PCU Member Connect has a new home.

If it seems like we just got started, that's because we did. PCU Member Connect is off to a great start and now has a new home at piedmontcu.wordpress.com. Make a visit there and let me know what you think.

Please just take a moment to update your bookmarks and feeds to the new address. Here are links to the new addresses feeds.

Piedmont Credit Union Member Connect

Feeds

• Feedburner RSS Feed
• My Yahoo Feed
• Google Reader/Homepage

Pittsylvania County Schools Budget

Yesterday we received an email from the Chamber of Commerce asking their members to support an increase in funding for Pittsylvania County Schools. Here is an excerpt from their statement:

Summary
Our region’s economic growth and prosperity will be fueled by the ability of our workforce to be productive, adaptable, and continuous learners. The foundation of a strong workforce begins with an innovative, challenging and exemplary school system that educates and nurtures students to be successful and productive citizens.

• Pittsylvania County currently ranks 132 out of 133 school divisions for funding the operating cost per pupil.
• In recent years, the Pittsylvania County Board of Supervisors has funded at or near the bare minimum that the state has required for education.
• Technology, vocational equipment, and extracurricular activities are just a few of the programs that are “at risk” of not being funded if school budget funding is not increased.
• The school system needs to offer competitive salaries in order to attract and retain the best teachers and staff possible. With a national shortfall of qualified teachers, we can not continue to fall behind in our compensation of teachers.
• Pittsylvania County must invest in the necessary maintenance of existing facilities. If we neglect our facilities, rising maintenance costs will continue to erode our ability to fund programs that directly support our students.

The success of our students is at stake. The success of our region is at stake.

County residents may attend the hearing on Monday, April 23, 2007 at 7pm at the Pittsylvania County General District Courtroom. Or they may contact the Pittsylvania County Board of Supervisors.

Protecting Yourself Online, Part 2

Since the credit union has implemented Multi-Factor Authentication I thought I would take the opportunity to remind us all of some basic online security practices.

As stated in our previous post "Protecting Yourself Online", MFA will make it more difficult for online thieves to create a Piedmont CU look-alike website designed to steal user names and passwords. Here are just a few more tips for protecting yourself online:

1. Before entering your password or personal information on any secure site look for the padlock graphic either in the address bar or in the bottom right-hand corner of the browser window. Note: PCU NetBranch addresses always start with "https://nbp1.cunetbranch.com/piedmont".
2. Do not click on a weblink that is inside of an email claiming to be from your credit union, bank, financial firm, or anyone that you give personal information to. Instead type the address in by hand.
3. For sites that you visit regularly like NetBranch, piedmontcu.org, or even PCU Member Connect, make a bookmark to the site and always use the bookmark to get back to it. PCU Member Connect has a nice live feed feature that can be bookmarked by clicking the little orange icon in the address bar.
4. Update your web browser. The most modern web browsers such as Firefox 2.0 and Internet Explorer 7 have anti-phishing capabilities built-in. Use them.
5. Use MFA to your advantage. If you are using a foreign computer it should not ask you to answer and security questions. So if you using a computer you always use to access NetBranch and it all of a sudden prompts you to answer a security question, please take note and verify the address and the pad-lock icon that we talked about in step 1.

If you are ever in doubt about any Piedmont Credit Union site just give us a call, email, or even a comment on this site. Sometimes this site even gets checked on the weekends! So far no one has had any problems with MFA that we know about. Please contact our office directly if you have experienced any problem with it. Thank you for using NetBranch and thank you for being part of Piedmont Credit Union.

Freedom First FCU / VA Tech Memorial Fund

People helping people has been an ideal shared by credit unions across the country for as long as they have been in existence. In the aftermath of the tragedy at Virginia Tech here is a way that we can all help out the people most directly affected by it.

NEWS RELEASE
CONTACT: Jamie Asciolla
Vice President of Marketing
Freedom First Federal Credit Union
(540) 378-8968

Freedom First Federal Credit Union Has Established the FFFCU/Virginia Tech Memorial Fund

Salem, Virginia— Freedom First Federal Credit Union has established the FFFCU/Virginia Tech Memorial Fund to support the recovery and renewal process following the tragic events at Virginia Tech. All proceeds will be directed towards the Hokie Spirit Memorial Fund.

Freedom First Federal Credit Union has been serving the students, alumni, faculty, and staff of Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech) since 1986 and remains the only full-service financial institution on campus, with two branch locations at Squires Student Center.

Hokie Spirit Memorial Fund

To remember and honor the victims of those tragic events, the university has established the Hokie Spirit Memorial Fund to aid in the healing process and generate financial support.

The fund will be used to cover expenses including but not limited to:

Grief counseling
Memorials
Communication expenses
Comfort expenses
Incidental needs

To contribute to the FFFCU/Virginia Tech Memorial Fund, please make checks/share drafts payable to "FFFCU/Virginia Tech Memorial Fund" and mail your contribution to:

Freedom First Federal Credit Union
Attn: FFFCU/Virginia Tech Memorial Fund
PO Box 1999
Salem, VA 24153

Contributions to the FFFCU/Virginia Tech Memorial Fund will be accumulated and paid to the Hokie Spirit Memorial Fund as one contribution. Acknowledgement of contributors will be provided at the time of fund presentation.

Chartered in 1956, Freedom First Federal Credit Union serves several counties in southwest Virginia. The $200 million asset Credit Union is headquartered in Roanoke, Virginia.

Additionally, the university has a site where people may send their condolences, thoughts, and prayers here.

Our Thoughts and Prayers...

... are with the Virginia Tech community, students, faculty, parents, and friends.

Power Outage

If you live in Southside VA today then you know there are some very high winds. As a result the power is out at the main Piedmont Credit Union office.

Here's the good news! Our website including NetBranch and Online Billpay are unaffected by our local power outage. All Direct Deposits will continue with no interruption as will the ability to use your ATM or Visa Check Card(debit). The Telephone Teller is also still in operation at 1-877-768-5405.

Interesting Site With Local Economic Information

Found a site with some interesting information on it. It's called ecanned.com. At first I thought it was a spoof on the old "Danville Can" slogan from a few years ago, but it's not. It looks like they get alot of data from the last big census and from the different statistical bureaus. They publish this data along with some decent graphs. Every major locality across the country seems to have it's own page. Here are links for Danville, Pittsylvania County, Henry County, Patrick County, Halifax County, and Charlotte County. I could not find Martinsville. Any educational employee from these localities may join Piedmont Credit Union, so that's why they were selected. Some people, like me, find statistical information interesting.

One interesting read on the Danville page was how overall wages have increased by 26.5% since 2001. I am no economist but I would presume that this is the result of the economic growth our city has experienced over the last few years. I can think of 5 major employers just off the top of my head who share a large responsibility for this growth. Essel Propack, Arista Tubes, Yorktowne Cabinetry, Unarco Industries, Telvista, and coming soon Ikea. I feel like I'm forgetting some too. Here's a quote from the City of Danville's website:

Setting an unprecedented pace, the City of Danville has proudly announced 17 new projects and 9 expansions since March 2004. These companies will create 5,604 jobs and will spark the investment of more than $500,000,000 within the community. Of those 26 projects, 11 were announced in 2006.

It really is an exciting time for our city.

Our Own Newbie's Introduction to Blogging

So what is this site and how do you blog?

Thank you to everyone who has viewed or participated in our blog. It seems to be taking flight pretty well. I was thinking that it is quite likely that most of our credit union membership is like myself in that they are new to blogging and may not understand exactly how to do it. This is sort of like an online version of our newsletter except that it's interactive, meaning readers can easily share their own input on topics. Kind of like a discussion forum. To make a comment just click on the "comments" link at the bottom of the article you wish to comment on. It will give you the option to login to a Google account but that is not required. Feel free to just leave a comment with your name or even anonymously. Also it may or may not ask you to type in a set of funny looking letters. This is to keep spam off the site. Your comment might not post immediately. During business days it's faster than off hours.

In our initial post "Welcome, PCU to the world of blogging!" it was stated,

"I hope that this forum will become a place that fosters the cooperative, "people helping people" attitude that has driven Piedmont Credit Union since its creation."

I would appreciate your help in keeping myself and other contributors and commenters accountable to that goal. So here are a few things to consider when you leave a comment. Etiquette if you will.

1. This site is not our main website and is not secured by any type of login/password. Your comments may be read by anyone in the world. Just treat it like you would any other public place. You wouldn't shout out your account number to other people standing in our parking lot? Likewise, this site is just another public place for our credit union and our community to interact.
2. Give credit where credit is due. If you quote someone else, convey that somehow.
3. Please be considerate of others when you post. This site should always remain G-rated or better. So please abstain from profanity, vulgarity, or other inappropriate content. Again, it's like any public place. Such comments or posts will be blocked, removed, or edited.(Any edits will be noted)
   

Please take a few minutes to browse through our archives(bottom right of page). There is also a set of labels which are like topic names for articles. Thank you so much to all our members, employees, volunteers, and friends who work together to make our credit union something very special!

To all our faithful teachers:

Have a wonderful Spring Break this week!
For the work you do investing in our future you certainly deserve to have a week off.

Of course your credit union will be open if you want to pay us a visit.

Nestle-Danville is growing!

On Tuesday this week Nestle announced that they will be adding about 50 new jobs by opening two new production lines in their already massive production plant. (Newspaper story here.)
This is great news for our local Nestle facility, whose employees are a member group of Piedmont Credit Union. Nestle USA had other choices of where to do this expansion but they chose the Danville plant. Congratulations to all the Nestle employees who do a great job everyday at making their company a success. I had the pleasure of meeting many employees of Nestle over the last several weeks and I must say that that they all conducted themselves with a high degree of professionalism and integrity. It is easy to see why their company has been and will continue to be a huge success.

Wow.... the benefit of cooperatives!

Recently I helped to form a brand new cooperative! If you're wondering what a cooperative is, just look on wikipedia has a good definition as does Miriam Webster. My new cooperative is called the Pressure Washer Family Co-op. My father-in-law, brother-in-law, and I all own a share of a new gas powered Troy Bilt 2550 psi pressure washer. My coop total cost of the pressure washer is less than $95. It cleaned my house beautifully last weekend. Since I am not the sole owner of it I have already noticed that I treated it more nicely than if was altogether my own. I followed all the directions being careful not to damage anything. (I usually don't read directions!) But the best part is not having to pay two months worth of my savings to buy it and not always having the responsibility of storing it in my limited storage space. Sure, it requires a little more communication and planning if I need to get the pressure washer, but we're all social creatures. Personally, being naturally reserved and quiet, I need a little motivation to build relationships with my friends and family.

Much like my little co-op, Credit Unions are big cooperatives. Every credit union member owns a share of their credit union. They each get one vote as to the operation of their co-op. They can even volunteer to serve and oversee the administration of their co-op. Since my pressure washer co-op consists of just three people we don't have alot of administration to worry about. If I ever have a problem with the way my family uses our pressure washer I have a responsibility to let them know otherwise, in the long run, I may lose the benefit I have by owning a share of the pressure washer. And the benefits are what makes co-op's so attractive. I pay a little and get alot! In my case I save almost $200 by sharing a pressure washer. It's the same for credit unions. Members pay alot less for the same(or better) services that for-profit business offer.