Financial Literacy Licensing Program

As the need for comprehensive student financial literacy education gains increasing national visibility, many organizations are seeking to develop a robust financial literacy program for their constituents. Whether you work for a national organization, lender or guarantor, Decision Partners’ licensing program is a turnkey service that enables you to seamlessly integrate a tested, objective financial literacy education program into your organization’s website – quickly and easily.

Licensing a complete online learning solution offers your website visitors an outstanding value proposition – a free financial literacy learning experience that’s customized to their needs. Rather than wading through page after page of often-irrelevant textual information, they receive a course that’s customized to their personal situation, from year in school to independent/dependent student status.

Decision Partners' financial literacy solutions are trusted by leading organizations including the Association of American Medical Schools, PNC Bank, and the College Foundation of North Carolina.

Customer Focus: College Foundation of North Carolina

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College Foundation of North Carolina (CFNC), a free service of the State of North Carolina provided by Pathways, College Foundation, Inc. and the N.C. State Education Assistance Authority, helps students plan, apply and pay for college. CFNC.org currently provides services to over two million registered users. In the first quarter of 2008, Decision Partners worked with CFNC to develop and integrate two financial literacy courses into CFNC.org – a comprehensive course for high school seniors and college students, and a shorter course for grades 11 and lower.

The Decision Partners courses are seamlessly integrated into the CFNC.org user experience, even though the courses are hosted on Decision Partners servers. While there are many integration options, CFNC chose to make the course available only to registered CFNC.org users. If a user clicks on a course link, they are instructed to login or to create an account. Once the account is created, basic user information is passed to Decision Partners through a Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) encrypted connection to allow course access. Once the user’s course is created, they may return anytime without having to start over or re-register. In fact, users continue to have access to a fully-integrated “My Money” page, from which they can revisit the course, download fact sheets, explore interactive exercises, and even create their own short and long-term financial goals – all through their CFNC.org account.

While the core financial literacy curriculum developed by Decision Partners remained unchanged, CFNC was able to integrate additional content and to change the order of the course modules to better suit their users. For example, CFNC chose to integrate information on repaying educational loans into the “Credit and Debt” section of the course, add telephone contact information at various points in the course to give students more information on their programs, and add CFNC-produced downloads in a number of areas.

After production was complete, CFNC had worked with Decision Partners to create two best-in-class financial literacy courses that felt like “CFNC” courses to staff and to users. And rather than spending at least a year and hundreds of thousands of dollars developing a quality multimedia project from scratch, they were live in less than 90 days and for a fraction of the cost of developing and hosting an in-house project.

Learn more about the CFNC project by downloading our joint NASSGAP presentation (PPT file) from the spring conference.

Assessment and Reporting

At Decision Partners, we feel strongly that comprehensive assessment and reporting are the keys to developing lasting, effective programs. Through survey responses and course usage reports, your organization is provided with a wealth of actionable user information without having to develop and manage a complex Internet project. Our turnkey approach simply delivers better educated students and gives you the insight you need to assess your new financial literacy education efforts.

Every licensing customer receives access to an administrative control panel that provides real-time metrics on course usage. In fact, we can even allow you to track the effectiveness of different outreach programs through the control panel. Data presented in the control panel includes student contact information, year in school, course progress, and the date of last login. Data may be sorted by most criteria to focus on only certain users, and the list may be exported to Excel for further analysis by date or in its entirety.

While we do provide extensive usage information through the control panel, further user information is also provided in the form of an aggregate yearly report. Delivered as a 40 to 60-page PowerPoint presentation and as a raw data file, this comprehensive report provides aggregate pre and post-course survey data covering financial knowledge, attitudes and behaviors of course participants, as well as feedback on the course experience itself. Decision Partners maintains a strong commitment to user privacy, and no personally identifiable information is provided in survey data reports.

Getting Started

To learn more about this program, please Contact us.