A master lesson in PR 2.0 by Verity Credit Union.

I was just cruising around my regular credit union blogs and stopped in my tracks when I read a post from Shari Storm on Verity Credit Union's Our Voices blog.

Folks, learn from this. This is how your credit union needs to deal with critical situations. The honesty and transparency shown in this post is phenominal. Verity is a pioneer in the social web space, so I am not surprised by the leadership shown here. This is the power of having a credit union blog at your disposal. Obviously a blog is an ideal way to engage members and potential members on the light and fluffy side, but as you can see here, it is also a perfect venue to deal with the tough stuff. Here is a portion of the post:

Security Breach

You may have heard that a credit card processor in Florida had a high ranking manager steal 2.3 million people’s information and sell it to a data broker, who in turn, sold it to some marketing companies.

That is our credit card processor.

We are waiting on the list to see if any of our members were part of this group. Fidelity should be getting it to us in the next few days. They are also sending a letter to every consumer involved.

The good news for us (we think) is that it was Certegy Check Services that was compromised and we do not use them for our check servicing. We may find very few, if any, of our members’ information compromised. The other piece of good news is that it doesn’t look like this guy sold it to identity thieves. It looks like, at this point, that 2.3 million people are just getting more solicitations than they should.

I say this NOT trying to minimize the situation. The situation is awful. Nobody should steal another person’s information for any reason. However, it is important to note that the info went to marketing companies and not an organized crime ring.

Way to fess up and get the information out. Bravo.

Tim