How Air Academy Credit Union Rebuilt Its Salesforce Foundation with Cloud for Good
A stalled Financial Services Cloud deployment becomes a member-focused CRM that frontline staff uses every day, across all eight branches.
About Air Academy Credit Union
Air Academy Credit Union (AACU) manages more than $800 Million in assets and traces its roots to Lowry Air Force Base, where it was founded to serve the cadets, officers, and civilians of the Air Force community. Today, its membership reflects the people who keep communities running: educators, students, health care professionals, and first responders.
Like every credit union, AACU is member-owned and not-for-profit. The member relationship is the product. That is why a CRM that did not work was not a back-office inconvenience. It was a front-line problem.
The Challenge: A World-Class Kitchen, and No Idea How to Cook
About two years before partnering with Cloud for Good, AACU invested in Salesforce Financial Services Cloud (FSC) alongside Marketing Cloud. Marketing Cloud went live. FSC did not. A first implementation partner left the credit union with what Richard Vaughn, Chief Strategy Officer, would only call “half a shell of a CRM,” and a system the team effectively could not use.
“Probably the biggest waste of 30 grand I’ve ever seen. And likely will ever see.”
Richard Vaughn, Chief Strategy Officer, Air Academy Credit Union
The result was a powerful platform sitting almost entirely unused. FSC delivered a very limited return, serving mainly to confirm that Marketing Cloud was working. There was no meaningful adoption and no change management. One team member captured the feeling: they “were hungry, and we were put into a world-class kitchen,” where “everything was there, but we just didn’t have any idea where to start.”
AACU had become a textbook attrition risk, a customer in real danger of walking away from Salesforce altogether, carrying a hard-earned distrust of implementation partners with them.
The Solution: Structured Wins and Honest Guidance
Cloud for Good approached the engagement the way the team had hoped someone finally would. Rather than asking AACU what they wanted to build and waiting for answers, the team led with discovery sessions, assessed the existing org, and came back with a clear, achievable plan grounded in how credit unions actually operate.
That guidance started before the contract was even signed.
“We were running into issues with the first one, where they made everything seem possible, but they gave us very little guidance. We never got a lot of guidance on where exactly to go. So, well before we even started the project, Jeff and they were already giving us advice on what we could do that would be more achievable with timelines, before we even had the contract started. That was great.”
Ian Campbell, Business Intelligence Analyst, Air Academy Credit Union
From there, Cloud for Good rebuilt the FSC environment into a working, member-focused CRM. The rebuild turned FSC from a disconnected shell into the layer where member relationships actually live, with Marketing Cloud connected to it so a member’s outreach history and service history finally sat on the same record. The work spanned ten capability areas in total, seven of them major, fully configured and delivered, from access and security to lead and referral management, case management, and reporting. The team migrated more than 43,000 member records, provisioned roughly 90 to 95 operations staff, and delivered a structured Train the Trainer program so AACU’s own people could carry adoption forward after go-live.
Just as important as the configuration was the change management. Cloud for Good delivered early, visible wins, and paired them with clear architecture decisions, reversing more than a year of limited platform use and skepticism, one usable feature at a time. This is the kind of approach Cloud for Good has refined across what credit unions actually need from an FSC implementation.
The Impact: From Unusable to Daily Use
For the first time, AACU had a CRM that its people could log into, trust, and use every day. Within months of go-live, the system was running daily across all eight branches, and it changed what a member interaction looks like: a member walking into any branch now meets a representative who can see their full relationship and recent outreach in one place, instead of piecing it together across disconnected systems.
The numbers behind that shift:
- 80% CRM adoption among frontline staff, the difference between a platform that sits unused and one that the front line reaches for on every member conversation
- 75% of internal tasks now running inside Salesforce, consolidating work that used to scatter across separate tools
- 70% sales tracking adoption among frontline staff, giving leadership a pipeline view where there had been none
- A 4.8 out of 5 satisfaction score for the engagement
“We’re still kind of in our infancy stage with all this, but I do feel like we really have come a long way. We’re at a point where CRM is usable, it’s functional, staff can see it, and they can gain value from it. And gosh, when we first got it, we were miles away from that. I’m proud of the progress that we’ve made.”
Christian Dunker, Program Manager, Air Academy Credit Union
With FSC and Marketing Cloud now working together, staff can see which campaigns a member has already received and follow up with conversations that are tailored to that member instead of being generic. The CRM has shifted from a stalled investment into a tool that supports better, more consistent member service every day.
The Cloud for Good Partnership: People-First, End-to-End
What changed for AACU was not only the technology. It was having a partner who built what the credit union envisioned rather than simply what was technically possible.
“Cloud for Good was a joy to work with, and I look forward to working with them in the future for further Salesforce FSC enhancements. The team is extremely friendly, knowledgeable, and they truly place themselves in our shoes to ensure they are helping us build what we envision and not simply what they can build.”
Richard Vaughn, Chief Strategy Officer, Air Academy Credit Union
That is the heart of Cloud for Good’s people-first, end-to-end delivery model, as a certified B Corporation and Salesforce Summit Partner, Cloud for Good pairs deep financial services expertise with a purpose-driven, mission-first commitment to the people each organization serves. The engagement has now been formally extended, with Cloud for Good guiding AACU’s roadmap toward Data Cloud, Agentforce, and MuleSoft, and positioning Salesforce as the core engine for member growth and engagement.
For AACU, the real result is not a finished platform. It is a foundation they can build on, with a partner who sequences the next step around what the credit union actually needs rather than what is easiest to sell.
Ready to turn a stalled Salesforce investment into a foundation your team will use? Talk with our financial services team.