Congress may have low approval ratings these days, but an endorsement by an individual lawmaker apparently can still carry some clout.

For the past few weeks, Sen. Bernard Sanders (I-Vt.) has used his Twitter account to encourage people to move their money from banks to credit unions.

On Saturday he ratcheted it up a notch by citing NAFCU's www.culookup.com as a place to go for people to find a credit union to join. Sanders has extolled the virtues of credit unions in four different Twitter feeds today, including citing CUNA's figure that more than 650,000 people have joined credit unions since September.

NAFCU Public Relations Manager Patty Briotta said Saturday that Sanders' tweet, which has been extensively retweeted, was one of the causes of increased traffic to Culookup.com.

In addition, she said reports from NAFCU member credit unions indicated that many of them had more than the normal traffic flow because of Bank Transfer Day.

“There is a healthy trend of our credit unions experiencing a membership growth today, which has continued, a pattern of the last few weeks,” Briotta said.

Briotta added that NAFCU's survey of its members indicates that much of the recent surge in members stems from frustration with banks.

 “That's been the driving factor and credit unions have done a good job of capitalizing on that,'' she said.