If it takes deposits, offers checking accounts, mortgages and certificates of deposit, it must be a bank, right?

Wrong. It could be a credit union. Educating the public about what a credit union is, how membership is often easy to obtain and raising the awareness level of the array of products and services they offer has been the goal of a six-year image campaign undertaken by the Massachusetts Credit Union League.

The most recent development in the ongoing campaign is Wednesday’s launch of a redesigned Web site for its 280 member credit unions, said Robert B. Kimmett, senior vice president of the MCUL.

The site, www.maleague.org, is primarily set up as a business-to-business site but in radio ads run by the association, listeners are directed to the site to learn more about credit unions. From the home page, there are links to credit unions with Web sites of their own as well as a list of all credit unions in the commonwealth. But the opportunity to tout the benefits of credit union membership isn’t passed by. There’s plenty of history and credit union philosophy on the site as well.

“Fortunately, by the time we were rolling it out, it was in the post ‘gee-whiz’ phase, so we weren’t thinking, gee, we have to have flash and have to do a lot of graphics and things like that. We really just wanted to be able to communicate and provide service,” said Kimmett.

Although a “substantial” amount of money has been spent on the campaign, which started in 1995 with television ads, it’s difficult to quantify the success, said Kimmett.

“An image campaign really cannot be assessed in terms of sales that occur immediately. The image exists in the minds of the consumer and the only way to really measure that is to ask the consumer if their opinions and attitudes have shifted over time,” he said.

To accomplish that, in 2000 the association commissioned a study to poll consumers on their attitudes about credit unions before a radio campaign and after. The results proved the image campaign was working, said Kimmett.

Unlike other image campaigns, the association wasn’t trying to shine up a tarnished image. “It was really a question of opening people’s eyes up to the benefits. It was more an under-publicized image that we were concerned about,” he said.

The survey found that before the campaign, 32.7 percent of people polled thought that they didn’t belong to a group that would make them eligible to join a credit union. Afterward, that number dropped to 18.8 percent.

“We were looking to communicate with people who were uninformed or under-informed about credit unions and to clarify the notion that you have to belong to something to join a credit union and that they’re very restrictive in membership. Our general feeling is that not only should everyone have the right to join a credit union, but there’s one for everybody,” he said.

Hot Spots

The image campaign got its start when the two credit union associations in the state, the Credit Union League of Massachusetts and the Massachusetts Credit Union Association, met in joint committee.

“At the time we had two trade associations, so we were often sending sort of a fractured message both legislatively and from a marketing perspective. We pooled resources and have since merged … It really became an issue of getting the general public to understand the difference between a bank and a credit union,” said Karen E. Duffy, president and chief executive officer of Worcester Credit Union. The two associations merged in 1997 to form the MCUL.

Many times even the words “credit union” conjure up images of labor unions or special social groups in people’s minds, she said. While that may be true of the membership of some credit unions, all of them are financial institutions in the truest sense. “It’s helped all of us broaden the understanding of who we are and what we do and what we have to offer,” said Duffy, who is the 2002 chairwoman of MCUL.

As the public’s perception has changed, the ads have evolved as well, said Eugene Foley, president and chief executive officer of Cambridge-based Harvard University Employees Credit Union. Instead of dwelling on what a credit union is, they are now able to focus on the types of services provided.

The television spots that ran in the late 1990s were created by Christopher Thomas Assoc. in Boston and ran in Boston, Springfield and the rest of the state.

“They were very much image spots that talked about the values, the community connection that credit unions have. The idea that when you do business with the credit union, you’re investing in your community,” said Kimmett. The ads had lines such as “‘When Tom needed a new car, his friends pitched in to help. When they were getting ready to send Molly to school, the whole neighborhood had a hand in financing,’ and explaining the cooperative nature of the credit union to some extent,” said Kimmett.

In 2000, the association moved out of television and into radio spots where the money goes further. Christopher Thomas Assoc. still handles the account.

“We went through a development of a campaign that was a little bit more tongue-in-cheek in the past 18 months. It focused on getting people to think about changing the way they do business or utilize credit unions more thoroughly if they had accounts at both big banks and credit unions,” he said. One example portrays a superhero who uses only one of his powers and draws an analogy with consumers who only use a credit union for one purpose instead of using all its products.

The ads are targeted to a young demographic, said Kimmett. National statistics found that most people over 45 already understand the distinction between credit unions and banks. Therefore, the league has purchased statewide radio ads at stations with the demographic it wants, listeners aged 25 to 44. Ads are run on stations like Star 93.7, WXLO in Worcester and others.

The association was careful, though – especially after Sept. 11 – to reflect the feelings of the market it served. “It seemed that [the light-hearted ad] wasn’t quite as appropriate and it really wouldn’t resonate with people the way we thought it should. So we cut a new spot that talked more about the credit unions’ connection with the community and emphasized trust and what it is that credit unions are all about,” said Kimmett.

Foley, who serves as the chairman of the seven-member image campaign committee, said that this year’s ads would try to convey that credit unions are more understanding. “When credit unions do their lending, it’s more based on character than it is on any of the other credit [factors]. They’re flexible and understanding within the context of good business practices,” he said.

The ads are valuable to individual credit unions, said Duffy, because most can’t afford large marketing campaigns themselves.

“I don’t have even a specified marketing person, never mind a huge marketing budget. So what dollars I have for marketing need to be specific, product-specific, service-specific. I don’t have the money to do image ads,” she said.

So Duffy said she, and other credit unions, depend on the association to provide that generalized message about what a credit union is all about to a vast market.