Cross-campus collaboration is the theme of financial education efforts at Barstow Community College. Wendy Packer, a financial aid technician, has helped lead the cause by emphasizing the vested interest each campus department has in financial wellness. Thanks to these efforts, their CashCourse site has some of the highest levels of web engagement throughout 2017.
“Financial education cannot be done by one department alone,” Packer explains. “This has to be a campus-wide group effort. It should be everyone’s responsibility to promote this. A lot of schools assume financial aid should be the home because it involves the word ‘financial’, but they are not really the same thing.”
They have had great success sharing financial education resources available at the college, including CashCourse, with other departments. The office highlights how other programs could incorporate this type of work by speaking at all-campus assemblies and by scheduling meetings with key departments.
Packer says, “Our special programs department has really taken off with financial literacy at the Barstow campus. They have been presenting several financial literacy workshops to their students. For their distance students, they require them to use CashCourse to complete a coursework module of their choosing in lieu of attending a workshop.”
The Barstow financial aid office also features CashCourse on their student portals. This has proven to be a great place to highlight CashCourse, as students are generally thinking about money while accessing their financial aid portal. They have also marketed the program through fliers and social media posts, but the financial aid portal notification has proven to be their most effective strategy.
“With the marketing resources provided by the site, getting the word out about CashCourse has been easy. It can be tough to get students to actually engage, since this is not required for our students. We added notifications to our student portals explaining CashCourse. This has been fairly effective with getting students to know about CashCourse,” Packer explains.
The ready-made marketing and workshop materials on CashCourse has really helped lighten their workload. In particular, the flyers and prewritten social media posts have been useful in saving time for Packer.
Packer says, “I love the CashCourse workshop presentations, flyers and the social media posts. It is so helpful to have these ready-made and saves us a lot of time.”
October 2017