Excerpt from: Higher Education Perspectives
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| January 09, 2009 | | Many organizations are launching Green efforts. How can you take advantages of the benefits of going Green? | Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. This is the leading mantra of the post-consumer greening efforts that are gaining momentum these days. Many organizations are launching efforts in this direction, including my local Y, who has recently moved their brochures online.
So how are you doing? Are you still printing out award letters, brochures and other materials, or have you joined many of your colleagues in moving your information and guidance to the Internet?
The daughter of one of my colleagues recently transferred to a major four-year university from a community college where all the information she needed was accessible online. She was greeted with pounds of paper from the financial aid office. She was flabbergasted and annoyed that she had to wade through all of that paper to find the information she needed. She also didn’t appreciate dealing with all of the paper she didn’t need. If she had been able to go online and access her information, it would have been much easier for her while being much more environmentally-friendly.
So once a school decides to move their financial aid process online, how can they measure success? There are two key questions to consider: “Are we reducing the amount of paper and postage we use?” and “Are students better informed?”
In most cases, the answer to the former question will be a resounding “yes!” The catch lies in the latter: are your students better able to find the information they need to complete the financial aid process? For fun and your information, if you have already invested in a website, try writing down five key terms or instructions that you have posted and ask one of your work-study students to find them while tracking how long it takes. If it takes them more than two to three minutes per item, you can bet that most students and parents won’t find it and will call you or come into the office. Having a strong workflow to guide the students and give them the information they need when they need it is a key component to success.
Want more ideas for going green? Join us for our free webinar, “It IS Easy Being Green: Timely, Engaging Student Communications” on January 27th at 2 pm EST. Greening can result in great benefits for you and your staff as well as for your students. You can contribute to your University’s efforts in a meaningful way and together we can make a better world. Takes “win-win” to a whole ‘nother level!
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