Identifying TASFAA’s Efforts in Texas
Association Activity and Resources Committee
By Lou Murray, LoanSTAR and Jim Anderson, Texas Tech University

The first quarter of every calendar year tends to carry a large number of financial aid awareness events. TASFAA stresses the importance of outreach and awareness.

The TASFAA Association Activities and Resources Committee would like to remind all members of TASFAA to remember to utilize and promote the TASFAA TRAINetwork (www.financialaid.ttu.edu/TASFAA/train.htm). The TRAINetwork was created in order to identify and acknowledge the various outreach and early awareness efforts accomplished by the Association’s members and associate members. This data is shared throughout the TASFAA membership in order that we are better informed of the activities which take place in specific areas of Texas and the territories that seem to be underserved. In addition, this data is used to inform and educate the community and government entities of the Association’s commitment to outreach and public awareness.

We are in need of information pertaining to the efforts that are being made by your organization. As grade school events, high school nights, financial aid awareness events, parent nights and other types of activities take place, please remember to take a brief moment to document your effort so that TASFAA can continue to build the database.

The system allows all member institutions to view activities by region, county, city and zip code. In addition, it also provides a brief detail of the event’s purpose, audience, turnout and comments to measure the success of the event. The site now features a search function that allows users to search by event, audience, location, and host. This information is useful throughout various conversations that take place between TASFAA members, as well as community, state and federal leaders, as our industry demands for their continued attention and support.

Submitting an event or activity is easy and is accessible by anyone associated with TASFAA and the financial aid community. Portions of the form are pre-populated and many options are presented when submitting the event to make the site easy to navigate and as functional as possible.

Future enhancements will include a reporting feature that will allow users to generate custom reports from the stored data, additional links to important information, and statistics that will illustrate the number of outreach activities that have taken place and the audiences that are addressed.

Once completed, the final project will allow us to enhance our ability to maintain a history of events and better identify the outreach needs of our populations. In addition, we can work with our state and community leaders by providing input regarding the best use of limited governmental resources. Finally, it allows a better and streamlined way to inform our membership of the combined efforts we make to impact education in Texas.

You can enter your event information on the TRAINetwork or email the committee at AssociationActivities@tasfaa.org or fax such information to 281-997-0088.

If you are interested in learning more about this project, please let us know.