Every time someone calls a credit union “the best kept secret in financial services,” Andy Janning says a little part of him dies inside. Same.
Andy, founder of NO NET Solutions and one of the more thoughtful voices on storytelling in the credit union space, joined Sarah Snell Cooke of The Credit Union Connection live at GAC 2026 for a conversation that is part research findings, part creative challenge, and part industry intervention. After spending a year analyzing over 1,500 pieces of content from 100 randomly selected credit unions, he has a pretty clear diagnosis for why so much of what the industry calls storytelling is not actually moving anyone.
The 89% stat is the gut punch credit unions are not expecting. That is how much of the content credit unions label as stories are not really stories at all. They are operational reports. Not the kind of thing that makes members lean in and ask what happens next or see themselves in a similar story. Andy is careful to point out this is not a writing quality problem. It is a structural one, and it shows up in predictable ways: stories centered on the institution instead of the member, no tension, no uncertainty, a tidy resolution that wraps everything up before the reader has a chance to feel anything.
To address it, he built Story Score, a 10-dimension framework that functions like a home inspection for your content. It is not about style or prose. It is about whether what you are calling a narrative is structurally capable of doing what narratives are supposed to do. One of the more useful things it does is catch what Andy calls the name swap test: if you can drop any other credit union’s name into your story and it reads exactly the same, you do not have a story, you have a template.
The Adam Grant moment he describes from earlier that same day at GAC is worth hearing in full. The short version: the missing ingredient in most credit union storytelling is tension. Not manufactured drama, not crisis for its own sake, but the honest admission that things were uncertain, that the outcome was not guaranteed, that someone had to figure something out. Superman is most compelling when kryptonite is nearby. Credit unions tend to skip that part entirely.
There is also a genuinely practical conversation in here about consent, model releases, and how to actually get members to open up and share their real stories. Andy spent years producing a documentary about the financial crisis of a cancer diagnosis, which means he has earned the right to talk about how to handle people’s most vulnerable moments responsibly. If your marketing team has ever hit a wall on member stories, this section alone is worth the watch.
NOTE: If transcription were this AI’s superpower, it would be a very disappointing superhero origin story.
Sarah Cooke
Hello. Welcome everyone. We are here today at the GAC live. I am Sarah Snell Cooke, which I’ve said about 50 times today. Your host here at The Credit Union Connection, and I am joined by Andy Janning, welcome, Andy of no net solutions, yes, and tell us a little bit about yourself and the company and what you do.
Andy Janning
So I have been in credit unions for 26 years, actually, 28 years now, and in financial services for almost 38 this industry has been better to me than I’ve ever deserved. I’ve come up through forum credit union in Indianapolis, got to help them with their talent development efforts, and then started my own company. Started my own company about 14 years ago, doing a lot of leadership, development, consulting, communication consulting, all of that. And then I was given an opportunity by the National Credit Union Foundation back in 2020 to create a documentary about the financial crisis of cancer. So from that one project has basically changed the entire course of my life, I get to now try and help credit unions give meaningful relief to people and members who have who are struggling financially because of cancer, and then also try and help credit unions tell better stories. How can we help, you know, position ourselves better in a marketplace where there’s a lot of noise, there’s maybe a lot of confusion about the work that we do. So if I can find a way to apply what I’ve learned and hopefully help people not make the same mistakes I did when it comes to storytelling, then I think that will be a good day at work, right?
Sarah Cooke
Yeah, and you’ve told so many stories, from the cancer journey to, you know, funny stuff at the National Credit Union Foundation, or Wegener and that kind of thing. So I’ve seen you speak many, many times. So jealous, so jealous of your speaking, and I don’t think I can do the voice either. But yeah, so you and I talk about storytelling relatively often. What do you see as missing from the creating storytelling? Because they have, as everybody says, They have such a great story to tell, they just don’t.
Andy Janning
So yeah, I think you so. I’ve been spending a lot of time with this question, and we’ve said, you know, for many years, we’re the best kept secret financial services. And I don’t know about you, but someone has said this earlier, night and miss stealing their line, a little part of me dies inside every time i Yes, because it’s like we need to be doing better. So I spent looking, I spent a lot of time looking at the last year of credit union storytelling, looking at over 1500 stories from 100 randomly selected credit unions and analyzing them to see, are these really stories or not? Are they really things? Are there really stories that ask people to ask the question, what happens next that’s a story, or is it just like a report or an overview or a recap of something that happened? And in those situations, our natural question is, do I have to remember this? Do I am I going to need to know this? Is this relevant to me? Right? What I found was 89% of the content that we position as stories, as an industry aren’t they’re not stories. They’re interesting information. It’s useful information, but it’s not differentiating enough for it to stick in someone’s mind, right? So I from that has come this model that I’ve created called Story score, which gives a credit union the ability to look at either an individual story or their entire story library and say, Hey, how much of our content actually functions as stories? It looks at your each thing in 10 different dimensions and says, 10 different dimensions that make up a compelling story. And says, here’s where you’re strong, here’s where you’re weak, here’s where you’re non existent. And it basically gives you a 20 point score higher, the better that says, hey, this is what things are working and here’s what’s not. The way I like to tell people about it is think of it as like a home inspection for your stories. When you get a home inspection, the home inspector is not coming in there and saying, don’t like the wallpaper, don’t like the furniture, don’t like the chairs, anything like that. The inspector is looking at what’s deeper. It’s making sure that there’s nothing structurally wrong with your house that’s going to make it collapse. Same thing with story score I met. This is not about writing style. It’s not about trying to get people to become the next Stephen King or whoever it’s going deeper and saying is what you’re calling a narrative. Does it structurally work enough to get people to engage with it as a story mentally? Or are they trying to looking for a way to check out? That’s what this model does. And I’m really excited about its applications. I’m really excited about what it can do for credit unions. And I think it helps give a term that everybody hears about stories. I think it really kind of puts it on a fundamental level in saying, let’s make sure we’re measuring the right thing in the right way at the right time, so we can have the right impact, right?
Sarah Cooke
So did the 89% shock you?
Andy Janning
It did not, I think it just, it kind of puts a number on something that I think we all kind of know. We’ve all kind of suspected we’re really good as an industry. We should be about capturing what has happened, about, you know, writing, you know, over views and reports and gathering details. Writing a story, though, is different. It requires a different set of muscles. This is not about going into a credit union saying, okay, all of you are bad at writing, and none of you should have ever graduated high school. It’s instead saying, Hey, here’s some things that you think you may be doing well, but it’s actually falling short. And this is where maybe the disconnect is with your stories and why they’re not getting engagement. So it’s designed to be a way to have a shared conversation about something we all want to get better at. It’s not me saying, Okay, you all need to get on my level. We’re all chewing the same dirt here, right? So this gives us a common language that we can use to move forward, right?
Sarah Cooke
And I couldn’t the 89% did not shock me either. Honestly, being in the media earlier in my career, and like doing podcasting now and so many other things, I see it. I definitely see it, and it’s often because I feel like it’s often because it’s about us as opposed to them, like it’s not about your target audience that you’re trying to reach.
Andy Janning
And that’s something that I discovered in the research. So there’s a couple, a couple things came out 89% like I said, it’s of the content we’re saying, Your stories are not the second trend, though, is something I call the superhero problem. The superhero problem is basically, like you said, it positions the institution as the hero, and the member is basically the main character, that the member becomes the prop in our story, rather than the protagonist in theirs. And this kind of defies in the face of why we were founded, we’re supposed to center the members. The member’s supposed to be the hero of the story. If you’d ask anybody here at GAC, who’s the focus of our stories, the member. But what story score identifies is saying, No, you’re basically keeping the members your supporting character, but you’re kind of putting yourself front and center. So the model also evaluates that and says, Hey, how much you making yourselves the main character? And then gives you specific feedback about, how can you position yourself as the supporter, as the, you know, as the guide, and make the member the hero. What are some things you have to start and stop doing to be able to make that happen? I call it the superhero problem, because, you know, we see, you know, like Superman especially, it’s my favorite example. You know, he’s indestructible. He’s a God.
Sarah Cooke
I can see you in a Superman suit.
Speaker 2
I appreciate that. Has be a lot of Photoshop. With Superman stories, though, when he’s at his best, nothing can hurt him, which is why, like 90% of the time in the Superman story, he’s being not super. He’s struggling, he’s hurting, he’s been he’s struggling through kryptonite, all these other things. He’s doing the same things that we do on a day to day basis. He’s trying to figure it out. But then when he all it all comes together, and he overcomes all of that. He’s, he’s truly Superman. That’s where we connect with him most of the time. Though, in our stories, we’re not willing to show that. Earlier today was, was Adam Grant session for GAC, and I actually got to ask him a question, submit a question, and get through the QR code. And it was, it was shared on stage. I asked him, How can we stop being the best kept secret in financial services from a storyteller standpoint? And he said, I think the thing that you’re missing is tension in your stories. You’re missing that tension, that that uncertainty, that’s what that’s the narrative thread that holds stories together, and when we are positioning ourselves as a superhero, as the main character that does everything flawlessly, there’s no tension there. Now I’m not saying that we need to show that we are an existential crisis whenever we open up a check, but every once in a while, we need to pull back the curtain. Show here’s where we’re struggling, here’s where we’re uncertain. Here are the mistakes that we made. Those are some of the things that I’ve seen when credit unions do that, that makes their story stick, that makes lives change. I think if we do more of that and talk about the human side of our business, and the human effect that it has, showing it impacting real members in real ways that we can’t always expect.
Sarah Cooke
I think that’s gold and impacting their feelings, exactly, their feelings around money, lots of feelings around money, and we advertise our rates. Yeah, and the whole best kept secret thing, I could just, no, just know that was not something to brag about. But anyway, so one of the things I thought was really interesting about story score is actually operationalizing how you’re doing. But anyway, and the other thing about it is, because one of the things that I think both of us have heard over and over again, is that okay? Marketer wrote that story. They wrote that story that the member did the thing, and you say, and you know, the credit union was a they were able to buy their home because they, Credit Union made an exception and gave them a mortgage. Yeah, but they don’t do that, like, by the end, once it goes through the levels, typically, it’s not that story. And I think one of the things that’s really important about the story score is that now we have something to hold it, hold it against. Like, wait a minute, I had it at a, let’s say, an 18 score on the story score, and it ended up at a three, you know, because, you know, the board got involved, or the CEO, whoever wanted to change up everything. But really, we need to trust our marketers well.
Andy Janning
And this is, you know, everybody, nobody’s acting maliciously, nobody, but they want to protect kind of, their area of the house and their particular paragraph, if you will, of the story. And that’s completely fine. What story score is designed to do, like you said, is operationalize this is to actually put this through a rigorous, research tested model that says, Okay, let’s filter this through. This isn’t just me objectively saying, I don’t like, you know, this particular story. I think mortgages are boring. It’s instead saying, Where can there be more tension? Where can there be more stakes? How can we center it more on the member? How can we use more language that’s specific to your institution? Does this fail what I call the name swap test? Can I put anybody else’s credit union into your story, and would it be indistinguishable? Can we get past what’s also called, in the model, the resolution bias, the thinking that once that member buys that home, everything’s great, it’s happily ever after. Typically, it’s not. It’s typically like, that’s just the first freaking step of a very long process. And again, you need, you need what’s called operational reporting. That’s that 89% figure. That’s where most of those stories go into. They’re not stories. They’re operational reporting, talking about what they did and why it was good. Those are great. You need that to build baseline trust. It shows that you know what the heck it is you’re doing. But there needs to, then also to be a recognition of Okay, where can be a narrative, where was risk, where was surprise, where was something unexpected that happened. Where was that tension? And encouraging folks to be able to say, those are the threads you need to pull. This doesn’t mean you need to buy, you know, six figures worth of production equipment. All this takes is patience, time and consent. You get a few of those narratives. You get members to open up and say that we’re with you for the long haul, and we’re willing to be surprised by where you go. That’s, that’s a narrative that that no one else has. And I think that’s, that’s where our secret sauce is
Sarah Cooke
Yeah, absolutely. But that word, you just said, consent. But a lot of times that model, the model release, you know that they have to sign that can trip credits up. They’re also concerned. You know, there’s, at times been, and I don’t know if it’s a regulation or not, but just making sure your advertising matches your membership, you know is representative of your membership. And so I feel like that might get in the way sometimes. How do we how do we work around how do we work with it, around it?
Andy Janning
It comes down to a lot of patience, a lot of trust and a lot of just personal reassurance to the member that says, hey, we’re going to handle this responsibly, and if at any point you feel uncomfortable, pull the rip cord. So when I did the documentary side effects for the National Credit Union foundation, that was a big part of it. I mean, these are folks that are inviting you into the worst chapter of their life. Yes, and a lot of times they would push people away. And I’m not saying that, you know, I had any special, you know, special powers that made that happen. It was just, we think what you’re going through can help other people not have to go through it, right, right? We think that your story, your narrative, yes, it is important, yes, it is relevant, yes, it is powerful, and we will respect it if you want us to anonymize it. There are ways to responsibly do these stories in a way that still does not take anything away from their emotional punch, right? So I but I think a lot of that fear is like, Oh, well, we’re worried about all those things. Okay, that’s fine, acknowledge those, but then work with your member, because also they want to see a good story out there too. When they realize that they’re a partner in this, they don’t have, doesn’t necessarily have final cut. They’re saying we’re going to handle this responsibly. We want to make sure we honor what you’ve gone through, so other people can learn from us. So we can learn from it, too. I think when you lead with that, in my experience, from, you know, the documentary production, what are the work I’m afterwards? That’s, I think has worked well for me,
Sarah Cooke
yeah, definitely something that credit unions need to involve their members in and speaking for them, rather than you telling everybody how awesome you are, let your members tell everybody how awesome you are. That third party validation, especially from people who actually use you, is critically important. So Andy, I know we could go all day. I know that, but I always allow my guests to have the final thought. What would you like to leave our credit union audience with today?
Andy Janning
Well, again, I think our hearts are in the right place. I think we have we want to tell stories, and it’s been, if I had $1 for every time I’ve heard the word story used here, I would be a very rich man. I love our renewed focus on this, and I think now we’re now ready to say, Okay, what is the next step? How can we get more rigorous with this? And so if I can find a way to contribute to that, and find a way to give a credit union marketer, a credit union executive, a credit union system, to be able to say, hey, we know how to make great stories now we know what separates them and what can set us apart. Then again, I said that’s that, for me, is a pretty good day at the office. So folks want to go to make great stories.com they can learn all about this model, and they can talk with me a little bit more about it, how we can launch it at their credit union.
Sarah Cooke
Awesome. Well, thank you, Andy, appreciate your time.