work with non-profit organizations who help families develop critical life skills. The Family Resource Centre on the Island of Grand Cayman is one of those wonderful organizations. Through its Young Parents Services program, clients bring their babies with them to the center four days each week where they participate in presentations, take educational online classes, learn about helpful parenting tools, and receive interactive parenting advice. The program promotes healthy lifestyles and habits to help equip the young parents with the skills they need to have a successful, well-rounded family and professional future.

Personal finance is clearly one of those valuable life skills, but how does FamZoo fit in when the kids involved are just babies? It’s not for the kids. It’s for the parents. Carlie Rowell, a program support worker, explains:

The New York Times Tackles Online Allowance

Ron Lieber weighs the pros and cons of online allowance management in today’s New York Times piece: Managing a Child’s Allowance, the Online Version. The article focuses on a competitor, but FamZoo receives some nice mentions at both the beginning (with a link to our About page) and the end (with a link to a post about our Partner Edition for credit unions, banks, and other financial organizations).

Here are a few thoughts on the points Ron raises in the article.

First, Ron worries that online sites like ours make money less tangible for kids. I understand that sentiment, but one of our key goals is to educate kids that electronic forms of money are in fact very real — just like physical forms. The sooner kids get that — and they catch on fast — the better. Ideally, they’ll achieve this epiphany before they get a hold of credit cards or purchase boatloads of virtual goods within some nefarious online game.

Second, Ron laments encouraging yet more screen time for kids. I hear that, but realistically any screen time spent on FamZoo periodically checking a balance or progress on a savings goal is negligible compared to the time they’re likely spending on Facebook, Battlefield 3, Halo, World of Warcraft, Minecraft, you name it.

Third, Ron worries that the email based purchase approval process in Tykoon might replace real conversations. That’s one reason we didn’t implement such an approval process in FamZoo. Spurring meaningful conversations between parent and child about life skills is a key objective. The other — and frankly bigger — reason we didn’t implement an email workflow process for transactions is that it’s just plain cumbersome. We constantly remind ourselves while designing FamZoo that parents are insanely busy. We want to make it super simple and painless for parents to be consistent, effective money mentors.

Fourth, Ron notes that it can be annoying when the child’s desired purchase or charitable giving target is not in the canned Tykoon store. This gets into a bigger issue of business models and conflicting priorities: if a site’s mission is to help kids learn good spending habits, but the site makes money by getting a cut of every purchase made from the site, a conflict naturally arises between the mission (delayed gratification) and the revenue (which is proportional to purchase volume). That’s why our business model is a flat, transparent subscription fee. When your child learns and exercises spending restraint, FamZoo’s revenue doesn’t tank.

Lastly, the article includes some discussion about why a more game-like approach isn’t taken. While I’m a fan of infusing game-like incentives into task based systems, I think anyone who thinks they’re going to make a youth financial education game that rivals today’s popular games (like World of Warcraft or even Angry Birds) is going to find that’s a very, very tall order — if not impossible. I think gamification can be applied to personal finance in clever ways, but personal finance just doesn’t really cut it as a game in and of itself. Why? Check out this video

Shh... FamZoo's Secret Finovate Teaser Trailer from Bill Dwight @FamZoo on Vimeo.

Your thoughts? Ron invites families to weigh in on the topic in his related blog post here.

How Banks and Credit Unions Can Offer FamZoo For Less Than Zero Dollars

Did you know your bank or credit union can offer an innovative award-winning online youth financial literacy solution from one of the coolest startups in America for less than zero dollars?

Umm, how’s that possible? By sharing revenue with us.

Just offer FamZoo to your customers or members through a registration link on your site, and we’ll share any ongoing subscription and renewal revenue from your families. You get half. We get half.

How much does it cost your financial institution to get started? Nothing. So, as soon as your first family converts to a paid subscription, you’ve spent less than zero dollars to offer FamZoo — meaning, of course, you’ve actually made money through our revenue sharing arrangement.

Interested? Contact us.

What If You’d Like to Give Your Families Their First Year for Free?

If you’d like to provide some special incentive for parents to get started teaching their kids good money habits, you might want to offer that first year for free by sponsoring your families. If so, you can purchase a basket of prepaid FamZoo subscriptions that can be redeemed by your families using a custom coupon code of your choosing. We offer volume discounts that start at 50% off our $30/year list price. For example, you can start by purchasing a basket of 100 prepaid one year subscriptions for a total of $1,500.

After their free year is up, your families have the option of renewing by signing up for a paid subscription. If they do, you’ll share the ongoing renewal revenue with us 50/50.

Interested? Contact us.

What If You’d Like to Sponsor Your Families for As Long As They Use FamZoo?

If FamZoo is part of your giving-back-to-the-community efforts, you may want to pick up the tab for as long as your families keep using FamZoo. You can do that by purchasing baskets of discounted prepaid subscriptions just like above, but your families won’t have to enter a special coupon code (although you can require an access code if you like) and they won’t be asked to purchase a subscription.

Note: On each successive anniversary of their registration, your families will be asked to explicitly acknowledge that they’d like to continue using FamZoo. That way, you don’t get stuck paying for families who have since graduated from FamZoo.

Interested? Contact us.

What If You’d Like to Display Your Brand to Your Families?

Would you like your financial institution to remain top-of-mind while your families are using FamZoo week-in, week-out over the years? The entry-level “static branding” option of our Partner Edition product allows you to feature your brand in the top banner area as well as along the right sidebar of each page in the application. You can even override visual styles and elements if desired. Just tell us how you’d like things to look, and we’ll make it happen for a modest one-time setup fee.

Interested? Contact us.

What If You’d Like to Schedule Targeted Offers to Your Families?

Would you like to schedule relevant promotions and product offers to your FamZoo families while they’re using the application? Would you like to target your messaging to just the right audience — say, all parents who currently have a child 13 or older? You can do that with FamZoo Partner Edition using our administrative console. You can place your own custom content in the top banner, along the sidebar, and within emails that are sent out to the family (like the weekly account summary email). Furthermore, you have complete control: you can use any HTML markup you like, you can schedule when it appears, you can dictate where it appears, and you can control what portion of your audience sees it — all on your own through our self-service administrative console. Of course, we’re always happy to assist! Access to the administrative console is available for a modest annual subscription fee.

Interested? Contact us.

Related links:

• Schedule a private online demo/discussion
• 6 Ways to Partner with FamZoo and What It Costs
• How to Deliver Youth Financial Education with FamZoo Partner Edition
• How to Embed Your Own Custom Content in FamZoo Partner Edition
• FamZoo Voted Best of Show at FinovateFall 2011
• What Credit Union Leaders Are Saying About FamZoo
• FamZoo Earns “A” on Credit Union Report Card
• FamZoo Picked as One of 72 Coolest Startups in America

Finovate Winners

The Spring Finovate conference that showcases emerging financial technology just wrapped up this week in SF. We weren’t demoing this time (we launched our FamZoo Partner Edition at Finovate last Fall), so we missed the live show (but we did appreciate the nice CEO Interview coverage on the Finovate blog just beforehand).

Whether you attended the show or not, if you’re looking for a very nice recap with quick thumbnail sketches and insights on each demo, check out this excellent FinovateSpring 2012 live blogging post by Erin McCune. You can also browse the #Finovate tweet stream for interesting (not to mention harsh at times) commentary.

Curious to know who’s taken home the Best of Show accolades each conference since 2007? Here’s a list I put together using List.ly. If you can't see it embedded below or want to access all of the social functions, click here.

How to Embed Your Own Custom Content in FamZoo Partner Edition

Do you deliver financial products or services to a family audience? Would you like to associate your brand and your offerings with innovative and effective youth financial education? Then take a look at FamZoo’s Partner Edition product.

It allows you to embed your custom content within our award winning Virtual Family Bank. Every time your families interact with our application to teach kids good personal finance habits, they’ll see your brand, your related product/service offerings, your educational content, your latest social media streams, you name it — all at just the right time and in just the right context.

Using Partner Edition’s self-service administrative console, you’re in complete control of your custom content. You can

• Schedule an unlimited number of targeted content snippets.
• Place the content in a variety of locations throughout the application — across the top of our pages, in different positions along our sidebar, and even at the top of automated FamZoo emails to your audience.
• Use any HTML markup you’d like for your content — anything from just simple images to sophisticated social media widgets.
• Schedule your content for a specific date range of for ongoing display.
• Target your content specific audience segments.

So how does it work? Here’s a specific example: Suppose you’re the Director of Online Marketing for the hypothetical XYZ Credit Union, and you’d like to offer a teen checking account product to your member parents who have a child approaching the target age. Your desired ad might look something like the one to the right.

Here are the step-by-step instructions for scheduling your targeted sidebar offer to appear in front of the right segment of your FamZoo audience:

Step 1: Sign Into Your Partner Edition Admin Console

Click to view full size.

To create, schedule, and manage your custom content, you’ll need to sign into your private Partner Edition administrative console. We send you the credentials for your first administrative user when your partner edition account is activated. You can subsequently change those credentials and add as many addition administrative users as desired.

Step 2: Select the Sidebar Ads Link on the Branding Tab

Click to view full size.

Once you’re in the admin console, click on the Branding tab. This is where you’ll find most of the features for adding your own custom content. Click on the Sidebar Ads link in the Viewing section of the left-hand sidebar to see a listing of any custom sidebar content you’ve created so far.

Step 3: Fill in the Create Sidebar Ad Form

Click to view full size.

Click on the Create link in the Actions section of the left-hand sidebar to launch the Create Sidebar Ad form. Fill in:

• The name of the ad as you’d like it to appear on the listing page of the admin console.
• The title of the ad as it should be displayed to the end user.
• The HTML markup for the body of the ad.
• The preferred vertical position of the ad within the sidebar, if any.
• Whether or not the ad should be shown to a sub-segment of the audience — like “just parents with children ages 13 and up” in this case.
• Where in the application this ad can be shown — either all pages, just the pages on a specific tab, or just a specific page in the application.
• The specific date range for the ad if there is one.
• The advanced option for indicating that this ad takes top display priority among other candidates if desired. This setting can be handy when you have multiple ads vying for a given position, but you want one to dominate. Normally, FamZoo will rotate display through all of the matching candidate ads for a given position. When checked, this option overrides that normal rotation and always gives precedence to the specified ad.

Step 4: Test Your Ad with the Preview Option

Click to view full size.

It’s a good idea to test your ad to make sure it’s displaying properly before unleashing it on your audience. When creating or editing your ad, select the Preview option to have it display in the special preview section of the sidebar within the admin console.

Step 5: Activate Your Ad to Make It Visible to Your Families

Click to view full size.

Once you’re happy with your ad, check the box next to the Active option, and it will be displayed to your family members when it matches the specified conditions.

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That’s all there is too it! The steps for scheduling banners and email ads are very similar and just as easy. That said, if you ever have any questions, we’re always eager to help. Just contact us.

Related links:

• Schedule a private online demo/discussion of Partner Edition
• How to Deliver Youth Financial Education with FamZoo Partner Edition. Written specifically for Credit Unions, but 99% relevant to all partners.
• 6 Ways to Partner with FamZoo and What It Costs
• What Credit Union Leaders Are Saying About FamZoo
• FamZoo Earns “A” on Credit Union Report Card
• FamZoo Picked as One of 72 Coolest Startups in America

6 Ways To Partner With FamZoo And What It Costs

Would you like to partner with us to deliver innovative, effective youth financial education to your audience? Would you like to grow your audience and your sales along the way?

FamZoo offers a variety of ways to partner, a spectrum of price points (including free), and multiple revenue generation options. The following table (nice PDF version here) summarizes 6 different partnering scenarios based on two dimensions: family sponsorship level (none, partial, or full) and branding option (FamZoo brand or co-branded).

			BRANDING OPTION
			FamZoo Brand	Co-Branded
			No co-branded look No in-app cross-selling No Partner Setup Fee No Partner Admin Fee	Co-branded look Builtin cross-selling platform Partner Pays Setup Fee [3] Partner Pays Annual Admin Fee [4]
FAMILY SPONSOR LEVEL	None	Partner does not pay for any family membership fees. Family pays for all membership fees after free trial. FamZoo pays partner a share of family subscription and ongoing renewal revenue. [1]	Option 1 You tell your families about teaching good money habits with FamZoo. We share initial family subscription and ongoing renewal revenue with you.	Option 4 Everything to the left, plus... >>>	Co-Brand You connect with the next generation. You keep your brand in front of parents for years while you help them teach their kids — your future members, clients, customers — good personal finance habits through hands-on practice. You bolster your brand. You associate your brand with effective youth financial education, social responsibility, innovation, and a good ’ole warm family feeling. You increase cross-selling opportunities. You present your related content, products, and services to just the right audience at just the right time.
	Partial	Partner pays for discounted initial family subscription. [2] Family pays for any renewals after initial sponsored subscription. FamZoo pays partner a share of ongoing family renewal revenue. [1]	Option 2 You help families get started with good money habits by sponsoring their initial subscription. We share FamZoo renewal revenue with you.	Option 5 Everything to the left, plus... >>>
	Full	Partner pays for discounted family subscription and renewals. [2] Family subscribes and renews annually for free. FamZoo/Partner revenue sharing is not applicable.	Option 3 You help families develop and sustain good money habits by sponsoring their FamZoo membership for as long as they need it.	Option 6 Everything to the left, plus... >>>
[1] FamZoo shares 25% of family subscription and/or renewal revenue with partner.
[2] Discounted bulk family subscription/renewal pricing starts at $15/family/year (50% off best list price). Discounts increase with volume.
[3] Setup fee is proportional to partner size and ranges from $250 to $5,000
[4] Annual admin fee is proportional to partner size and ranges from $200 to $3,000. NOTE: Annual admin fee can be eliminated with our “static branding” option.
All prices mentioned here are for general informational purposes only and are subject to change at any time. To obtain formal pricing for your specific situation, please contact us.

Option 1: FamZoo Brand, No Family Sponsorship

This is a very popular choice for bloggers, and it’s completely free for you, the partner. Just surround FamZoo with relevant, compelling content — like blog posts, videos, podcasts or curriculum that describe how your niche audience can get the most mileage out of our Virtual Family Bank. Embed our affiliate links in your content to direct your audience to our site for registration. If a family converts to paid after our standard free trial, you share in 25% of the initial subscription revenue as well as 25% of any ongoing renewal revenue down the road. Those renewals can turn into a nice little annuity (with no extra effort), because most families use FamZoo for several years.

Family finance blogger Suzanne Parker sets a great example. Her top notch content over at GrowingRichKids.com includes detailed online allowance site comparisons and FamZoo best practices drawn from her own genuine experiences with our product. Suzanne’s families know exactly what to expect when they sign up for FamZoo, and they trust her judgement. As a result, Suzanne yields an impressive 38.3% conversion rate of free trial families to paid subscribers. That’s better than the conversion rate we see on our own site, and it’s a testimonial to the power of a well-targeted and well-informed audience.

Option 2: FamZoo Brand, Partial Family Sponsorship

If you’d like to take it to the next level of value for your audience, consider sponsoring the initial subscription period for your target families — or perhaps just a segment of them. How? You can purchase a discounted basket of prepaid subscriptions from us to hand out to your audience in the form of custom coupon codes. For example, you might run a special promotion during April to commemorate National Financial Literacy Month. You could hand out a coupon code called MYFINLITPROMO that’s redeemable by up to 100 different families for one free year of FamZoo membership.

After the sponsored term is up, each family has the option of renewing as a paid subscriber. You share 25% of any such renewals, just like in Option 1.

Option 3: FamZoo Brand, Full Family Sponsorship

Taking it up one more notch on the value scale for your families, you might even choose to fully sponsor their memberships — perhaps as part of a non-profit educational initiative. In this case, you pick up the (discounted) fees for the initial subscriptions as well as any subsequent renewals. Note: families must explicitly renew each year by clicking through an acknowledgement screen; this prevents you from continuing to pick up costs for a family who has since graduated from FamZoo.

Option 4: Co-Brand, No Family Sponsorship

Option 4 is just like Option 1, where we share all the family membership revenue with you, but you also get co-branding and cross-selling capabilities.

The Co-Branding Option allows you to infuse FamZoo with your brand and your targeted content — ads, special offers, social media streams, educational material, you name it. You customize the look of our application with your brand, schedule your targeted content, and monitor the activity of your families through your own private administrative console. The administrative console is completely self-service, so you maintain full control over your marketing initiatives — no waiting for our intervention. That said, we’re always available to give you any help or guidance you might need along the way.

To gain access to your administrative console, you pay us a one-time setup fee and an annual admin subscription fee. Both of those fees are proportional to the size of your organization. If you’d just like to set up your co-branding and targeted content once and forget about it — and if you’re happy to forgo access to your administrative console — we’ll drop the annual admin subscription fee. We call that the “Static Co-Branding Option”, and you only pay the one-time setup fee.

Most partners who have their own products and services to sell choose the Co-Branding with either this option, Option 5, or Option 6, depending on how important revenue sharing is for their youth financial education business model.

Option 5: Co-Brand, Partial Family Sponsorship

Option 5 is just like Option 2, where we share the family renewal revenue with you and the initial family subscription is your treat, but you’re also promoting your brand and cross-selling your offerings with the Co-Branding Option described in Option 4.

Most financial institutions pick either this option, or the next one.

Option 6: Co-Brand, Full Family Sponsorship

And lastly, Option 6 is just like Option 3, where you’re treating your families to FamZoo subscriptions and renewals, but you’re also promoting your brand and cross-selling your offerings with the Co-Branding Option described in Option 4.

What’s The Best Option For You?

Need help deciding which option makes the most sense for your situation? Need a private online demo? Just contact us and we’ll walk you through it.

Need a formal pricing quote good for 30 days? Contact us.

Related links:

• Schedule a private online demo/discussion of Partner Edition
• How to Deliver Youth Financial Education with FamZoo Partner Edition. Written specifically for Credit Unions, but 99% relevant to all partners.
• How to Embed Your Own Custom Content in FamZoo Partner Edition
• What Credit Union Leaders Are Saying About FamZoo
• FamZoo Earns “A” on Credit Union Report Card
• FamZoo Picked as One of 72 Coolest Startups in America

FamZoo Earns "A" on Credit Union Report Card

The dog ate my...err... report card!

In the better-late-than-never category, I just stumbled upon the fact that we earned an “A” grade on the FinovateFall 2011 Report Card posted by the Filene Research Institute. Woot!

The report card expresses the opinions of 23 credit union leaders who accompanied Filene to the financial technology innovation show last year in New York City where FamZoo picked up a Best in Show award. Since the report card doles out 3 A’s, 3 B’s, and 3 C’s to the nine Best in Show winners, the “A” grade represents a best-of-the-best nod from the credit union perspective. We’re very honored by the accolade.

This excerpt from the Filene post explains the evaluation criteria used on the report card:

Nine ideas that were ranked Best in Show by the FinovateFall 2011 audience...have been given a report card grade based on the rankings of Filene’s evaluators, which factored in the viability of the idea, relevance to credit unions, and connection to a consumer need.

The evaluator comment next to our A grade reads:

Cool product. May be a play for credit unions to engage the next generation of members.

Interested? For more information about our youth financial literacy and marketing solution for credit unions, see here.

What Credit Union Leaders Say About Teaching Kids Good Money Habits With FamZoo

A few months ago, I was invited to demonstrate FamZoo’s online youth financial education solution to credit union innovation leaders and executives from across the US and Canada. They were assembled in Kansas City at the “big.bright.minds” meeting hosted by the Filene Research Institute. I was delighted to have the opportunity to demo FamZoo to such a motivated, innovative, high energy group. I was also intrigued to hear about all of the cutting edge projects driven by the Filene i³ working groups. Very cool.

After the meeting, Filene sent me all of the anonymous feedback on my presentation. (Attendees were able to submit comments on presentations in real time to an internal site.) It just dawned on me (umm, duh!) that this feedback is one of the most credible sources of testimonial information we can offer to credit unions who are deciding whether FamZoo is worth a look.

As proof of full transparency, I’m even including the handful of skeptical comments. Being a life-long engineering type, I’ve never been very comfortable with (or impressed by) much self-promotion, so that makes spreading the word about FamZoo a bit challenging at times. Since this comes directly from the mouths of attendees without any filtering on our part, I feel very good about passing it along.

Here are all of the comments verbatim.

Great tool to support credit union commitment to financial literacy.

Incredible concept, had to do this manually growing up and would have loved to have this! I see this going viral very quickly!

Absolutely love this idea! Can’t wait to talk to him more. Wonder if we can tie it to a gift card for older kids.

Really like the concept. It should create better members. I will certainly sign up as this serves a big need as a parent of 2 young boys. Great example of innovation and how it is created.

Totally sweet idea as a parent. Great tie for a credit union.

Love this! He is so passionate about this. Parents MUST teach this at a young age, if you wait until you have bills, budgeting it is SO overwhelming! Trust me. I am trying to figure it all out now. Financial education is so important.

FamZoo is a great idea and is of interest to us.

Oooh....we want this! I really like that this fit so well with our spend share save philosophy. Love that it involves the parents so thoroughly.

Love this for financial education for kids!

Great idea with a unique, applicable approach...we’ll be trying at home for sure!

Great product. I checked this out when I received my pre-reading.

I like the fact that this is an interactive education tool that ties back to daily life. I also like that it is driven by the family and not the Financial Institution. Need more time to see how it might fit with our brand/strategy. May have an interest in participating.

Very good presentation.

Like the concept. Ultimately we need to take all of this financial literacy stuff and consolidate.

Going to get this to my brothers and sisters for their kids to try I hope.

Great online content and partnering opportunity.

I believe experiential learning programs work far better than other educational approaches.

Wow. We couldn’t be more proud of those comments.

Now, to follow through on my promise of full disclosure, here are the handful of comments that registered anywhere south of positive, along with responses for each:

This will only work with very committed parents. I wonder if any parents have actually learned along with children. Many of their parents have never had any financial training.

I understand the concerns. At FamZoo, we know three key things viscerally from firsthand experience:

1. All parents want to equip their kids with basic personal finance skills, particularly in today’s scary economic environment.
2. Very, very few parents consider themselves financial experts.
3. Parents are insanely busy. In fact, family life can be a real zoo! Get it?

We’ve designed FamZoo with these three realities firmly in mind. We help you pass along personal finance fundamentals to your kids with minimal prerequisite knowledge and minimal effort. It’s mostly about instilling very simple, sound financial habits through consistent practice.

Once you take a few minutes to set up FamZoo, the consistency comes along for the ride. That’s because many of the capabilities — allowance, compound interest, recurring payments, chore reminders, weekly progress reports, etc. — just chug along on auto-pilot while you’re off juggling family, work, and the rest of your busy life. From time to time, when those “financial moments” pop up with your child, FamZoo is right there for you — helping you encourage rational fiscal behavior without all the typical emotion.

Do parents learn right along with their kids? You bet. Even those parents with a firm grasp of financial concepts often find that the process of collaborating with their kids improves their own personal finance habits. It’s a cool added bonus.

I think it's novel and likely very applicable, but like PFM I don't know that it would be pervasively used.

Point taken, but it’s a lot less effort than your traditional PFM tool (and those tools are getting easier and easier to use every year I might add). Kids just don’t have that many transactions to track, and virtually everything else is on auto-pilot (see comments above). It’s also more than a PFM tool. As far as kids are concerned, FamZoo is their credit union, and it holds their money. Technically, the accounts aren’t real — an account balance just represents an IOU from the parent to the child — but to a kid, that account balance is very real indeed. As a result, FamZoo is a very “sticky” application once families get started.

Good learning tool for kids, but a bit over-the-top.

I admit it. I packed a lot into this demo, showing back-to-back scenarios from my kids’ real-life experiences ranging from their young years all the way up through college. So, I’m not surprised if some found the presentation to be a bit overwhelming. The nice thing is you can start super, super simple. Then, as your child matures, you can add sophistication gradually as desired.

Or, maybe “over-the-top” was in reference to my neon FamZoo shoes. I’m afraid I don’t have a good defense for those...

Concerned about security and branding. Should a credit union let its member go somewhere else? What if a Bank buys Famzoo?

Security: First off, we don’t keep any real bank account or payment information stored anywhere on our servers. Nobody can get at your real money through FamZoo. Even so, we take security very seriously, because we value the privacy of our families. We use industry best practices and robust underlying technology to protect the personally identifiable information (like email addresses) for our users when they choose to supply it — optional in all cases except for the registering parent. Got a specific security concern? Just contact us to discuss.

Branding: Our Partner Edition allows you to easily mix in your own branding and targeted content along the top and sidebar of the FamZoo application pages using our self-service administrative console. You can also customize aspects of our default UI using your own (nerd alert!) CSS rules. Wondering if you can pull something off to meet your branding requirements? Contact us and let’s discuss.

Being bought by a bank: Really? Can’t imagine that scenario. We think that partnering with a wide array of credit unions, banks, financial advisors, and other financial organizations will help us spread good money habits to more families, more efficiently. That’s consistent with our mission. Being beholden to a single bank is not.

Can’t say it’s critical for the CU, but it should create better members.

Fair enough. FamZoo isn’t critical in the sense that your credit union can certainly function without it. But, credit unions operate to serve their members, not to maximize profit. So, if you’re genuinely interested in the well-being of your member families, believe in the importance of youth financial education, want to start connecting with your next generation members, and want to be top of mind when they transition to real world financial products, I know you (and your families) are going to like FamZoo.

It’s also super easy to roll out — no integration or IT fuss required.

One of the big.bright.mind credit union attendees went live with FamZoo Partner Edition just last week. Will your credit union be next?

Need more info about FamZoo Partner Edition? What is it? How does it work? What does it look like? Why is it good for my credit union and my members? How do I roll it out on our site? Check out this post.

Ready to schedule a live demo for your credit union? CLICK HERE.

How Credit Unions Can Fill the Youth Financial Education Gap

Credit Unions truly care about youth financial education. Why? It’s part of their community-oriented DNA (more here). As Edward A. Filene, the father of the American credit union movement, succinctly put it: “Credit unions are educational institutions.”

That’s why some of the biggest, brightest minds in the credit union industry have already started rolling out our new FamZoo Partner Edition as an innovative, effective way to fill the gaping educational void between the piggy bank and the check book. (Want to know what those folks had to say about us? You can read their unfiltered comments here.)

Will your credit union be joining the youth financial education thought leaders in 2012?

To schedule a live demo for your credit union, CLICK HERE.

It’s easy. Check out the quick slide show below. You can also view it directly on Flickr and slideshare, or you can download the presentation in PDF and PowerPoint formats.

NOTE: For best results, view in full screen mode.

Here are the details:

Slide 1 of 18: The Gap. There’s a huge educational gap between the piggy bank and the commercial checking account. As with any significant skill, mastering personal finance requires instruction and practice — lots of practice.

The piggy bank is a good first start for the very young, but it quickly runs out of steam as an educational tool. On the opposite end of the spectrum, the traditional checking account is designed for adults and presumes considerable amounts of knowledge and maturity. Mistakes can be costly and carry lasting implications.

To learn the financial ropes, kids need something in between: a solution that teaches progressively more sophisticated personal finance skills through real experiences without onerous punishment for the inevitable failures. Mistakes must be considered an opportunity for learning, not profit. Also, since money and values are so deeply intertwined, kids need to work closely with their parents. But parents are insanely busy, so the solution must be quick to set up and painless to maintain.

What’s the answer? FamZoo’s “virtual family credit union.”

Slide 2 of 18: How does it work? Parents run their own private online “credit union” for their kids. The accounts in this credit union aren’t real financial instruments — they’re “virtual accounts.” A virtual account balance simply represents how much the parent “owes” the child at any given time. From the child’s perspective, a virtual account is still very real.

The parents are the virtual credit union managers. They credit accounts for deposits, chores, odd jobs, allowance, gifts, interest, etc. Most of these credits are automated after a one-time setup. Parents hold on to the real money for safekeeping while kids make goals and save. Parents debit accounts after purchases, donations, or withdrawals.

The kids are the virtual credit union members. They learn to spend, save, and give wisely through regular hands-on practice. Kids collaborate with their parents in a private, friendly, educational environment and learn from their mistakes without doing any serious real-world financial damage.

Slide 3 of 18: Friendly Online Access. Parents and kids can sign into their private virtual family credit union through a friendly online web interface. As the managers, parents see and control all of the accounts in their family. Kids only see their own accounts with access permissions that are determined by the parents.

Slide 4 of 18: Match Policies With Values. As the managers, parents are in charge. It’s their credit union; they make the rules in a way that matches their unique family philosophy. For example, when it comes to a child’s income, parents can decide whether it’s based on odd jobs, paid chores, regular allowance, birthday gifts, or whatever — perhaps even some combination.

Slide 5 of 18: Incentives That Kids Can Appreciate. Do you really think the annual interest rate on a real savings account is going to motivate a kid to save? Nope, that’s not gonna cut it. With a virtual family credit union, parents can offer incentives with arbitrarily aggressive rates and time-frames. Let parents decide what it takes to communicate the magic of compound interest and jump-start good saving habits with their own kids.

Slide 6 of 18: Kids Monitor Their Own Money. Kids can monitor their own accounts and transactions using a web browser, a mobile interface (iPhone app or Android), or text messages (any mobile phone). With FamZoo, kids learn to live within their own means, not their parent’s.

Slide 7 of 18: Set Goals, Make Plans, Monitor Progress. Kids can make saving and giving goals, plan what-if scenarios for achieving them, and track their progress over time. With their parent’s guidance, kids will learn to save patiently and give thoughtfully.

Slide 8 of 18: Start Simple. Add Sophistication As Kids Mature. FamZoo’s broad spectrum of personal finance tools allows parents to start very simple with their youngest kids. As children mature from youngsters to tweens to teens, parents can add sophistication incrementally. Older kids can learn to manage budgets, loans, expense accounts, and more as they gradually transition to your credit union’s real world financial products.

Slide 9 of 18: Quick Setup. Auto-Pilot. Parents are insanely busy! They need a simple, visual setup that gets the family up and running in minutes. They need automation to keep things like allowances, chores, interest payments, recurring expenses, and reminders running smoothly in the background. That’s exactly what they’ll get with FamZoo.

Slide 10 of 18: Deliver Great Education. Grow Membership. Using FamZoo Partner Edition, our award winning co-branded platform with its built-in targeted advertising engine, credit unions can deliver effective youth financial education while capturing new members as they naturally transition to real world financial products.

Slide 11 of 18: Super Simple Implementation. You can integrate FamZoo on your credit union’s site with just two links and some copy on your youth financial education landing page — no software installation or fancy back-end integration required. Your IT department won’t be freaking out. FamZoo doesn’t move any real money around or hold any real account info either. Your security officer can rest easy. Get your FamZoo Partner Edition up and running in minutes.

Slide 12 of 18: Custom Registration Form. Parents registering from your landing page will see your registration form. You can optionally customize it with your own top banner, introduction section, verification field, and any click-through legal terms or privacy policy provisions you’d like to include in addition to the standard FamZoo ones.

Slide 13 of 18: Custom Look. Custom Content. Parents and kids from your registered families will see your custom co-branded styling as well as your targeted content. Your custom content can appear in the upper banner area and in the right-hand sidebar. The content and the targeted audience segments are entirely up to you. You might include age and situation appropriate offers for your relevant financial products, educational content, links to your social media sites, favorite charitable organizations, or anything else your member families might find useful.

Your co-branded styling is controlled through your own custom CSS rules (nerd alert!). If you aren’t familiar or comfortable with CSS, don’t worry! We can help you implement the styling changes you need to achieve your desired co-branded look.

Slide 14 of 18: The Administration Console. Your FamZoo Partner Edition comes with access to your own self-service administration console. Use the admin console to set up your co-branded look, manage your custom content, and see usage stats for your registered families.

Slide 15 of 18: Create and Schedule Custom Content. Use the admin console to create, preview, schedule, and manage your custom targeted content. Your content can appear in banners across the top of FamZoo web pages, in sections within the right-hand sidebar, and within emails sent out by FamZoo to your registered family members.

Slide 16 of 18: Target Your Content. Use the content targeting options to get the right message to the right audience at the right time within the right part of the FamZoo application. For example, you might choose to schedule a special prepaid card offer to appear in the second position on the sidebar of the Overview page during the month of January to all parents with a “tween” or a teen.

Slide 17 of 18: Manage Your Account and Settings. The Account tab in the admin console is where you can find your special registration/sign-in URLs, manage your custom registration page settings, and keep an eye on your family subscriptions/renewals relative to what you’ve ordered so far.

Slide 18 of 18: Questions? Contact Us. Do you have any questions about FamZoo Partner Edition? Would you like to schedule a detailed demo and discussion session over the Web using GotoMeeting? We’d be delighted to talk to you about bringing FamZoo to your credit union — just contact us here.

Credit unions, ready to get started?

To schedule a live demo for your credit union, CLICK HERE.

Related links:

• 6 Ways to Partner with FamZoo and What It Costs
• How to Embed Your Own Custom Content in FamZoo Partner Edition
• What Credit Union Leaders Are Saying About FamZoo
• FamZoo Earns “A” on Credit Union Report Card
• FamZoo Picked as One of 72 Coolest Startups in America

It's Here: FamZoo Partner Edition for Banks, Credit Unions, and Advisors

FamZoo Partner Edition, our new co-branded version of FamZoo, is now available for financial institutions and advisors looking for an innovative new way to deliver effective youth financial education. Using Partner Edition, a financial organization can deliver FamZoo’s Virtual Family Bank directly to its client families. Partner Edition includes an administrative console wrapped around a built-in targeted advertising platform. Using Partner Edition’s self-service console, an institution can customize FamZoo’s appearance, schedule targeted offers, and monitor activity. The platform allows organizations to deliver the right offers at the right time to the right segment of their audience as kids gradually transition to real world financial products. For example, a financial institution might choose to highlight its teen-oriented debit card offering to all parents who have children between the ages of 13 and 17 or its starter savings account to parents of kids 12 and younger.

Please note: families who register and subscribe directly with us via FamZoo.com remain free from all advertising — just as before. Only families registering via a partner using FamZoo Partner Edition are subject to advertising and offers from that sponsoring partner.

The “formal unveiling” (OK, aside from my jeans, Bank of Mom & Dad T-Shirt, and orange shoes) of FamZoo Partner Edition took place last week in New York City at FinovateFall 2011, the premiere conference for showcasing new innovations in banking technology. The format consists of 63 companies delivering back-to-back, pressure-packed 7 minute demos over two days in front of roughly 1000 financial industry executives, analysts, press, and venture capitalists. To top it off, if you don’t heed the big red count-down clock and exceed your time limit, the Finovate staff rings a loud buzzer and unceremoniously cuts your microphone — whether mid-sentence or not. Pretty brutal, but we all know the deal going in, so fair enough.

I was super relieved just to make it through without getting “gonged” and without suffering any unnerving technical glitches. Several hapless presenters were not so lucky — ouch. Kudos to Chris for all the behind-the-scenes prep work and technical contingency planning, like our backup server that fortunately never got called into duty. (But, if it hadn't been there, you just know we would have needed it.) Oh yeah, and my apologies to the poor NYC subway passengers who became an unwitting audience for repeated ad-hoc mumbled rehearsals of my 7 minute schpeel in the days leading up to my time slot.

The videos of the actual demos are not up on the Finovate site just yet, but in the meantime, here’s a goofy little trailer we produced to generate a little pre-show interest:

We were absolutely thrilled (and, frankly, a little bit surprised) by the incredible interest and response we received. The audience voted FamZoo Best of Show and we received tons of genuine interest at our booth - and not just for our cool stickers! Really. Although, I must say my favorite moment was when the big, burly, tough, tattooed union guys who broke down the show booths came over to me to politely request extra stickers for their kids. How could I refuse? It’s the only time I saw those guys smile. Everybody loves cartoon stickers. They were a universal hit.

Last, but by no means least, I want to give a special shout-out to our two launch partners for FamZoo Partner Edition: Paul Comstock Partners and Jay Sanders (President of Maturity Planners and youth financial literacy educator in New York City — see Jay’s great blog). Your help and support was instrumental in ironing out those inevitable initial kinks when you deploy the real deal. Your passion for our product is insanely motivating. Jay, you were an absolute gem at our Finovate booth — I couldn’t have handled the crush without you!

To wrap up my thoughts on the show: I’m truly delighted to see an increasingly serious industry commitment to honestly teaching kids sound personal finance skills — not just check-the-box style efforts. It’s been a long road from day one in 2006, but we’re seeing lots of new activity in the youth financial literacy segment and a variety of creative approaches. That bodes well for kids and familes everywhere, and we’re proud to be a part of it.

P.S. If you find yourself in New York City and you like to walk, here’s a cool tip (thanks to my bro): check out the High Line Park — really, really cool.

For articles covering FamZoo’s appearance at FinovateFall 2011, see here.