In this episode of CampusIDNews Chats, Anthony Condo, Director of Campus Services at Swarthmore College, discusses NACCU’s SAGs (Standards and Guidelines) program – how it helps institutions and administrators identify campus card best practices to evaluate and improve their card office operations through a structured industry assessment.

Evaluating every aspect of a campus card program

The SAGs program is a 10-month online course made up of 12 modules covering topics such as marketing, finance, leadership, legal considerations, and technology. Participants meet roughly every three weeks and complete assignments designed to assess how their institution aligns with current industry standards.

Rather than serving as a “how-to” course, the program is intended to help institutions embark on a deeper exploration of their existing operations.

Rather than serving as a “how-to” course, Condo explains that the program is intended to help institutions embark on a deeper exploration of their existing operations.

“It’s meant for you to evaluate your program,” he says. “You’re really taking an internal look at what you’re doing – what you do well and what you have to work on.”

Using data to support leadership decisions

A major part of the program is the executive summary participants complete at the end of the course. The summary highlights operational strengths, identifies areas for improvement, and can help institutions justify requests for additional funding, staffing, or resources. 

The institution benefits most because you're really taking an internal look at what you're doing, what you do well, and what you have to work on.

Participants are required to provide documentation supporting their assessments, including marketing materials, policies, and technology plans.

Condo recommends the program for professionals who already have some industry experience and enough time to fully engage with the coursework. While SAGs does not provide a formal certification, he says the knowledge gained through the process can provide long-term value for both individuals and institutions.

TRANSCRIPT

The SAGs program was developed by NACCU faculty and staff as a means to evaluate card office programs. SAGs stand for standards and guidelines.

It's an online course. It lasts roughly ten months. So normally it starts in late May and it'll run through February.

There are modules that you work through, basically looking at all aspects of a card office operation.

You're going to you're going to have a unit on marketing a unit of finance and technology, and legal. Anything that has to do with the card office you're going to have a module on that. It meets, roughly every three weeks. There's a down time, a month of August, normally just to allow schools to get to, to let their students come back and everything. Then it'll start right back up again.

Evaluating your office for campus card best practices

The ultimate goal is you're going to write an executive summary, so you know how you've done and how you've rated your program. Maybe pull out the outliers, the things you're doing really well, maybe things that you need to work on because you want to have something to present to your leadership to show them, hey, we do really well in this area, but these are some areas that we need to focus on based on what the industry standards are.

Hopefully if you need to get resources or funding, you can use this as backup to get whatever it is that you need.

So again, there's modules.

You're looking at marketing and it'll ask you things like where can you find information about your meal plans or where could you find information about how to upload your photo? Or give your headshot or your office hours and where are your offices? Finance, maybe it'll ask you to explain how funds are allocated for your program. Do you have enough funding

There's a module on leadership that'll look at your office structure and what your reporting structure is and who's in charge of your office. Who is the leader of your card office program and how long have they been in that role?

You know, legal that's a huge module, because there's a lot of aspects to a card office program with regard to legal issues. Technology is another one, it'll ask you what kind of card readers you're using, and what kind of servers and how you back up your servers etc.

We’ve gone through eight SAG cohorts. We're about to start the ninth cohort.

Then one thing that we've been talking about the past few years is we've had all these people go through the program and put in all this work, and what can we do next with them?

So that's probably something that's on the horizon, starting to reel everybody back in and say, tell us about how your executive summary went and what were some of the challenges that you noted that you had to address and where you're able to address them?

Were you able to get the funding that you needed or the staff that you needed? I think we're going to be seeing more of that coming down the pike.

I think who benefits most is the institution, because you're really taking an internal look at what you're doing and what you do well and what you have to work on. We always like to tell the students going through SAGs, it's not a poor reflection on you.

If there's a certain area where you didn't meet the standards, you're not going to fail. It's just good that you were able to recognize that and now you have some points that, you have to work with.

I think you can certainly justify it to your leadership because the ultimate thing is you're going to really take an introspective look at your program with the goal to make sure that you're meeting the industry standard.

Some advice I would say is you want to have been in the industry, for a couple of years. Or at least have attended the Industry Essentials Institute, so you have some knowledge. You probably don't want to walk into this being brand new in your role. You want to have some card office experience.

You want to make sure that you're going to have some time to do this because there is homework, so every unit you have to do some homework, you have to provide documentation for everything you do. The homework entails rating yourself on the different standards within each module. But you can't just say yes, I meet the standards, you have to prove it. Show us that you meet the standard, show us the documentation.

Taking that into account, make sure you have enough time to get some homework done. If you're if you're going to be working on a larger project, you know, maybe you're going to launch mobile or something, maybe you want to wait till after that.

You have enough time to put towards this program so you can get the most out.

I think you can certainly justify it to your leadership because the ultimate thing is you're going to write an executive summary, and it's going to really take an introspective look at your program with the goal to make sure that you're meeting the industry standard.

I think it's money well spent. Yeah. I wouldn't call it a certification. You get a certificate saying that you completed the standards. You certainly get some bragging rights. I think what you learn going through it and what you discover about your card office – it's not all about finding things that are that are wrong.

You might find things that you do really, really well and you can build on that too. I think the knowledge that you gain going through the program will certainly benefit you.