This week, NACCU launched its new Guide to Going Mobile, an online resource that includes best practices for institutions  preparing for a mobile credential launch.

Project team members contributed their own experiences and interviewed campus administrators who had already deployed the new IDs as well as others that were in various stages of the process.

Courtney Petrizzi, University of Alabama Action Card Office Services Specialist, was a member of the project team. She spoke to CampusIDNews about the project in a recent video chat.

Specific sections address technology, change management, financial planning, marketing, data analysis, and potential roadblocks.

The guide is only accessible to current NACCU members in the resources section of the NACCU website.

To checkout the video interview, click the image at the top of this page.

Video transcript:

We're excited to be launching the newest deliverable from NACCU, which is the guide to going mobile.

It started around two years ago.

The engagement committee with NACCU joined forces and realized all the conversations that were happening around mobile – how can you get to mobile, what you need to do, and who do you talk to?

There were a lot of questions and a lot of them were going through the listserv, but we wanted something where the school is coming in and they don't know what to do and their administration says, hey, we need to do this mobile thing.

Where did they turn? Where do they go?

And so we wanted to provide them a source for that in our communal space on NACCU because mobile is a very big undertaking.

You have to do a lot of planning, you have to prepare for change management and the change in campus culture. What is the student's experience going to be like, and how is your administration going to deal with this?

So we provide a lot of those overarching high-level structural beliefs around the mobile credential.

It started out with the engagement committee, which is comprised of a couple of different institutions.

I do want to shout out specifically to Deb Nightingale with Liberty University, Rosie from University of Houston, and Michelle Dietz from Xavier.

They all were instrumental in getting all of the content developed and reaching out to a number of other schools. Those included schools that had already gone mobile and schools that were in the planning and discovery phase. It also included schools that hadn't even begun the transition to mobile to ask them what are your questions?

And so they comprised all of this information into a nice document for membership to look at, but then also we had contributors from across our membership, notably Jeanine Brooks formally with the University of Alabama and Ken Boyer with Mercer.

There were a number of people who contributed real-life scenarios of what they experienced when they went mobile. What questions did their administration have? What was the student experience like? What were the challenges and the roadblocks?

They provided a lot of great feedback.

There is a section on financial planning. One of the biggest issues that a lot of schools are concerned about is the financial aspect. You can look at how other schools that are similar to yours are structured. If you find a school that is in your same system or one that is similar across the board, you can see what their experience was like.

Now that also is defined on are you only going to be mobile? Are you going to do multiple credentials?

You have a lot of options and there is a financial planning for that to point out the different avenues that you can take to help alleviate some of the financial stress or figure out the pre-planning. How long it is going to take and what the prominent things that you need to be looking at financially?

The guide to going mobile is live on the NACCU website, so I encourage you to go and take a look.

Go ahead and get your planning in order and then get excited to go mobile.