Protecting Campuses Against Financial Improprieties (Press Release)
Software solutions to increase transparency and guard Student Activities and Student Government Associations (SGA’s) against fiscal misconduct
16 Nov 2007, Cambridge, MA – Colleges and universities across the United States and Canada are implementing software solutions to streamline processes, enforce policies, and archive information about budgetary and purchase decisions in student activities and student government. These software solutions provide the checks and balances to protect institutions against the types of financial improprieties that have struck a number of institutions recently.
CollegiateLink, a leading solutions provider to colleges and universities, has worked with student affairs departments for the past two years to implement and improve upon SA Finance, a technology product and workflow solution to track funding and purchase processes, comply to audit requirements, and improve financial reporting.
SA Finance, first implemented at “charter” client Wentworth Institute of Technology in 2004, has been recently updated as part of the SA LINK 2.1 software release this fall. SA Finance provides a combination of 1) an accounting system to track departmental allocations to student organizations and 2) a configurable financial requests function that builds an audit trail around the purchase process.
Other features of the SA LINK solution address the desire of higher education institutions to assess student engagement in programs, to facilitate student organization compliance with university policies, and to help students identify how to get involved outside the classroom. SA LINK is able to integrate with campus ERP and authentication systems to make it a secure and extendable technology platform.
A combination of accountability and convenience are major benefits identified by SA LINK institutions. “[We] enjoy the control both the students and staff / faculty advisors have over their budgets…[SA LINK] has enabled us to give the students more responsibility and accountability,” Todd Foley, Associate Director of Student Leadership Programs at Wentworth Institute of Technology said.
“Before SA LINK…students never kept a ledger as requested. Now, students can just log on, day or night, and get account balances, process a payment and request funds,” Dave Hahn, Office Manager of the Rosenberg Center for Student Involvement at University of Baltimore said.
For additional information on SA LINK 2.1, contact Mark Miller, VP Business Development at (877) 733-8335 or visit www.collegiatelink.net.
We would first like to thank all of the organizers and attendees at the following conferences:
NASPA Region 5 Conference (Las Vegas, NV)
ACUI Region 5 Conference (Charleston, NC)
ACUI Regions 8 & 9 Conference (Chicago, IL)
NASPA Region 1 Conference (Burlington, VT)
NIRSA Region 1 Conference (Ithaca, NY)
NASPA Region4 Conference (Indianapolis, IN)
Your contribution and thoughtful insight is greatly appreciated. We look forward to working with all of you in the near future.
Also, we have new implementations of SA LINK this fall, which include IUPUI and Radford.
Finally, Mark Greene, Chief Technology Officer and Lead Developer of the SA LINK software, has released a new white paper about using external vendor applications to help support campus directory services. Please see the attached PDF for the full article.
Welcome to the first issue of CollegiateLink - Technology in Student Affairs. Each month, we'll feature news and analysis of new technologies and best practices for use - particularly in the areas of student engagement, involvement, and assessment.
Proposed Web forum to aid student groups From Penn State's The Daily Collegian - an interesting project to offer new ways for student organizations to collaborate
by
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, President - CollegiateLink Corp.
Web-based technology services have been almost uniformly embraced by higher education institutions and students across the world. In fact, your students probably expect an online component to almost every course or academic program. This expectation can be attributed to both the high utilization of systems such as Blackboard, web portals, as well as students' overwhelming preference for online communication - IM, Facebook, the Daily Jolt, and other messaging / social networking tools.
For Co-curricular Involvement, Service Learning, and Leadership Development professionals, this expectation gives rise to a new challenge - the information technology (IT) infrastructure of most colleges and universities focuses primarily on addressing the needs of academic departments and auxiliary services such as course management, student information, and facilities. More often than not, co-curricular programming departments will need to look outside of their campus IT division to address their needs...
The updated SA LINK 2.0 has recently been released with a new design layout, accessible interface, and new features. Student clubs and organizations can track feeds of recent activity in "My Organizations" and access multiple event views including My Events and Upcoming Events.
Other upgrades include a customizable financial request approval process and new integration capabilities to support CAS, PubCookie, and other campus authentication sources in addition to the previously supported LDAP and Active Directory.
New Implementations! Working with 40 Schools - 400,000 Students
Recently launched implementations include:
Alma Mater Society of the University of British Columbia
Ithaca College
Maryville University
Muhlenberg College
SUNY Oneonta
Western Carolina University
NOVEMBER 2007 CONFERENCE SCHEDULE
Regional Conferences 2007 NASPA Western Regional Conference: Las Vegas Las Vegas, NV Nov 1st - 4th
ACUI Region 5 Conference College of Charleston, NC Nov 1st - 3rd ACUI Regions 8 & 9 Conference Northwestern University, IL Nov 2nd - 4th
NASPA Region 1 Conference Burlington, VT Nov 4th - 7th
To schedule a time to meet with us at one of these conferences, click the links above.
I hope you found our first newsletter helpful as you refine your strategy for reaching students and evaluating the success of your initiatives. Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions about the chosen topics or with suggestions for future articles.
Best regards,
Aaron Severs
___________________ AARON J. SEVERS President CollegiateLink +1 877.733.8335 tel +1 617.250.7054 direct +1 617.661.0244 fax 1698 Massachusetts Ave Cambridge, MA 02138 www.collegiatelink.net
The end of October has been a very busy time for us. We recently released our first Technology for Student Affairs Newsletter for November. In it, you can find links to articles about student affairs technology, company updates, and conference schedules for this month.
We have also released new version SA LINK 2.1, the web-based information system for managing student clubs and organizations.
Updates to the software include:
* Enhanced Step-by-step organization registration process containing one or more custom forms, releases, roster updating, and organization profile updating
* Enhancement to our robust paperless forms/surveys and workflow process
* Increased the granularity of reports about the types of leadership roles held by students, faculty, and staff
* Added ability to freeze/disable organizations
* Added ability to track active vs. inactive organizations
* Additional searching and information added to the organizations list
* Privacy settings to allow users control their public roster display settings
* Improved financial account display for organization presidents and treasurers
* Increased the number of friendly confirmation messages presented to user before deletion and updating of data
* Added comprehensive financial request PDF export with attached transaction list and stage history
* Improved workflow for approving financial requests by adding more context sensitive links on confirmation screens
CollegiateLink has also been attending Student Affairs regional conferences. Last weekend, Ken Abert and myself attended the NASPA Region 5 Conference in Las Vegas, NV. Aaron Severs will be representing us at the NASPA Region 4 Conference in Indianapolis, IN on Nov. 11th - 13th. You can find the full list of conferences we will be attending in our newsletter, where you can also schedule a time to meet with us.
Article for CollegiateLink - Technology in Student Affairs Newsletter: Vol 1, Nov. 2007
Web-based technology services have been almost uniformly embraced by higher education institutions and students across the world. In fact, your students probably expect an online component to almost every course or academic program. This expectation can be attributed to both the high utilization of systems such as WebCT, Blackboard, and web portals, as well as students’ overwhelming preference for online communication – IM, Facebook, the Daily Jolt, and other messaging / social networking tools.
For Student Involvement, Service Learning, and Leadership Development professionals, this expectation gives rise to a new challenge – the information technology (IT) infrastructure of most colleges and universities focuses primarily on addressing the needs of academic departments and auxiliary services such as course management, student information, and facilities. More often than not, co-curricular programming departments will need to look outside of their campus IT division to address their needs.
What to look for when planning projects
There are three primary ways that technology can be used to directly impact student engagement.
Technology can: 1. lower the barriers to getting involved 2. raise awareness of opportunities 3. provide new incentives for students to get involved
Lowering barriers
A primary student complaint is that they simply don’t know where to go to find out how to get involved. The best solution to address this is a single, cross-departmental website to serve as the central source of information on all co-curricular programs and events. Just as it makes sense for all available courses from multiple academic departments to be listed in one course catalog, your co-curricular opportunities - everything from service learning to leadership and organizations should be easy to browse. Furthermore, a simple online form should be all that is required for a student to RSVP, register, or express interest in any particular program, workshop, or group.
Increasing awareness
Social networks like Facebook and websites like MeetUp, Evite, and The Daily Jolt are very popular with today’s college students. Using social networking and online communities is the single best way to bring attention to your programs and resources and to leverage the centralized web resource advocated for in the previous section.
SA LINK, CollegiateLink’s technology offering, allow you to both facilitate your own online involvement gateway and syndicate content to other sites, but even your department’s website can become a popular destination with some social networking-based publicity. As a start, you could set up your own Facebook group to post weekly updates linking back to your website. Use e-mail as a publicity tool only sparingly – and always reference back to both your website and Facebook group for the most up to date information.
Providing new incentives
For better or for worse, students put a lot of effort into posting information about themselves online. They take great pride in their profile, pictures, and other information they choose to share. As a student affairs professional, you may already be familiar with ways encourage them to use these websites wisely, but what about actually providing content they can post about their own involvement?
If your institution actively tracks student participation using a tool like SA LINK, providing a guide for students to publicize certain items from their involvement record if they wish to (with a special logo or picture they can post on their profile, for instance) will give students an added benefit to participating. New technologies like Facebook Applications even make it possible to provide every student with a leadership section of their profile that links back to your website.
Ultimately you can use online systems to track membership, leadership, and service to power robust co-curricular transcripts that can serve as an important part of their portfolio for graduate school applications, internships, and job searches.
How do we get there from here?
Implementing new technology or enhancing your existing online presence should be done at least annually – students embrace new services and features as they emerge and so should you! Below are some options for implementing technology projects:
1. DIY or Do It Yourself – Even if your department doesn’t have the software design and programming resources to build sophisticated systems, you should build a plan for using what is already available to you: campus web space and social networking sites. Focus on showcasing what is available in one central website before trying to build a system to accomodate complicated processes such as online forms and databases.
2. Work with your campus IT department – while some schools have successfully built their own complicated systems, manage your expectations. You may want to hire a web design firm to work with IT to build an interface compelling enough to meet the expectations of your students. Campus IT departments also tend to have large backlogs of work so it could take several months, or even years, to get to the head of the queue.
3. Find a proven, vendor-supplied solution – moving from today’s manual systems and out-of-date website to an entirely new platform is what is generally classed as a “make or buy” decision. There are software development firms that specialize in Student Affairs technology. There are also flexible, pre-built platforms like SA LINK that have already been designed to address many needs.
Your best approach to evaluating your options is to put together a technology assessment committee of both staff and students to identify your short and long term goals, work with campus IT, and examine what vendors have to offer.
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