GROUP MEMBERS:

Kathryn Brady-Good
Elise Crick
Danielle Preston
Whitney Wolfe

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY:

MoneySense is a financial literacy campaign developed for and sponsored by Beta Alpha Psi (BAP). Founded in 1919, BAP is an international scholastic and professional fraternity for financial information students and professionals that holds scholarship, social responsibility, and practicality as its ideals. The MoneySense program, designed by Western Washington University BAP alumni, emphasizes the tools and practical lessons that allow participants to build a solid financial foundation.

The results of the Standards in Economics Survey, conducted on behalf of the National Council on Economic Education (NCEE) by Harris Interactive in 2005, indicate that economics is believed to be an important subject that is often lacking in the education of young adults. Additionally, the study revealed “only half of high school students say they have ever been taught economics in school,” economics seems to be reserved as a course for business majors at the university and college levels.

The program goal is to greatly impact the community of young adults in Bellingham and surrounding areas. We hope students will come to recognize that the decisions they make today in their personal finances have a large impact on their future financial success. The program is designed to reach students at all levels, from Future Business Leaders of America, to high school students, to those enrolled in community colleges as well as universities and technical colleges.

It is believed that by supporting and promoting this program, we can increase the number of people served, compared to its initial year, and help the program continue to build on the number of people served in the future. It is also believed that the foundation of the program can be reinforced with local business sponsorship. To this end, we hope to positively influence attendance at on-campus seminars by actively advertising. We hope to reach additional students by presenting material on an “on request” basis to interested groups.

Our Results

Our goal was to increase the attendance of the on-campus seminars based on last year’s pre-registration numbers (due to the fact that this is a new program and those were the only records available). Unfortunately, we did not attain our goal, as overall, more people pre-registered last year than did in the current year. However, it is important to note that the last on-campus seminar was cancelled due to inclement weather, and we concentrated a large portion of our efforts on that particular seminar. While we are disappointed in this result, we also have no way of ascertaining that we did not improve attendance, as a trend emerged this year indicating that more people actually attended the seminars than registered.

Supporting activities included providing information regarding the program to the university communications department, which resulted in newspaper articles in the Bellingham Herald, the AS Review, and the Western Front. This also resulted in the MoneySense program being featured on the Western Washington University homepage. Additionally, an announcement was aired on Western’s radio station KUGS and we recorded our own public service announcement, which was broadcast on Skagit Valley College’s station KSVR.

Feedback forms collected during the on-campus seminars allowed us to determine the most effective forms of advertising as they related to seminar attendance. We concluded that, in fact, our efforts potentially impacted seminar attendance as 58% of participants listed flyers, the homepage, or word of mouth as how they heard about the program.

We were able to accommodate all requests for off-campus seminars made this quarter and had a certain amount of success in this endeavor. Requests were made for four additional seminars, all of which were prepared, but again the weather interfered and the fourth seminar necessitated postponement. The seminars presented off-campus were well received and feedback was positive.

The overall cost of the program is minimal when compared to the benefits. Social implications alone potentially cause stress, detriment to meaningful relationships, poor self-esteem, substance abuse, poor job performance, fatigue, and illness, as well as affect prices and interest rates in the community. Since there are different consequences for everyone, we have decided not to attempt to assign dollar values to these social implications.

In our cost-benefit analysis we compared the direct costs of the program to potential costs avoided by a single attendee. The costs of the program were relatively easy to determine as $1,638. However, the benefits vary from person to person, and are difficult to quantify because they occur in the future. We decided to err on the side of caution and assign costs to common financial consequences that would occur without basic financial knowledge provided at the seminars. We used lessons taught at each of the five seminars and summarized the potential financial results which yielded a benefit of $11,036.