What the Savannah Bananas can teach credit unions about members
By obsessing over fans, Jared Orton and the Savannah Bananas have built an online viral sensation and a profitable baseball team. And credit unions can steal from the playbook to build on their people-helping-people model.
The Savannah Bananas, a barnstorming baseball organization that has sold out every game since 2016, amassed over 35 million social media followers, and turned a scrappy minor league team into a sports and entertainment phenomenon worth an estimated $500 million—all without a single outside investor. The Bananas' parent company, Fans First Entertainment, was projected to generate over $100 million in revenue in 2025, outperforming 11 MLB franchises on profitability despite being a fraction of their size.
The secret isn't trick plays or viral TikToks, though there are plenty of those. It's a philosophy that the Bananas call Fans First. When you genuinely put people first, everything else follows. Credit unions can build member loyalty that lasts with the ‘fans first’ playbook.
'Fans first' as a decision-making lens
When the Savannah Bananas launched in 2016, they had no outside capital, no investors, and no one to answer to. Orton says that turned out to be a competitive advantage.
"The only people we need to report to, from day one and hopefully now, 11 years later, are the fans."
That clarity of purpose became the filter through which every decision—big and small—gets made. No matter what changes in the industry, the market, or the world outside, the question is always the same: is this right for our fans?
"Our hypothesis was that if we do what's right by the fans in the short term, the long term is going to pay off for us," Orton said. "Financially and in all of our business metrics—but fans first has meant that we are going to be fanatical about our fan, singular fan, and anything that we do."
That might mean making decisions that look sacrificial from a traditional business standpoint. Passing on short-term revenue. Investing in experiences that don't immediately show up on a spreadsheet. But the long-term payoff—in loyalty, in word-of-mouth, in a fanbase that will literally wait years on a 3-million-person ticket waiting list to attend a game—speaks for itself.
Credit unions were built on a version of this same idea. People helping people isn't a marketing slogan; it's the founding principle of the movement. But as organizations grow, they face more challenges, from operational complexity, compliance demands, and the daily pressure to hit financial metrics. Orton’s framing is a useful challenge: when was the last time your team made a decision that was genuinely, purely about what's best for the member, even if it cost you something in the short term?
Do for one what you wish you could do for everyone
As the Bananas grew from selling a few hundred thousand tickets to playing in front of 3.5 million fans, Orton faced the same scaling problem every growing organization faces: how do you maintain an intimate, relationship-driven culture when you can't possibly have a one-on-one connection with every single person?
Orton’s answer: You don't try to do it for everyone. You do it for someone.
"Do for one what you wish you could do for everyone. The stories become scalable."
The Bananas have built a culture around finding those individual moments and then amplifying them. Each game, the entire organization is reminded that the person in the very last row of the top section and the person in the front row expect the same experience. “It's our obligation to think of them as an individual, not as 100,000 people."
After the game, instead of reviewing sales numbers or crowd counts, the organization gathers for a recognition session where staff share stories of individual fan moments they witnessed or created that night.
"We're not going to celebrate because we sold a bunch of merchandise," Orton said. "What we incentivize and what we talk about are the stories that get created for our people and for our fans."
The result is a self-reinforcing culture. New team members hear fan stories before and after every event, and they start thinking about how they'll get their own story to share. The values don't need to be posted on a wall. They're lived, out loud, in front of the whole team.
For credit union leaders, this is worth sitting with. Your member experience stories exist. Are you collecting them, sharing them, and celebrating them as intentionally as you do your loan volume or deposit growth? The metrics you recognize are the behaviors you'll get more of.
From members to fans
When asked for the most practical, actionable thing a credit union could do tomorrow to start shifting toward an experience-driven culture, Orton pointed to something his team created a few years ago: a 20-page aspirational story about a family's first Banana Ball game.
It wasn't a process document. It wasn't a step-by-step operations manual. It was a narrative—four characters, with real names, making their way through every touchpoint of the experience. From the parking lot to the gate, the bathroom to the hot dog stand, the person they met in their row to the moment the kid in the story turns to his parents at the end of the night and says, "That was the most fun I've ever had in my life."
The document was written not to describe what happens, but to describe what they wanted to happen. It became the emotional blueprint for everyone on the team to understand what they were actually building together.
"No matter what business you're in—what's the story? Why are they coming in, who are they meeting, what do you want them to say when they leave?"
Orton turned it back on financial institutions: "What do you aspire for [your members] to say about what you do, how you made them feel, how you served them? Because that's what they're going to tell others."
The exercise is simple enough to do in an afternoon. Gather your team. Write a member's journey—ideally a new member's, since first impressions shape the relationship. Make it narrative, not procedural. Make it aspirational. Put real stakes in it. And then ask: does our current experience match this story? If not, what has to change?
Creating fan loyalty
There are a lot of sports teams, and just within baseball, the field isn’t narrowed much. A mistake many leaders make is not knowing what business they’re in. The Bananas decided the business of baseball wouldn’t make them competitive. The answer was to look at what others were unwilling to do and carve out their own space.
The result was something no one else was offering: a sports and entertainment experience designed entirely around the joy of the person in the seats. Dancing players. Trick plays. Games capped at two hours, so no one leaves saying, 'It went too long.' A commitment to creating something people couldn't get anywhere else—and couldn't stop talking about afterward.
The loyalty that followed isn't fickle. It isn't tied to wins and losses. It's tied to identity and feeling. Orton notes that the Bananas have fans who aren't even sports fans—people who found something in the Banana Ball experience that connected to them in a way that traditional sports never did.
"Is there something we can go compete in that others are just unwilling to go do?" Orton asked. "Again, for the fans, for the long-term value—the long-term customer that could be created out of that?"
Credit unions are not banks. The people-helping-people principle isn't just a differentiator. For the credit union movement, it's the whole point.
The Bananas are proof that when you build an organization completely around that principle—when you make it a real operating lens, not just a value on a website—the financial results take care of themselves.
The question for your team isn't whether to put members first. The question is what would it look like if you did it as relentlessly, as creatively, and as visibly as a team in yellow tuxedos does it every single night.
Discover the new ideas and gain insights to help your credit union create the connection between member success and storytelling at Digital Marketing Virtual School, August 12-14.
