Results from ASA’s Partnership Dialogue Series: Communication Confusion
Spring’s in full swing, and that means that ASA’s Partnership Dialogue Series: A Focus on Communication is coming to a close. Through the series, we learned that there’s still a lot of confusion about how to best communicate important financial aid messages to students. But the good news is that we’re all in this together.
Throughout the nine sessions in this series, we heard that financial aid offices seem to be competing for students’ attention—not just with the hundreds of other pieces of e-mail and snail mail directed at students, but also with the other offices on campus. Often the bursar’s, admissions, and financial aid offices are trying to reach the same students about closely linked or even identical issues. Yet these offices may be completely unaware of each other’s activities.
As a result, students today are perplexed and annoyed by the barrage of school-related communications. And, if these messages are directed at students’ rarely checked standard campus e-mail addresses, they may be ignored by students altogether.
But before you resign yourself to a vision of students sighing a disdainful “whatever” and marking these e-mails as spam, you should consider what tactics some schools have used to combat this problem successfully.
A few participants in this Dialogue Series reported that their schools have convened a communication committee and/or created a campus-wide communication plan that represented a variety of administrative offices as well as faculty members. Through such plans, schools tracked the timing, method, and message of communications to the student body—from emailed reminders about financial aid and registration deadlines to Web-based information on campus events to mailed hard copies of policies and procedures.
The hope is that students won’t receive a blur of overlapping messages marked “urgent” or hear conflicting information from different departments with varying agendas. With the nuts-and-bolts interactions kept to a manageable level, students may even be receptive to larger messages—such as the importance of debt management and good financial habits. After all, as we’ve discussed before on this blog, preventing delinquency and default shouldn’t just be the concern of the financial aid office, since these issues take a tangible toll on alumni giving and potentially even admissions.
Most importantly, schools who are participating in cross-department communications planning are embracing a culture of creativity and results-based assessment. Even if you aren’t able to rally your fellow departments to join a coordinated communications team, you can still take the initiative to stay abreast of their interactions with students and harmonize your office’s communication plans with theirs. And you may find success in experimenting with your methods, such as posting information on your website, sending text messages to students’ cell phones, or asking students to supply an e-mail address other than their official school account where they’d like to receive messages. One thing became clear in our Partnership Dialogue Series discussions—schools from coast to coast, large and small, public and private are grappling with these same issues. Stay tuned for more insights to your colleagues’ concerns and successes to be published in this blog when the series wraps up in May.
Until then, let us know if you’ve had luck in coordinating the messages at your institution. Do your students respond to your communications in a positive way? We want to hear your stories!
Posted by Susan Nathan on May 02, 2008 at 02:24 PM EST
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Blog Author
Susan Nathan
Vice President, Lender and School Services
Biography
Susan Nathan is Vice President of Lender and School Services at American Student Assistance (ASA)®. She has held this position since October of 2002. Ms. Nathan joined ASA in February 1987 as supervisor of the external program review unit. She has held roles of increasing responsibility in product development, operations, client management and customer service, and marketing. She has been a member of the design teams for a number of ASA’s signature products, including FASTFUND, ASA’s disbursement product, and ASA Direct, ASA’s web processing tool. She was the manager of the business plan for ASA’s major system conversion in 1998.
She is credited with the development of ASA’s nationally recognized client management team. Ms. Nathan oversees the ASA Advisory Council, and is the staff liaison to the Marketing Planning Committee of ASA’s Board of Directors.
Prior to joining ASA, Ms. Nathan was a Financial Aid Officer for Lesley College. She is a graduate of Brown University and a fellow of the Institute for Educational Leadership. She is a member of state, regional and national financial aid associations and is routinely sought by the financial aid community as a professional development trainer.
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