Frequently Asked Questions
Below are some common questions about our services. If you have a question that's not listed, please contact us.
If you have a product support question, please visit the Help Centers of Financial Literacy 101 or MoneyEdu. Administrators with questions can contact us online or contact their Decision Partners representative.
Company Background
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What's the story of Decision Partners?
Answer: Decision Partners was founded in 2003 by Austin Jackson. We are based in Concord MA, a suburb of Boston.
Prior to Decision Partners, Austin founded Westover Communications shortly after graduating from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1992. Westover published guide books for college students seeking "adventure jobs" that were based, in part, on Austin's experience working in Alaska's fishing industry and living abroad. Over five years, Westover bootstrapped to a dozen employees, published four books, produced two videos, and launched a number of highly-trafficked websites including StudentAid.com - a financial education and scholarship application service.
In 1999, Westover was sold to YouthStream Media, then a publicly-traded NASDAQ company. After working in product marketing roles for YouthStream's pioneering social network SixDegrees.com and for venture capital-backed alcohol educator Outside The Classroom, Austin saw the need for online financial education - particularly for students transitioning to the financial independence of college. With the generous assistance of Duke University's financial aid director and assistant director, the initial curriculum was created in 2003 with the first online course launching the following year.
Since then, Decision Partners has grown to serve hundreds of thousands of students per year through relationships with hundreds of universities and associated organizations. Our mission is to improve the lives of individuals through personalized financial education and we challenge ourselves to continually improve both the effectiveness and efficiency of our online learning technology.
Over the past ten years, we've accomplished a number of "firsts" - from the first online financial education course to the first fully customizable financial education platform for credit unions. And we're just getting started.
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Which organizations do you work with?
Answer: We're proud of the long-term relationships we've built with hundreds of organizations nationwide. Because of these partnerships, we've been able to deliver over one million completed assignments since 2011.
Here are some facts:
- Hundreds of universities use our services and nearly 150 undergraduate institutions are our direct customers.
- All medical schools in the United States and Canada have access to a medical-student version of our program through a partnership with the Association of American Medical Schools.
- All high schools and colleges in North Carolina have access to our program through a partnership with the College Foundation of North Carolina.
- Thousands of individuals nationwide use our services through partnerships with organizations including PNC Bank, Consumer Education Services, ALL Management Corporation, 3rd Millennium Classrooms, plus a growing number of credit unions and community nonprofits.
Our strong partner relationships not only allow us to build innovative services for students, but they also enable us to give back to the community through donation and scholarship programs. To date, our donation programs have generated over $25,000 for TRIO-affiliated organizations such as the Council for Opportunity in Education. In 2013, Decision Partners will distribute nearly $10,000 in financial literacy-related college scholarships.
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I see Decision Partners is a ".org" - are you nonprofit?
Answer: Decision Partners was originally founded as a 501(c)(3) charitable organization. While "nonprofit" captures the spirit of our mission, after several years it became clear that more flexibility was needed to achieve it. As the result, we are now a Massachusetts Limited Liability Corporation.
Today, we're celebrating our first 20 years and are well-positioned for many more. Our approach to business management embodies the spirit of our financial education curriculum - manage spending, be skeptical of short cuts, address risks effectively, and save for the future.
As a former nonprofit, we understand the challenges they face. We're proud that over 95% of our customers are nonprofit organizations. We continue our mission through our commitment to an advertising free, non-commercial learning experience and by offering well below market pricing for our services:
- Compared with the college alcohol prevention courses purchased by many colleges and universities, our pricing is typically 80% or more lower - while offering more content, customization, and reporting options.
- We allow credit unions to sponsor entire schools while paying as little as $0.50 per registration, rather than the thousands of dollars for partial sponsorship that some other organizations often charge.
- We offer steep discounts to groups including first-generation college student success programs, credit unions with assets under $100 million, and any organization in demonstrable need.
Our mission is to provide independent, non-commercial financial literacy education to as many Americans as we can. Our flexible, value-based pricing reflects that commitment and allows us to offer a commerce-free learning experience for all students.
In 2015, Decision Partners will distribute $25,000 in financial literacy education college scholarships.
- Compared with the college alcohol prevention courses purchased by many colleges and universities, our pricing is typically 80% or more lower - while offering more content, customization, and reporting options.
Privacy, Data Protection, and Compliance
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Does Decision Partners sell or transfer end-user information to external parties?
Answer: Absolutely not.
Decision Partners' programs are funded exclusively by universities, credit unions, and other sponsoring organizations - no other organization has access to end-user information in any form. All of our services are entirely non-commercial, meaning that there are no "opt-in" offers or product-related links of any kind. We believe that financial education should be a commerce-free experience.
For a complete list of the types of information shared with sponsoring institutions, please see "What end-user information is shared with customers?" below or click the Privacy Policy of any Decision Partners website.
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How does the system ensure confidentiality of data?
Answer: For information regarding the physical security of our servers, please see "Where is the system hosted" below.
Regarding the data available to university staff, we can customize the information that is made available depending on your needs. For example, our Financial Literacy 101 program used by universities provides only aggregate data on student financial knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors. At least five students must complete the program before the reporting tools are unlocked. By default, member-specific data is limited to contact information, course completion code, grade, missed questions, and account creation/last login dates. Universities are given the option to require or not require student IDs at registration.
Beyond data that is provided by default, participants can also opt-in to sharing more data with university staff. This additional data sharing is used to facilitate financial counseling and can include monthly budgets, financial goals, saved course content, course notebooks, and the results of personal feedback exercises on financial behaviors. Please see below for a complete list of data fields that can be shared.
Finally, our platform never asks for or captures any data that may be used for malicious purposes. For example, no account numbers, social security numbers, credit scores, or related information is ever captured. Even personal behaviors that could be used maliciously (for example, the personal data protection behaviors surveyed in our Identity Theft Risk Assessment) are not saved to our database.
Decision Partners also recently passed a stringent data security audit by PNC Bank, one of our major licensing partners.
We take data security and privacy very seriously at Decision Partners and have incorporated additional safeguards against website and account hacking that can be described further upon request.
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What end-user information is shared with customers?
Answer: Information shared is limited to the type of information that would commonly be gathered in any "in the classroom" course.
Information available to non-administrators using only course completion certificates to verify participation includes:
- Name
- Course title
- Grade including any questions re-taken
- Course completion date
- Course completion code
Administrators with access to an administrative control panel have access to:
- Name
- Email address
- Year in school (if applicable)
- Phone number (if collection is enabled by the course administrator)
- Student ID (if collection is enabled by the course administrator)
- Date of registration
- Date of last log in
- Percentage progress to completion for each course
- Courses taken
- Course grades including questions re-taken
- Course grades excluding any re-taken questions
- Missed quiz questions including which answer was selected
- Course confirmation codes
- Course completion dates
Decision Partners also offers organizations the capability of allowing users to opt-in to sharing select personal information from their online learning experience with their program administrator(s). This feature is intended to assist in providing personalized financial counseling services to site users. Sharing is always disabled by default - organizations must enable content sharing and users must then choose to participate by updating their sharing preference on their "My Account" page.
If the sharing option is enabled by the customer, users can choose to share the following information:
- Monthly budget
- Financial goals exercise
- Saved course content
- Course notes
- Personalized feedback exercise
Please note that custom solutions developed as part of our Professional Services program may differ in data collected and shared. All Decision Partners' services include a Privacy Policy for end-users.
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Where are your servers hosted?
Answer: Decision Partners uses Amazon Web Services for all web hosting and data storage. Trusted by a wide variety of organizations, from Netflix to Adobe, Amazon Web Services is the leader in cloud-based hosting solutions.
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Is your system Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) compliant?
Answer: Yes. We have designed our student-focused programs to fully comply with FERPA guidelines. We also understand that institutions vary in their interpretation of FERPA guidance, so we provide a simple self-service interface for institutions to select what data points are collected at registration.
Technology, Support, and Training
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What amount of technical staff support must be provided by the customer?
Answer: Our platform is designed to operate independently as a fully managed service. Your organization's technical staff will not need to support the program on an ongoing basis post-launch.
Should a customer request single sign-on user authentication, in which members first log in to one of your sites and are then forwarded to our platform, we will need to work with technical staff to set up a secure method for passing log in data. Please request our Support Outline and Technical FAQ document for more information on the types of data that can be passed to our system.
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How is user access controlled?
Answer: There are two options for controlling user access at registration:
- Single Sign-On Integration - In this scenario, users are authenticated on university servers and data is passed securely to Decision Partners "behind the scenes." We then automatically create the student account. If their account already exists on our server, they are logged in.
- Access Code-based Registration - Users enter access codes or click a link with an embedded access code to gain access to the program.
Further, customers can choose to use both single sign-on and access code-based registration.
After an account has been created, a user may access it again by continuing to use the single sign-on option above or by simply entering their email address and password. Members can also be required to use single sign-on access.
For registered users, new courses may be assigned by distributing a Course ID to students. Administrators also have the option of allowing self-directed student registrations, meaning students can choose to access any of the courses made available by the administrator.
- Single Sign-On Integration - In this scenario, users are authenticated on university servers and data is passed securely to Decision Partners "behind the scenes." We then automatically create the student account. If their account already exists on our server, they are logged in.
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What are the minimum computer requirements for schools / end users?
Answer: Our platform is compatible with virtually any computer in use today. Minimum requirements include:
- Windows 98 or later (OS X or later for Macs)
- At least a 56K dial-up Internet connection
- Adobe Acrobat (free PDF reader for Fact Sheets and some data reports)
- Any modern browser (Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and Internet Explorer are all tested)
- 200 MHz Intel Pentium-class processor
- 512K RAM
- 1024 X 768 pixel display
- A multimedia-capable computer is not required to use our program
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Can user data be downloaded from the system?
Answer: Yes. Decision Partners offers many tools for analyzing data including the export of data to an Excel-compatible CSV file and graphical PDF reports. Please see "What end-user information is shared with customers?" above for information on data points shared.
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Please describe your disaster recovery and business continuity plan.
Answer: Considering that Decision Partners offers mission critical services to our clients, such as required financial education services for the State of North Carolina, we build a high degree of recoverability into our operations. Unplanned interruptions are, by their nature, unpredictable events causing unscheduled outages. While Decision Partners cannot predict when an unplanned interruption will take place, we have established a proactive operations management plan outlining what actions will be taken to minimize an outage's duration.
Our day-to-day processes include in-place safeguards and backup operation components. Regular testing validates the availability and appropriateness of these components. Through cloud-based hosting technology, we are able to offer full data backup capabilities and the ability to avoid significant downtime as the result of hardware failure. Our systems are monitored 24 hours a day.
In the event of a natural or man made disaster, our Cloud-based platform and the geographically diverse data centers maintained by our hosting provider will enable us to rapidly restore service through either back up or routing Internet traffic to another data center. Our physical servers are located in Northern Virginia.
We are confident that our disaster recovery and business continuity plans are more than adequate for the types of services we provide. If you have questions, please do not hesitate to contact us.
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Do you offer implementation coaching and training?
Answer: Yes. We offer one-to-one coaching calls as part of any of our services at no additional charge. These collaborative Webex calls offer organizations the opportunity to tell us more about their financial education goals. We can then provide guidance based on what has been effective with similar organizations.
In addition to live support, Decision Partners offers the following additional materials:
- All program administrators receive periodic email newsletters. Each newsletter outlines system enhancements and provides implementation best practices. Archived copies are available through the Financial Literacy 101 administrative control panel.
- Decision Partners provides an administrative guide that may be viewed online or printed (PDF format). This guide outlines the use of key administrative features and abilities. An administrative Frequently Asked Questions list is provided and updated regularly.
- An implementation guide is provided to describe suggested implementation scenarios. An implementation check list is also provided to help administrators develop, organize, and launch their financial education program.
- Quiz question answer guides are available for all courses.
- A library of marketing templates is provided including multiple versions of a student presentation, email templates for students and other stake holders, handout/flier templates, and a press release template. All templates are delivered in Microsoft Word or PowerPoint formats for easy customization.
- All program administrators receive periodic email newsletters. Each newsletter outlines system enhancements and provides implementation best practices. Archived copies are available through the Financial Literacy 101 administrative control panel.
To learn more about bringing one of our services to your organization, please contact us.