Virginia Credit Union: Driving 42% Web Revenue Growth with Pantheon and COLAB

Richmond-based Virginia Credit Union (VACU) has $7 billion in assets and has served members for almost a century with affordable banking, loans, mortgages, and free financial education. For a credit union whose members depend on always-on digital access, web performance is the product that can make or break business.

The website, however, was working against them. Accessibility gaps threatened ADA and WCAG compliance. Members had to call or visit branches for requests that should have been handled via self-service. The marketing team couldn't change a menu without IT involvement, let alone run multi-channel campaigns. 

There were performance issues, including backup and recovery challenges, which created operational challenges for us as an organization. We also needed to free up our marketing team to creatively innovate and drive improved results for our members and our organization.” 

— Eric Berkman, Director of Digital Marketing & Analytics 

The marketing team made the case to leadership: moving to the cloud could be done safely, and a new platform would not just fix the current problems; it would grow with the business. The gap between where the website was and where it needed to be was stark — and closing it would ultimately transform the web from a 17% revenue contributor to nearly 30%. Here's how it happened.

The Solution: Built for Control, Built to Last

VACU brought in COLAB, a Richmond-based digital agency specializing in strategic design and web development, to rebuild from the ground up. The scope was significant: new hosting, new infrastructure, Drupal as the CMS, and a redesigned member experience that would give both customers and the marketing team far more autonomy.

Eddie O'Leary, President of COLAB, brought in Pantheon to replace the legacy hosting environment. The platform enabled Dev, Test, Live environments, Multidev for parallel development, and version control — all critical for a team that needed to move fast without introducing risk. O'Leary captured the shift: 

Drupal on Pantheon was a liberating experience for VACU. It freed the IT team from supporting a legacy system that was burdensome for everyone, and gave the marketing team the power to strategically shape their messaging and the user experience."

For an organization in financial services, 24/7 availability was non-negotiable. COLAB implemented Multizone Failover, enabling full failover and failback in the event of a zone outage — alongside Pantheon's built-in security, immutable code, and protection against denial of service attacks.

The result was a marketing team that could finally move at the speed of the business. When fast-moving situations required urgent communications, the team could push updates to members in minutes rather than days. "If we didn't have the infrastructure and the revised workflow that we do now, it would have been very time-consuming," Berkman says. "On certain days, we had to get updates to our members in a matter of minutes as things were changing fast."

The Results: Revenue Transformed

The impact on revenue was fast and durable. Within the first year since launch, the credit union saw a $3 million per month revenue increase from the website. Click-through rates to lead forms grew 32% year-over-year, and completed lead forms drove a 42% increase in web-based revenue overall.

The share of revenue VACU derives from its website nearly doubled to 29–30% within the first six months. Meanwhile, the web admin lead reclaimed 15 to 20 hours a week compared to the prior system, freeing the marketing team to focus on strategy rather than maintenance.

We had the right team, the right partners, and the right technology — so our members can get what they need in as frictionless a manner as possible." 

— Eric Berkman, Director of Digital Marketing & Analytics